Jurisprudence Commons^™

The Hermeneutical And Rhetorical Nature Of Law, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

In its most venal manifestation, scholarly writing betrays the anxiety of influence by claiming to offer a radically new solution to age-old conundrums. The goal is to make a clean break from a traditional path of thought that has become trapped in a cul-de-sac, to make progress by finding a new way forward. Not so with Jean Porter’s work, and particularly her most recent book. Professor Porter demonstrates that thinking through an established tradition – one that has responded to numerous challenges within very different contexts over several millennia – can sometimes offer the most productive response to contemporary dilemmas. …

The Empty Tomb: Post-Critical Legal Hermeneutics, Peter Goodrich

Nevada Law Journal

There is nothing more refreshing than a successful failure. A momentary flaring of flamboyance. A near miss. Fifteen weeks as media monarchs; a good part—a small part—of a decade as a political threat to the order of the academy, if not the stability of the system. The affective bonds and the institutional disruption of youthful and latterly not-so-young dissidents and socialist sympathizers within the law schools definitely had their excitements, their impetus and novelties, and then they grew old, got rejected, disappeared into the shadows, backrooms, and faculty lounges. The various histories assign different figures to the failure of critical …

As Time Goes By: Hermeneutics And Originalism, John T. Valauri

Nevada Law Journal

What is the continuing relevance of hermeneutics to legal theory in general and to constitutional theory in particular if we are all originalists now? Both seem to be vital despite the decline of interest in hermeneutics recently. This article argues for the continuing relevance of hermeneutics to both fields because of the centrality of issues of application and practical reasoning in both. Law seeks for find the meaning of texts applied over time; legal texts are truly letters of transit. That we are all originalists, yet still have the same sort of interpretive debates we have always had, only indicates …

Ugly American Hermeneutics, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

This article will appear in a Symposium on comparative legal hermeneutics that includes four articles by American scholars and four articles by Brazilian scholars. I argue that the "ugly American" hermeneutics exemplified in Justice Scalia's opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller is unfortunate, even if we supplement Justice Scalia's hermeneutical fantasy with the much more careful and balanced philosophical work by Larry Solum, Keith Whittington and other scholars. Nevertheless, the pragmatic work of interpretation by lawyers and judges in the day-to-day world of legal practice shows a plain-faced integrity of which we Americans can be proud.

The Existential Subject Of Rights And Private Law: The Example Of The Indian Issue In Brazil, Jose Carlos Moreira Da Silva Filho

Nevada Law Journal

The issue of the juridical subject has been a topic of discussion as part of the rethinking of the classical jurisprudential concepts in Brazil. In particular, some authors have written about the “repersonalization of private law.” This has opened a promising path of inquiry regarding the legal subject for at least four major reasons. First, continental private law is the classical field to discuss the subject of rights. Second, the focus of private law remains the concept of the person, opening an important space to recover the moral philosophy in law. Third, the repersonalization of private law demonstrates the necessity …

Hermeneutics- The Path Of The Hermeneutic-Ontological Shift And The Decolonial Shift, Celso Luiz Ludwig

Nevada Law Journal

The purpose of the reflections that follow is to highlight the meaning and importance of the hermeneutic shift produced by the work of Gadamer, to consider some of his themes and categories, and to extend the meaning of this hermeneutic rationality to the legal field in terms of a new conception of interpretation. A second objective is to catch sight of new theoretical perspectives, having as a starting point the unfolding of practical philosophy into hermeneutic philosophy carried out by Gadamer. This article aims at recuperating, among other things, the fundamental hermeneutic problem, so as to obtain a glimpse into …

Constitution, Human Rights And Republic: A Necessary Dialogue Between Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics And Boaventura De Sousa Santos's Diatopic Heremeneutics, Jania Maria Lopes Saldanha, Jose Luis Bolzan De Morais

Nevada Law Journal

When we think about the concept of human rights—including all the possible ways of its realization, and considering the complementarities and also the unity of different dimensions of the concept—we confront several difficult questions. In particular, in an age when constitutions and constitutional doctrine have already incorporated a substantive body of human rights law, we must address how some of the constitutional promises regarding individual rights have not been fulfilled. Additionally, we must consider how rights that foster solidarity in the economic, social, and cultural spheres have not been recognized.

