Law’s Hermeneutics: Other Investigations

This edited collection of essays brings together a dozen leading academics hailing from different scholarly and cultural horizons with a view to revisiting legal hermeneutics by making particular reference to philosophy, sociology and linguistics. On the assumption that theory has much to teach law — that theory solicits, motivates and enables —, the writings of such intellectuals as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricœur, Giorgio Agamben, Ronald Dworkin and Ludwig Wittgenstein will 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, the book 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. By generating a fruitful exchange between leading scholars from various disciplines in order to highlight the modalities under which understanding takes place, this work will give lawyers the opportunity to think more critically about legal interpretation.