법의 근거 이론과 법률해석―헌법합치적 해석과 헌법정향적 해석의 법이론적 함의―

What stands out in our supreme court’s recent decisions is the application and development of the method of ‘constitution-conforming’ and ‘constitution-oriented statutory interpretation’. In particular, the method of constitution-oriented statutory interpretation plays an important role in our supreme court’s decisions. The purpose of this article is to clarify the legal-theoretical implications of constitution-oriented statutory interpretation. If legal interpretation is an activity that interprets according to ‘the law that exists’ rather than ‘the law that ought to exist’ and derives the content of ‘law as it is’ to be applied to the case at hand, legal interpretation should identify and confirm the content of the ‘law as it is’. Therefore, the question of legal interpretation is intimately related to that of the grounds of law. This central legal-theoretical problem consists in the clarification of what are the determinants of law, or what is the basis of the law that constitutes the ‘law as it is’ and determines its contents. While positivist theories of the ground of law assert that (exclusively or primarily) social facts alone constitute ‘law as it is’ and determine its contents, non-positivist theories to be developed in this article insist that social facts and moral facts work together as the grounds of law. Depending on the priority relation between social facts and moral facts in constituting and determining ‘the law as it is’, nonpositivism is divided into moral filtering versions and moral architecting/structuring (or moral reading) versions. This article argues that the latter are better than the former in explaining and justifying the grounds of law, and that the methods of constitution- conforming and constitution-oriented statutory interpretation can be best understood in light of a moral architecturing/structuring (or moral reading) version of nonpositivism.