The status of legal construction may at first appear paradoxical. Although essential, matters of legal interpretation are seldom addressed, except by a few specialists often very close to the sociological jurisprudence or the American Realism movements. The result is a kind of general consensus (which equally serves as a political principle) of the academic community upon the subsidiary role of interpretation in the law-making process – whereby the law-making process is deemed to fall almost entirely into the realm of the legislative branch of government. Yet, this idea that the legislative branch is the sole source of law-making is somehow at odds with the facts. This idea is above all contradicted by a set of works drawn from the philosophy of translation which, in the wake of the “hermeneutic turn” dating from the second half of the twentieth century, has brought to light a different paradigm : the interpreter is not alien to the text, and the idea that he could never add to what the author or the first reader could have had in mind should be denounced ; the text is not a “pretext” or a secondary concern in the decision-making process and should be taken seriously by legal hermeneutics. Finally, the theory of translation firmly rejects the use of the author’s intention for interpretative purposes.