Chapter 71 Hermeneutics and Law, in The Blackwell Companion to Hermeneutics 595 (eds., Niall Keane and Chris Lawn, Wiley-Blackwell 2016)

This chapter appears in an anthology 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 about 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. The chapter argues that these three important themes are sufficient to underwrite Gadamer's famous assertion that legal practice has exemplary status for hermeneutical theory.