Contextual familiarity, not legal training, governs interpretive competence.

Evidence

Observe the implications of this need for more of the feel of the situation. The lack of the sense of the context is the reason why a lawyer trained in one legal system is usually incompetent, and feels himself incompetent, to interpret a statute belonging to another system. This helps to explain why even a lawyer in one of the states of the United States will often retain local counsel if he has a hard question of interpretation of a statute of another state. — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process, 894

Categorization

• XREF: Braids into the polyad’s shared thread of listening/observation-as-method - interpretation fails without immersion in context, paralleling colonial administrators misreading native custom and urban dwellers misreading strangers. — connects to: No statute can be interpreted without attributing purpose to it. — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 880; Required statutory clarity varies with the literacy of its addressees — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 3519; Interpretive codes function as modes of attention directed at textual phenomena — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1686 (+2 more)
• CANDY: The fact that even judges retain local counsel across state lines is a light, tweetable explanation of how jurisdiction-bound context is.

Broader Connections

• Interpretive codes function as modes of attention directed at textual phenomena #expands (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1686
• Comprehension requires conscious confrontation with reality rather than interpretive comfort #contradicts (0.75)
• Attention is learned, not innate, so it can be retrained #expands (0.72) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 198