An important reason for rejecting the claim that legal interpretation seeks linguistic meaning derives from three propositions that are widely shared by theorists of legal interpretation: 1) legal interpretation often yields interpretations that resolve legal disputes; 2) in resolving disputes, judges must follow the content of the law except in extremely unusual circumstances; 3) the content of the law is often determinate enough to resolve disputes. Given these tenets, the output of legal interpretation cannot be merely the linguistic meaning of the relevant texts. If it were, and if judges must in general follow the content of the law, then legal interpretation would not be able to yield outputs that resolve legal disputes; there would have to be a further step of ascertaining the content of the law. In addition, as will be evident from the discussion in sections 3 and 4, most theories of legal interpretation make legal interpretation depend on factors that are not relevant to ascertaining linguistic meaning.