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Responding To Nietzsche: The Constructive Power Of Destruktion, Francis J. Mootz Iii
Responding To Nietzsche: The Constructive Power Of Destruktion, Francis J. Mootz Iii
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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 …
Rethinking The Rule Of Law: A Demonstration That The Obvious Is Plausible, Francis J. Mootz Iii
Rethinking The Rule Of Law: A Demonstration That The Obvious Is Plausible, Francis J. Mootz Iii
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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 …