Abstract
This paper analyzes the implications that the linguistic formulation of the marriage provision of the Spanish Constitution of 1978 had for securing the passage in 2005 of Law 13/2005, which legalized same-sex marriage (SSM). By claiming that a semantic (contextually recovered) omission in the original legal text was a marker of distributiveness (i.e., inclusiveness of SSM), SSM supporters aimed to avoid a constitutional amendment, and succeeded in doing so. This linguistic argument, based on implicitness, was instrumental as a subsidiary argument of political moral argumentation. Linguistic meaning therefore contributed decisively to both the legal meaning of the marriage provision and the content of the law (the extension of marriage rights to same-sex couples via the Civil Code). I argue, against some assumptions in the literature stating otherwise, that linguistic meaning should not be dismissed in constitutional interpretation and adjudication.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The design and implementation of the same-sex-marriage bill was the result of an open alliance between the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), headed by Rodríguez Zapatero, and the L.G.B.T. movement. See in this respect [10]. Rodríguez Zapatero placed the SSM demand at the center of the presidential campaign in 2004, and after his victory in March 2004, the SSM bill was sent for approval to the Cortes Generales. The SSM bill was vetoed by the Senate on June 22, 2005 (131–119 with 2 abstentions) after it was approved by the Congress on April 21, 2005 by 183 votes to 136, and 6 abstentions. Because the Senate only has an advisory capacity, upon being returned to the Congress, the bill passed by 187–147 with 4 abstentions on 30 June 2005. See [24], No. 84, 21 April 2005; No. 103, 30 June 2005 and [25], No. 46, 22 June 2005.
“Art. 44: El hombre y la mujer tienen derecho a contraer matrimonio conforme a las disposiciones de este código.” See [14].
“El matrimonio tendrá los mismos requisitos y efectos cuando ambos contrayentes sean del mismo o de diferente sexo.” See [14].
“Art. 32.1. El hombre y la mujer tienen derecho a contraer matrimonio con plena igualdad jurídica.” See [17].
El País, Spain. En encaje con el artículo 32.1 de la Constitucion. 30 September 2004. http://elpais.com/diario/2004/09/30/sociedad/1096495201_850215.html. Accessed 15 July 2016.
See, ABC. Spain. Entrevista. Álvaro Rodríguez Bereijo, La reforma territorial se planteó por la élite de un partido que no se llama nacionalista y lo es: el PCS. 24 April 2005, p. 12. http://hemeroteca.abc.es/nav/Navigate.exe/hemeroteca/madrid/abc/2005/04/24/010.htm. Accessed 15 July 2016.
The Constitutional Court (Tribunal Constitucional) is the supreme interpreter of the Spanish Constitution and has the final say with regard to the constitutionality of ordinary legislation. See the lawsuit, “Texto integro del Recurso del Partido Popular.” Al Tribunal Constitucional, 28 September 2005, http://www.felgtb.org/rs/125/d112d6ad-54ec-438b-9358-4483f9e98868/6fc/filename/recurso-anticonstitucionalidad-pp.pdf. Accessed 14 April 2016.
I am referring here to the collective/distributive distinction proper to sentences with plural subjects. When each individual in the subject is the separate agent of the described event, the predicate is distributive. When both individuals act conjointly, the predicate is collective.
The original meaning is an “operative meaning” when interpreted in its original terms by the contemporary audience [59, p. 170].
The 1978 Constitution was the first, among the twelve enacted between 1812 and 1978, that was not imposed by the party in power [51, p. 50].
Non-originalists sometimes argue that even when the original meaning should not be respected because it has fallen “behind the progress of conventional morality,” the legal interpreter may occasionally depart from it in order to enhance “the constitution's moral legitimacy and justify its claim to moral authority” [43, p. 59].
In the traditional civil legislation on marriage women were subject to their spouses’ will. As Lucy A. Sponsler explains, “the duty of a husband was to protect and that of his wife was to obey.” Married women needed to ask for permission to their husbands for a number of juridical acts: e.g., to acquire property, sell it or make a contract, to appear in court. See [67, 1605].
