ABSTRACT Mark Greenberg has suggested that there is a ‘standard picture’ of how law works, according to which the contribution that a legal text makes to the content of the law is constituted by the meaning of the words contained in that text. Greenberg and other critics have offered several objections to this Standard Picture (or SP), one of which is that it cannot account for important aspects of legal practice (such as the operation of certain principles of legal interpretation). In this article, I suggest that adherents of the SP may have available to them adequate responses to existing versions of this objection. I then offer a new version of the objection, according to which the SP is unable to account for what I call ‘retrospectively operating modifier laws’ – roughly, laws that alter the contribution that pre-existing statutes make to the content of the law. I consider several ways in which adherents of the SP might seek to account for retrospectively operating modifier laws, and contend that none of them is successful. I conclude that this version of the objection poses a serious threat to the SP, and also to claims made by some of the SP’s critics.

中文翻译：

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基于实践的反对法律如何运作的“标准图景”

摘要 Mark Greenberg 提出法律如何运作有一个“标准图景”，根据该图景，法律文本对法律内容的贡献是由该文本中包含的词语的含义构成的。格林伯格和其他批评者对这个标准图片（或 SP）提出了几个反对意见，其中之一是它不能解释法律实践的重要方面（例如某些法律解释原则的运作）。在这篇文章中，我建议 SP 的支持者可能已经对现有版本的反对意见做出了充分的回应。然后我提供了一个新版本的反对意见，据此 SP 无法解释我所谓的“追溯性操作修正法”——粗略地说，改变现有法规对法律内容的贡献的法律。我考虑了 SP 的追随者可能试图解释追溯性操作修正法的几种方式，并认为它们都不是成功的。我的结论是，这个版本的反对意见对 SP 构成了严重威胁，也对 SP 的一些批评者提出的主张构成了严重威胁。