Law's Hermeneutics: Other Investigations

Bringing together an international range of contributors, this collection revisits legal hermeneutics, by making particular reference to philosophy, sociology and linguistics, and asking how law can benefit from the hermeneutical insights developed by a wide range of non-legal thinkers.

With reference to a range of continental theorists – including Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, Giorgio Agamben, Jürgen Habermas, and Niklas Luhmann – the volume pursues an appreciation of the merits and limits of law’s hermeneutics as an enquiry into the emergence of meaning, within the dynamic between the reader and the text. In this respect, albeit from different perspectives, and with different orientations, these papers explore the matter of reading the law beyond, it is argued throughout, the reduction of hermeneutics to a simple tool for textual exegesis.