Chapter 3 explains the interpretative methodology adopted in this book. It shows that the process of interpreting the law of armed conflict, including Article 36, has so far been lacking transparency both in practice and scholarship. It has been largely marked by presenting the outcomes of interpretation rather than explaining how these outcomes were achieved. To ensure that giving meaning to the terms of Article 36 will proceed in a transparent and principled manner, this chapter addresses the shortcomings of Articles 31 and 32 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties and suggests an interpretative methodology that helps overcome its limitations. The chapter also draws on the ideas of Stanley Fish and his work on interpretative communities. Thus, interpretation is here understood as a process of ascribing a meaning from a suite of possible meanings to convince the relevant interpretative community that a certain interpretation is the most persuasive interpretation to adopt. The interpretative community includes States, courts and tribunals, the International Committee of the Red Cross, non-governmental organisations and legal, military and academic experts. [177 words]

Chapter 9 focuses on various theorists who make up the Anti-Free Speech Movement, starting with philosopher Herbert Marcuse. They suggest that the First Amendment has been interpreted too broadly to allow protection for speech they believe is intolerable, and that this should be reversed. The chapter examines those who have espoused critical race theory to develop arguments for suppressing hate speech, and feminists who advocate suppressing sexually oriented speech. The connection between these various theorists is that they argue that the First Amendment has gone too far, yet they vigorously deny that they support censorship. In doing so, they adopt the rhetoric and tactics designed by Anthony Comstock, Fredric Wertham, and Newton Minow before them.The chapter concludes that the purpose of the First Amendment is to block government from having the type of power these theorists advocate, and suggests that one way to preserve free speech is to use this list of characteristics as a means of identifying censors.

This chapter discusses four more accounts of interpretation. First, the notion of a holistic textual act is introduced, which is an act performed by an author through the production of an entire text. It is argued that there is a kind of interpretation that aims to grasp an author's holistic textual act (which is, or is part of, the author's meaning), and the epistemological aspects of it are discussed. Next, externalist interpretations are discussed, the hallmark of which is that they don't aim to specify author's meanings but rather indicative or expressive meanings. Such interpretations, it is argued, may perhaps never reach the exalted status of knowledge. I then criticize Stanley Fish’s reader-response theory of interpretation because it flies in the face of a number of commonsense assumptions about texts, authors, and meanings. Finally, it is argued that reading and interpretation (on any of the accounts discussed) are distinct and different acts, and that there can be reading without interpretation, even if in actual fact the two usually go together.