The original formulation of the provision of marriage stated: Art. 27. 1: “Starting with a nubile age, a man and woman have the right to marry, create and maintain, in equality of rights, stable family relationships.” The Communist Parliamentarian Group and the Socialist Group proposed, respectively, the two distinct following formulations: “Marriage is based on the complete equality of rights and duties of both spouses,” and, “Every person has the right to develop his/her affection and his/her sexuality, to marry, to create in freedom stable family relationships and to decide freely the number of children he or she wants to have. For this purpose, he or she has the right to have access to the information and means necessary to exercise that right.” See [20]. On 28 October 1978, the rule on marriage was approved with its final formulation: “Art. 32.1. A man and a woman have the right to contract marriage in full legal equality.” See [21].
This is not to say, however, that linguistic meaning is a mere semantic template for the building of legal inferences, or that it is prior and separate from those (pragmatic) inferences. The linguistic meaning in the text is, as pointed out before, a semantic-pragmatic unit governed by the interaction of the many factors that intervene in the speech event.
The Due Process Clause specifies that no State shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Equal Protection Clause mandates that no state shall deny to any person “the equal protection of the laws.”
An intentional definition answers the question “what is x?” An extensional definition delimits the ratio of application of the legal term.
For an illustration of the role played by both the presence and the absence of a definition in preventing and creating, respectively, ambiguity in Hispanic American constitutional rules on political citizenship—with respect to either the inclusion or exclusion of women—see [75].
In this sense, from the perspective of its imputed distributive meaning, the collective subject of Art. 32.1 has turned into a multi-individual plural subject, thus admitting polygamous marriage. Compare, for instance, this Article with the marriage provision in the Canadian Civil Marriage Act enacted on 20 July 2005 which legalized same-sex- marriage in Canada: “Marriage, for civil purposes, is the lawful union of two persons to the exclusion of all others.” Just by replacing in the traditional common-law definition of marriage “one man and one woman” with “two persons,” sex indistinctiveness and binomialism were guaranteed (see [47]). The distributiveness implications of Art. 32. 1 were enthusiastically recognized four years after the legalization of SSM by Beatriz Gimeno Reinoso, president of the Spanish L.G.T.B movement at the moment of the SSM reform and a key advocate of this reform: “In order to achieve a revolution in the heterosexist order, we have to continue. If marriage has nothing to do with biology any longer, nor with procreation, nor with sex, nor with gender, why should it be restricted to two persons? Why not three or four? That is the way” [42, p. 29].
Judge Ollero Tassara was one of the three, among the twelve, judges of the Constitutional Court who dissented from the Court’s judgment on the suit against Law 13/2005 (see [74, at 212]).
“Presuppositions contribute to the shaping of text by distributing information into the background and foreground, that is, by setting out a kind of textual frame which contains pieces of information that are given as uncontroversial by the interactants and which determine the point of view from which the text develops” [6, p. 149].
See El País, Peces-Barba dice que los ponenetes constitucionales abrieron las puertas a las bodas gays. 22 January, 2005. http://elpais.com/diario/2005/01/22/sociedad/1106348403_850215.html. Accessed 1 August 2016.
Idem.
The Constitutional Court, in its ruling of 13 December 2005, pointed out that in the 1978 congressional debates the inclusion or exclusion of “with one another” was not addressed. The records of those debates, the Court said, show that “not even remotely” was the question of marriage between persons of the same sex discussed. No group in Congress proposed an amendment to introduce “with one another” because such a phrase “would have been considered, without doubt, unnecessary.” Legislators always presumed that marriage was a heterosexual institution [73].
Lessig defines “text” not as a whole content but as the wording of the normative statement. Meaning is a function of text and context, the latter understood as “the collection of understandings within which” a text makes sense. A changed or unchanged context may or may not lead to the changing of the text (=the wording). See [50].
The unlikelihood of a constitutional amendment is manifested in the voting results for the SSM bill in both chambers of the Cortes. The bill was vetoed by the Senate and approved by the Congress with less than three-fifths of the votes. See note 1.
The Council of State is the Spanish Government's supreme consultative body; the General Council of the Judiciary is the governing body of judges and courts; and the Royal Academy for Jurisprudence and Legislation “has among its aims the research, appraisal, and contribution to the improvement of the law” (see [40, at notes 9, 10 and 11]). The three reports are available at [16, 58, 60].
