Hermeneutics and Law

Abstract

This chapter will appear in a forthcoming book on hermeneutics. After providing a hermeneutical phenomenology of legal practice that locates legal interpretation at the center of the rule of law, the chapter considers three important hermeneutical themes:

(1) the critical distinction between a legal historian writing aboout a law in the past and a judge deciding a case according to the law;

(2) the reinvigoration of the natural law tradition against the reductive characteristics of legal positivism by construing human nature as hermeneutical; and

(3) the role of philosophical hermeneutics in grounding critical legal theory rather than serving as a quiescent acceptance of the status quo, as elaborated by reconsidering the famous exchanges between Gadamer, Ricoeur and Habermas.

I argue that these three important themes are sufficient to underwrite Gadamer's famous assertion that legal practice has exemplary status for hermeneutical theory.

Keywords: Critical Theory, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jurgen Habermas, Martin Heidegger, Hermeneutics, Natural Law, Positivism, Rhetoric, Paul Ricoeur