You could write volumes about the interpretation of the law, Dominican or of any other kind. Of course, it helps if you have legal training, that’s why you have lawyers.
There have been several instances in history when lawmakers tried to do away with interpretation but they have all failed. In revolutionary France before Napoleon (1789-1799) it was established that judges could not interpret the law at all, they had to apply it just as it was written, and in case of obscurity or ambiguity the judge had to refer back to the legislature, where the will of the people supposedly resided, for interpretation. The system soon broke down under the overload of cases at the Legislative Assembly and judges went back to do their job of interpreting the law. The revolutionary lawmakers had repeated the old mistake of believing they could draft perfect laws. All human laws are imperfect and as such must often be interpreted to make them applicable to certain cases. “Life is wiser than the lawmaker,” a famous French judge once said.
For purposes of interpretation, Dominican lawyers use the same tools used by lawyers worldwide, guided by court precedent (“jurisprudencia”) and the opinion of legal authors (“doctrina”). For the particular case of Labor Laws, the Dominican Labor Code establishes a general rule of interpretation (Principle VIII): in case of contradictory texts or doubt about the meaning of a text, the judge will interpret the law under the light most favorable to the employee (“in dubio pro operario”).
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