Description
Book SynopsisMootz offers an antidote to the fragmentation of contemporary legal theory with a collection of essays arguing that legal practice is a hermeneutical and rhetorical event that can best be understood and theorized in those terms. This is not a modern insight that wipes away centuries of dogmatic confusion; rather, Mootz draws on insights as old as the Western tradition itself. However, the essays are not antiquarian or merely descriptive, because hermeneutical and rhetorical philosophy have undergone important changes over the millennia. To return to hermeneutics and rhetoric as touchstones for law is to embrace dynamic traditions that provide the resources for theorists who seek to foster persuasion and understanding as an antidote to the emerging global order and the trend toward bureaucratization in accordance with expert administration, violent suppression, or both.
Table of ContentsPart 1 Legal Hermeneutics and Theory; Chapter 1 The New Legal Hermeneutics; Chapter 2 The Ontological Basis of Legal Hermeneutics: A Proposed Model of Inquiry Based on the Work of Gadamer, Habermas, and Ricoeur; Chapter 3 A Future Foretold: Neo-Aristotelian Praise of Postmodern Legal Theory; Part 2 Law, Hermeneutics and Rhetoric; Chapter 4 Rhetorical Knowledge in Legal Practice and Theory; Chapter 5 Law in Flux: Philosophical Hermeneutics, Legal Argumentation, and the Natural Law Tradition; Part 3 Critical Hermeneutics and Legal Rhetoric; Chapter 6 Nietzschean Critique and Philosophical Hermeneutics; Chapter 7 Responding to Nietzsche: The Constructive Power of Destruktion;
