Law's Hermeneutics

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 Ricoeur, 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.

Simone Glanert is Senior Lecturer at Kent Law School and Director of the Kent Centre for European and Comparative Law. Fabien Girard is Assistant Professor (Maître de conférences) at the Faculty of Law, Université Grenoble Alpes.

CONTENTS Acknowledgements Hermeneuticizing the Law Simone Glanert and Fabien Girard PART I - A MATRIX 1 Heidegger's Hermeneutics Cristina Lafont 2 Understanding the Other: A Gadamerian View on Conceptual Schemes Charles Taylor 3 Gadamer's Interest for Legal Hermeneutics Jean Grondin 4 The Interpretation of Foreign Law: How Germane Is Gadamer Simone Glanert PART II - CONCURRENCES 5 Ricoeur's Legal Hermeneutics: Mapping the Non-Place of Critique Fabien Girard 6 Dworkin, Interpretation and Legal Change Paul Yowell 7 Taking Stories Seriously: The Place of Narrative in Legal Interpretation François Ost PART III - VARIANCES / DISCREPANCIES 8 Wittgenstein on Rule-Following and Interpretation Julia Tanney 9 Derrida's Gadamer Pierre Legrand 10 Habermas, Law and the European Union William Outhwaite 11 Law's Disappearance: The State of Exception and the Destruction of Experience Cosmin Sebastian Cercel ENVOI The Hermeneutic Character of Legal Construction Ralf Poscher Notes on Contributors Index