Hans-Georg Gadamer?s philosophical hermeneutics is especially relevant for law, which is grounded in the interpretation of authoritative texts from the past to resolve present-day disputes. In this collection, leading scholars consider the importance of Gadamer?s philosophy for ongoing disputes in legal theory. The work of prominent philosophers, including Fred Dallmayr, P. Christopher Smith and David Hoy, is joined with the work of leading legal theorists, such as William Eskridge, Lawrence Solum and Dennis Patterson, to provide an overview of the connections between law and Gadamer?s hermeneutical philosophy. Part I considers the relevance of Gadamer?s philosophy to longstanding disputes in legal theory such as the debate over originalism, the rule of law and proper modes of statutory and constitutional exegesis. Part II demonstrates Gadamer?s significance for legal theory by comparing his approach to the work of Nietzsche, Habermas and Dworkin.

Mootz offers an antidote to the fragmentation of contemporary legal theory with a collection of essays arguing that legal practice is a hermeneutical and rhetorical event that can best be understood and theorized in those terms. This is not a modern insight that wipes away centuries of dogmatic confusion; rather, Mootz draws on insights as old as the Western tradition itself. However, the essays are not antiquarian or merely descriptive, because hermeneutical and rhetorical philosophy have undergone important changes over the millennia. To "return" to hermeneutics and rhetoric as touchstones for law is to embrace dynamic traditions that provide the resources for theorists who seek to foster persuasion and understanding as an antidote to the emerging global order and the trend toward bureaucratization in accordance with expert administration, violent suppression, or both.

Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur were two of the most important hermeneutical philosophers of the twentieth century. Gadamer single-handedly revived hermeneutics as a philosophical field with his many essays and his masterpiece, Truth and Method. Ricoeur famously mediated the Gadamer-Habermas debate and advanced his own hermeneutical philosophy through a number of books addressing social theory, religion, psychoanalysis and political philosophy. This book brings Gadamer and Ricoeur into a hermeneutical conversation with each other through some of their most important commentators. Twelve leading scholars deliver contemporary assessments of the history and promise of hermeneutical philosophy, providing focused discussion on the work of these two key hermeneutical thinkers. The book shows how the horizons of their thought at once support and question each other and how, in many ways, the work of these two pioneering philosophers defines the issues and agendas for the new century.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.

Hans-Georg Gadamer‘s philosophical hermeneutics is especially relevant for law, which is grounded in the interpretation of authoritative texts from the past to resolve present-day disputes. In this collection, leading scholars consider the importance of Gadamer‘s philosophy for ongoing disputes in legal theory. The work of prominent philosophers, including Fred Dallmayr, P. Christopher Smith and David Hoy, is joined with the work of leading legal theorists, such as William Eskridge, Lawrence Solum and Dennis Patterson, to provide an overview of the connections between law and Gadamer‘s hermeneutical philosophy. Part I considers the relevance of Gadamer‘s philosophy to longstanding disputes in legal theory such as the debate over originalism, the rule of law and proper modes of statutory and constitutional exegesis. Part II demonstrates Gadamer‘s significance for legal theory by comparing his approach to the work of Nietzsche, Habermas and Dworkin.

Explores the relevance of hermeneutics for modern human sciences, its history and development, and its key philosophical debates.

Bringing together leading academics hailing from different cultural and scholarly horizons, this book revisits legal hermeneutics by making particular reference to philosophy, sociology and linguistics. On the assumption that theory has much to teach law, that theory motivates and enables, the writings of such intellectuals as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricœur, Giorgio Agamben, Jürgen Habermas, Ronald Dworkin and Ludwig Wittgenstein receive special consideration. As it explores the matter of reading the law and as it inquires into the emergence of meaning within the dynamic between reader and text against the background of the reader’s worldly finiteness, this collection of essays wishes to contribute to an improved appreciation of the merits and limits of law’s hermeneutics which, it argues, is emphatically not to be reduced to a simple tool for textual exegesis.