This article operates on two levels. On one level, we …

Ugly American Hermeneutics, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Nevada Law Journal

This article will appear in a Symposium on comparative legal hermeneutics that includes four articles by American scholars and four articles by Brazilian scholars. I argue that the "ugly American" hermeneutics exemplified in Justice Scalia's opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller is unfortunate, even if we supplement Justice Scalia's hermeneutical fantasy with the much more careful and balanced philosophical work by Larry Solum, Keith Whittington and other scholars. Nevertheless, the pragmatic work of interpretation by lawyers and judges in the day-to-day world of legal practice shows a plain-faced integrity of which we Americans can be proud.

Deconstructing The Models Of Judges: Legal Hermeneutics And Beyond The Subject-Object Paradigm, Lenio Luiz Streck

Nevada Law Journal

The linguistic-ontological turn has brought uncountable consequences to the interpretation of Law. However, dogmatic-legal knowledge remains hostage to a judicial protagonism, a philosophy of consciousness that, together with legal discretion, represent two sides of the same coin. The criticism of judicial discretion is a matter of democracy: decisions must be coherent, assuring the integrity of Law by reinforcing the normative power of the Constitution from which arises the need for correct answers in Law.

Legal Interpretation: The Window Of The Text As Transparent, Opaque, Or Translucent, George H. Taylor

Nevada Law Journal

It is a common metaphor that the text is a window onto the world that it depicts. I want to explore this metaphor and the insights it may offer us for better understanding legal interpretation. As in the opening epigraph from James Boyd White, I shall develop the metaphor of the text as window in three ways: the text may be transparent, opaque, or translucent. My goal will be to argue that the best way to understand legal interpretation is to conceive of the legal text as translucent, but along the way I will compare the merits also of considering …

Faithful Hermeneutics, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

This article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools on January 9, 2009 as part of a panel on "Scriptural and Constitutional Hermeneutics." The panel was co-sponsored by the Law and Religion Section, Section on Jewish Law, and Section on Islamic Law, and the papers will be published by the Michigan State Law Review.

My article compares legal and religious hermeneutics by exploring the dual nature of what I term "faithful hermeneutics." The ambiguity evoked by this phrase is intentional. On one hand, it suggests an investigation of the relationship between legal and religious …

Interpretation, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

In this chapter from "Law and the Humanities: An Introduction," published by Cambridge University Press, I first survey various theoretical approaches to interpretation, including natural law, analytical legal positivism, law as communication (originalism, intentionalism, and new textualism), and the hermeneutical turn. I then discuss the role of interpretation in contract law, statutory law and constitutional law, to situate the theories in practice.

Responding To Nietzsche: The Constructive Power Of Destruktion, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

As a student of Hans-Georg Gadamer, and later a translator and important commentator on Gadamer’s philosophy, P. Christopher Smith is widely acknowledged to be a leading hermeneutical philosopher. In a series of works, Smith has argued that Gadamer provides an important corrective to Nietzsche’s caustic critical challenges, but that Gadamer’s hermeneutics has no relevance for legal theory because law is just the manifestation of will to power. In this paper I argue that Smith misunderstands the nature of legal practice. Starting with a re-reading of the debate between Gadamer and Jacques Derrida about the legacy of Nietzsche’s philosophy, I argue …

Ricoeur’S Critical Hermeneutics And The Psychotherapeutic Model Of Critical Theory, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

This paper seeks to extend Ricoeur’s acclaimed mediation of the Gadamer-Habermas debate. Freud’s psychoanalytic practice was an important touchstone for the debate, and Ricoeur’s reading of Freud provides a key to his critical intervention in the debate. The emerging postmodern account of psychotherapeutic practice provides a model of the critical hermeneutics that Ricoeur championed. Bringing Ricoeur’s insights to bear on this model, we can advance the questioning spurred by the Gadamer-Habermas debate without pretending to bring closure to the unending conversation of thinking.