See Instituto Nacional de Estadística (Spain), Estadísticas sobre matrimonio http://www.ine.es/jaxi/menu.do?type=pcaxis&path=%2Ft20%2Fe302&file=inebase&L=. Accessed 15 April 2016.
See “Ley 13/2005, Disposiciones Generales,” BOE No. 157, 2 July 2005. http://www.boe.es/buscar/doc.php?id=BOE-A-2005-11364. Accessed 10 May 2016.
See [25, No. 189, 20 June 2005, p. 71].
Legislator Montón Giménez (see [24, No. 84, 21 April 2005, p. 4119]).
Senator Diaz Tejeda (see [25, No 46. 22 June 2005, p. 2509]).
Idem.
See the reference to the Civil Code in [14].
“Sentencia” Voto particular by Manuel Aragón Reyes [74].
References
Back, Kent. 1994. Conversational impliciture. Mind and Language 9: 124–162.
Back, Kent. 2001. You don’t say. Synthese 128: 15–44.
Balkin, Jack M. 2007. Original meaning and constitutional redemption. Constitutional Commentary 24: 427–532.
Bertea, Stefano. 2005. Does arguing from coherence make sense? Argumentation 19: 433–446.
Bertea, Stefano. 2005. The arguments from coherence: Analysis and evaluation. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 25: 369–391.
Bertuccelli, Marcella. 2009. Implicitness. In Key Notions for Pragmatics, ed. Jef Verschueren, and Jan-Ola Östman, 139–162. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Brennan, William. 1985. The constitution of the United States: Contemporary ratification. Text and Teaching symposium. Georgetown University, Washington D.C., 12 October, 1985. http://3197d6d14b5f19f2f440-5e13d29c4c016cf96cbbfd197c579b45.r81.cf1.rackcdn.com/collection/papers/1980/1985_1012_ConstitutionBrennan.pdf. Accessed 15 April 2016.
Brest, Paul. 1980. The misconceived quest for the original understanding. Boston University Law Review 60: 204–238.
Broekman, Jan M. 2001. Reiterating the literal. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 14: 121–128.
Calvo, Kerman. 2007. Sacrifices that pay: Polity membership, political opportunities and the recognition of the same-sex marriage in Spain. South European Society & Politics 12: 295–314.
Carston, Robyn. 2002. Thoughts and utterances: The pragmatics of explicit communication. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Castresana, Carlos. 2005. Gay marriage in Spain. Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice 17: 131–136.
Chiang, Tun-Jen, and Lawrence B. Solum. 2013. The interpretation-construction distinction in patent law. The Yale Law Journal 123: 530–614.
Código Civil Español, Título IV: Del matrimonio; Capítulo II: De los Requisitos del Matrimonio. https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-1889-4763. Accessed 10 May 2016.
Comrie, Bernard. 1986. Markedness, grammar, and people in the world. In Markedness, ed. Fred R. Eckman, Edith A. Moravcsik, and Jessica R. Wirth, 85–106. New York: Plenum Press.
Consejo de Estado, 2004. Dictámenes. No. 2628/2004. http://www.boe.es/buscar/doc.php?id=CE-D-2004-2628. Accessed 10 May 2016.
Constitución española at http://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-1978-31229. Accessed 10 May 2016.
Constitución española. Sinopsis Artículo 32. http://www.congreso.es/consti/constitucion/indice/sinopsis/sinopsis.jsp?art=32&tipo=2. Accessed 10 May 2016.
Cortes Generales, Spain. 1978. Boletín Oficial de las Cortes. 5 January 1978, No. 44. http://www.senado.es/legis0/publicaciones/pdf/BOC_044.PDF. Accessed 15 April 2016.
Cortes Generales, Spain. 1978. Boletín Oficial de las Cortes. 17 April 1978. No. 82. http://www.senado.es/legis0/publicaciones/pdf/BOC_082.PDF Accessed 15 April 2016.
Cortes Generales. Spain. 1978. Boletín Oficial de las Cortes. 28 October 1978, No.170.http://www.congreso.es/public_oficiales/L0/CONG/BOCG/BOC_170.PDF. Accessed 15 April 2016.
Cortes Generales, Spain. 2001. Diario de Sesiones del Congreso de los Diputados. VII Legislatura, 25 September 2001, No. 106.
