INTRODUCTION
1. See, for example, David Couzens Hoy, "Interpreting the Law: Hermeneutical and Poststructuralist Perspectives," Southern California Law Review 58 (1985): 135; Hoy, "A Critique of the Originalism/Nonoriginalism Distinction," Northern Kentucky Law Review 15 (1988): 479; Gerald L. Bruns, "Law as Hermeneutics: A Response to Ronald Dworkin," in The Politics of Interpretation, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Ronald Dworkin, Law's Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986); Sanford Levinson and Steven Mailloux, eds., Interpreting Law and Literature: A Hermeneutic Reader (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988); Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989). [BACK]
2. Brad Sherman, "Hermeneutics in Law," Modern Law Review 51 (1988): 395. [BACK]
3. For a view of what jurisprudence has to teach hermeneutics, see Thomas M. Seebohm, "Facts, Words, and What Jurisprudence Can Teach Hermeneutics," Research in Phenomenology 16 (1986): 25. [BACK]
4. Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroads, 1982), 293. [BACK]
5. Consider the observations of the Italian hermeneutician Emilio Betti: "Having sketched this summary outline of the general theory of hermeneutics, we may ask ourselves what reception the new science may look forward to among scholars of the various moral sciences. We should not be surprised if it gains a more favorable reception the wider the horizon and vision opened by the given discipline, the greater the freedom from narrow prejudice, the deeper its own practitioners' awareness of their own methods." Betti, "On a General Theory of Interpretation: The Raison d'Etre of Hermeneutics," trans. George Wright, American Journal of Jurisprudence 32 (1987): 250. [BACK]
6. For an introduction to the history and competing meanings of hermeneutics, see Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969). [BACK]
7. Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics plays an important role in the essays by Dallmayr, Bruns, Stone, Ball, Hoy, Perry, and Leyh. The essays by Knapp and Michaels and, to a lesser degree, Fish represent challenges to the picture of interpretation supplied by Gadamer. It is fair to say, then, that despite differences among the contributors in the degree to which Gadamer's ideas are embraced, all of the writers in this volume are nonetheless grappling with contemporary issues shaped by their treatment in the literature of philosophical hermeneutics. [BACK]
8. Gadamer, Truth and Method, xvi. [BACK]
9. For more on the relationship between Gadamerian hermeneutics and law, see Hoy, "Interpreting the Law" and "A Critique"; Sherman, "Hermeneutics in Law"; and Gregory Leyh, "Toward a Constitutional Hermeneutics," American Journal of Political Science 32 (1988): 369. [BACK]
10. John Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutical Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 213. [BACK]
11. Goodrich's essay, "Ars Bablativa: Ramism, Rhetoric, and the Genealogy of English Jurisprudence," explores the relationship between Ramism and early English law. The influence of Peter Ramus on the scholastic and humanistic traditions was especially visible in his contributions to rhetoric, dialectic, and logic. The influence of Ramism was not limited to England but was also felt in France, Spain, and Germany. Perhaps the central contribution of Ramism lies in the interest it generated in "method," a peculiarly modern subject. See, generally, Walter J. Ong, Ramus: Method, and the Decay of Dialogue; From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958). [BACK]
12. CLS critiques extend also to the pseudo-Socratic and hierarchical character of law school teaching. See, in general, Mark Kelman, A Guide to Critical Legal Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). [BACK]
13. For more criticism of the CLS position on radical indeterminacy, see Ken Kress, "Legal Indeterminacy," California Law Review 77 (1989): 283. [BACK]
14. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 274-75. [BACK]
15. Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, "Against Theory 2: Hermeneutics and Deconstruction," Critical Inquiry 14 (1987): 49. [BACK]