 Legal theorists have tried to construct theories of the meaning of legal language, and theories of legal interpretation, based on specific features of law, of legal systems, and of the use of language in making law. The entries on  constitutionalism  (see section 7, ‘Constitutional Interpretation’),  interpretation and coherence in legal reasoning,  legal interpretation,  legal interpretivism,  the nature of law, and  naturalism in legal philosophy  all address theories of legal interpretation. This section addresses features of language that raise challenges for philosophy of law and for philosophy of language. Any good account of the legal effect of the use of language in law making depends on the context of its use (addressed in this section). Section 2.3 addresses ‘pragmatic’ effects of language use, such as context-dependence, which have long been the matter of jurisprudential debate; recently the use of Gricean and post-Gricean  pragmatics  has become a major field of debate among philosophers of language and philosophers of law. These pragmatic features of communication raise insuperable difficulties for any attempt to give a true account of legal interpretation that is well enough organised to deserve to be called a ‘theory’. Debates over the pragmatics of legal language are often premised on the view that the effect of a lawmaking use of language is that the content of the linguistic communication in question determines the content of the law. But we will see in section 3 that even this premise is controversial; it has been denied by theorists who account for the law as being determined by moral reasons for conclusions as to what rights, duties, powers, and liabilities people have, given the facts of legal practice and history.