Cortes Generales, Spain. 2003. Diario de Sesiones del Congreso de los Diputados. VII Legislatura, February 20, 2003. No. 229.
Cortes Generales, Spain. 2005. Diario de Sesiones del Congreso de los Diputados. VIII Legislatura.
Cortes Generales, Spain. 2005. Diario de Sesiones del Senado, VIII Legislatura.
Coseriu, Eugenio. 2007. Lingüstica del texto. Introduccion a la hermeneútica del sentido. Madrid: Arcos Libros.
Coseriu, Eugenio. 1991. El hombre y su lenguaje. Madrid: Editorial Gredos.
Coseriu, Eugenio. 1973. Teoría del lenguaje y lingüística general. Madrid: Editorial Gredos.
Coseriu, Eugenio. 1992. Competencia Lingüística. Madrid: Editorial Gredos.
Dascal, Marcelo, and Jerzy Wróblewski. 1991. The rational law-marker and the pragmatics of legal interpretation. Journal of Pragmatics 15: 421–444.
Eskridge, R., and N. William. 2015. Original meaning and marriage equality. Houston Law Review 52: 1067–1120.
Eyal-Cohen, Mirit. 2013. Down-sizing the little guy myth in legal definitions. Iowa Law Review 98: 1041–1099.
Fallon Jr., Richard H. 2015. The meaning of legal “meaning” and its implications for theories of legal interpretation. The University of Chicago Law Review 82: 1235–1308.
Fallon Jr., Richard H. 2015. Taking the idea of constitutional “meaning” seriously. Harvard Law Review Forum 129: 1–10.
Ferrer Vanrel, María Pilar. 2011. Matrimonio Civil. In Los 25 temas más frecuentes en la vida práctica del derecho de familia. Tomo I, eds. Francisco Lledó Yagüe, Alicia Sánchez Sánches, Oscar Monje Balsmaseda, 173–188. Madrid: Editorial Dykinson.
Feteris, Eveline T. 2008. The Pragma-dialectical analysis and evaluation of teleological argumentation in a legal context. Argumentation 22: 489–506.
Flanagan, Brian. 2013. Causal legal semantics: A critical assessment. Journal of Moral Philosophy 10: 3–24.
Flanagan, Brian. 2010. Revising the contribution of linguistic meaning to legal meaning. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 30: 255–271.
Frege, Gottlob. Logic in Mathematics. 1979. Manuscript (1914). In Posthumous Writings. Translated by P. Long and R. White, 203–250. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Garcimartín, Carmen. 2013. Spanish law on same-sex marriage: Constitutional arguments. BYU Journal of Public Law 27: 443–464.
Garrote-Fernández-Díez, Ignacio. 2005. El matrimonio entre personas del mismo sexo: Perspectiva constitucional. Revista Jurídica Universidad Autónoma de Madrid 13: 133–164.
Beatriz, Gimeno, and Violeta Barrientos. 2009. La institución matrimonial después del matrimonio homosexual. Íconos Revista de Ciencias Sociales 35: 19–30.
Goldsworthy, Frey. 2011. The case of originalism. In The challenge of originalism. Theories of constitutional interpretation, ed. Gran Huscroft, and Bradley E. Miller, 42–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University.
Sánchez, Yolanda Gómez. 1992. Matrimonio y familia: Arts. 32 y 39 de la Constitución. Revista de Derecho Político 36: 207–223.
Greenberg, Mark. 2011. Legislation as communication? Legal interpretation and the study of linguistic communication. In Philosophical foundations of language in the law, ed. Andrei Marmor, and Scott Soames, 217–256. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Grice, Paul. 1988. Studies in the way of words. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Hogg, Peter H. 2006. Canada: The constitution and same-sex marriage. International Journal of Constitutional Law 4: 712–721.
Hurley, S.L. 1990. Coherence, hypothetical cases, and precedent. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 10: 221–251.
Kelsen, Hans. 1967. Pure theory of law. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lessig, Lawrence. 1995. Understanding changed readings: Fidelity and theory. Stanford Law Review 47: 395–472.
Levenbook, Barbara Baum. 1984. The role of coherence in legal reasoning. Law and Philosophy 3: 355–374.
