In this essay, the author sets out to illustrate the complexity of problems of interpretation, deriving both from the difficulty of establishing the meanings of the terms being interpreted and from the incidence of the principles that act as generators both of order and of disorder. A handful of principles suffices in order to overturn well-established critical benchmarks or to bypass the “letter” of the law when it is found to be unsympathetic. From this standpoint, it makes sense to go back to the principle of law certainty, whose diachronic aspects and impact on the legal order also need to be considered.
Keywords: Principles, Non-specificity, Rule of law, Interpretation