The Quest To Reprogram Cultural Software: A Hermeneutical Response To Jack Balkin's Theory Of Ideology And Critique, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

Critical theory has lost the self-assurance that defined the heady days of Marxist economics and Freudian psychoanalysis. In his famous debate with Hans-Georg Gadamer thirty years ago, Jürgen Habermas argued that critical theory was a necessary corrective to the quiescence and conventionalism that followed from Gadamer's hermeneutic perspective. As the 1960s unfolded, the second generation of the Frankfurt School appeared poised to bring sophisticated techniques of social criticism to bear on the emerging postindustrialist system of global capitalism. But the promise of critical theory failed to materialize. Today, Habermas plays the role of the aging lion who refuses to accept …

Foreward, Symposium: Philosophical Hermeneutics And Critical Legal Theory, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

This Symposium brings the considerable talents of a diverse group of scholars to bear on a pressing problem in legal theory: Whether critical theory is possible after the hermeneutical turn. All too often, this problem is framed to invite an “either-or” response. Either we reject the hermeneutical turn and hew to a traditional account of critique anchored by an unimpeachable standard (whether economic, historical, conceptual, cognitive, or otherwise), or we take the hermeneutical turn by embracing radical historical contingency and fluidity, thereby forsaking the possibility of critique and surrendering to conservative conventionalism or inviting postmodern chaos. This Symposium challenges this …

Natural Law And The Cultivation Of Legal Rhetoric, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

This essay appeared in a book celebrating Lon Fuller's contributions to jurisprudence. In it, Professor Mootz argued that Fuller's conception of secular natural law, designated as an "internal morality of law," lends welcome assistance to the effort to articulate a new direction in legal philosophy. He defended Fuller's natural-law approach from the common misinterpretations that it is either a hollow echo of the natural law tradition or an essentialist conception of law at odds with the legal-realist world that he helped to create with his doctrinal scholarship. By reading his famous, "The Case of the Speluncean Explorers," in a new …

Law In Flux: Philosophical Hermeneutics, Legal Argumentation And The Natural Law Tradition, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

Peter Goodrich describes the plight of contemporary legal theory with concise accuracy: We have abandoned natural law foundations originally constructed in ecclesiastical venues only to find that the project of developing a secular legal language capable of transforming the management of social conflict into questions of technical rationality is doomed to failure. The ascendancy of analytic legal positivism has purchased conceptual rigor at the cost of separating the analysis of legal validity from moral acceptability, but retreat from this stale conceptualism and a return to traditional natural law precepts appears wildly implausible. The irrelevance of the natural law tradition in …

The New Legal Hermeneutics, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

Gregory Leyh has edited a volume of essays commissioned “to examine the intersections between contemporary legal theory and the foundations of interpretation” as explored in contemporary hermeneutics. The essays are diverse and multidisciplinary, but each sheds light on perplexing issues of legal interpretation that have exhausted commentators in recent years. The contributors share a broad agreement that we must reject the picture of law as an autonomous, insulated discourse and instead must regard legal discourse as one of many interrelated practices rooted in our character as interpretive beings.

Each contributor addressees the central concerns defined by the leading philosopher of …

Rethinking The Rule Of Law: A Demonstration That The Obvious Is Plausible, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

In this Article, I defend the Rule of Law from its detractors in the academy by uncovering and criticizing the unsound presuppositions driving their critiques. I acknowledge that these critiques raise two different problems for those who defend the plausibility of the Rule of Law: The problem of ensuring legal innovation and the problem of supplying effective constraint. In response to these problems, I locate our faith in the Rule of Law in the hermeneutical practice in which we are engaged as lawyers. Jurisprudential characterizations of the problems of constraint and innovation are misguided reactions to the narrow Enlightenment conception …

Is The Rule Of Law Possible In A Postmodern World?, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

The Rule of Law is the core of our political and legal ideology, but the Rule of Law increasingly is attacked as an unattainable goal. Postmodern theorists challenge whether it makes sense to believe that rules can be formulated for general application and then later neutrally applied by decision makers. Postmodern theorists reject the Enlightenment world view and its political corollary, classical liberalism. The author agrees with the spirit of the postmodern critique, but argues that we can understand the Rule of Law in a manner consonant with postmodern thought. Drawing on the Continental tradition of hermeneutics, or the philosophy …