MacCormick, D.Nail, and Robert S. Summers. 1991. Interpreting statutes. A comparative study. Aldershot: Dartmouth Publishing Co.
Magone, José M. 2004. Contemporary Spanish politics. London: Routledge.
Marmor, Andrei. 2008. The pragmatics of legal language. Ratio Juris 21: 423–452.
Marmor, Andrei. 2011. Can the law imply more than it says? On some pragmatic aspects of strategic speech. In Philosophical foundations of language in the law, ed. Andrei Marmor, and Scott Soames, 83–104. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Östam, Jan-Ola. 2005. Persuasion as implicit anchoring. The case of colllocations. In Persuasion across genres: A linguistic approach, ed. Helena H. Almari, and Tuija Virtanen, 183–212. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Platero, Raquel. 2007. Love and the state: Gay marriage in Spain. Feminist Legal Studies 15: 329–340.
Poder Judicial. 2005. Informe del Poder Judicial. Estudio sobre la reforma del Código Civil en materia de matriminio entre personas del mismo sexo. http://www.poderjudicial.es/cgpj/es/Poder-Judicial/Consejo-General-del-Poder-Judicial/Actividad-del-CGPJ/. Accessed 10 May 2016.
Primus, Richard A. 2008. When should original meaning matter? Michigan Law Review 107: 165–222.
Real Academia de Jurisprudencia y Legislación. 2004. Informe que emite la Real Academia de Jurisprudencia y Legislación acerca del proyecto de modificación del Código Civil en materia de contraer matrimonio. http://www2.uned.es/dpto-dcivil/imags/INFORME%20Real%20Academia.pdf. Accessed 10 May 2016.
Rosch, Eleanor, and Barbara B. Lloyd (eds.). 1978. Cognition and categorization. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
López, Cristina Sánchez. 1999. Los cuantificadores: Clases de cuantificadores y estructuras cuantificativas. In Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, vol. 1, ed. Ignacio Bosque, and Violeta Demonte, 1025–1128. Madrid: Espasa Calpe.
Scalia, Antonin, and Bryan A. Garner. 2012. Law: The interpretation of legal texts. St. Paul, MN: Thomson/West.
Scalia, Antonin. 1998. A matter of interpretation. Federal courts and the law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Solum, Lawrence B. 2008. Semantic Originalism. Illinois Public Law and Legal Theory, Research Paper Series No, 07-24. http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1120244. Accessed 10 May 2016.
Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. 1986. Relevance theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sponsler, Lucy A. 1982. The status of married women under the legal system of Spain. Louisiana Law Review 42: 1599–1628.
Stern, James Y. 2013. Property’s constitution. California Law Review 101: 277–326.
Strauss, David. 2015. The Supreme Court 2014 Term. Foreword: Does the constitution mean what it says? Harvard Law Review 129: 1–61.
Supreme Court of the United States. The Obergefell v. Hodges Ruling. http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf. Accessed 10 May 2016.
Sunstein, Cass R. 2015. There is nothing that interpretation just is. Constitutional Commentary 30: 193–212.
Tribunal Constitucional de España. 1994. Auto 222/1994, julio 11, 1994. http://hj.tribunalconstitucional.es/HJ/cs-CZ/Resolucion/Show/AUTO/1994/222. Accessed 2 Aug 2016.
Tribunal Constitucional de España. 2005. Auto 505/2005, 13 December 2005. http://hj.tribunalconstitucional.es/fr-FR/Resolucion/Show/20612. Accessed 2 Aug 2016.
Tribunal Constitucional de España. 2012. Sentencia 198/2012, de 6 de noviembre de 2012. Recurso de inconstitucionalidad 68-64-2005. Boletín Oficial del Estado (BOE) 28 November 2012, No. 286, p. 179. http://www.boe.es/diario_boe/txt.php?id=BOE-A-2012-14602. Accessed 10 May 2016.
Villars, Rina. 2009. Literality and communicative intention in a case of legal ambiguity: The notion of citizenship in Hispanic-American constitutions. Journal of Pragmatics 41: 2137–2380.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Villars, R. Same-Sex Marriage and the Spanish Constitution: The Linguistic-Legal Meaning Interface. Int J Semiot Law 30, 273–300 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-016-9491-8
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-016-9491-8