Legal Hermeneutics: The Text and Beyond
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12775/SPI.2015.004Keywords
legal hermeneutics, critical hermeneutics, judgment, meaning, restorative jurisprudence, Paul RicoeurAbstract
This paper discusses legal hermeneutics, the role of interpretation in law. My claim is that legal hermeneutics—and hermeneutics more generally—offers four larger insights. First, legal hermeneutics offers tools for a very sophisticated reading of a text; it allows us to discern more closely what is at work in the text. This discernment requires hermeneutic training in acts of judgment, an acumen that goes beyond the more formulaic and algorithmic resources of much contemporary education. Second, legal hermeneutics requires analysis of the interrelation between meaning and application over time. Often an existing rule cannot be applied mechanically to a new case; hermeneutics shows how the rule must be creatively extended. Third, legal hermeneutics emphasizes the quality of hearing: an attentiveness to the other that demonstrates the humanistic qualities of the law and of legal understanding. Fourth, legal hermeneutics aims to recover insights into human meaning in contrast to more reductive approaches that limit human aspiration to more confining values such as economics. Legal hermeneutics—and hermeneutics as a broader field—is a wager in favor of meaning.
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