Classic Legal Theory

Written in the 1960s, Truth and Method is Gadamer's magnum opus. Looking behind the self-consciousness of science, he discusses the tense relationship between truth and methodology. In examining the different experiences of truth, he aims to present the hermeneutic phenomenon in its fullest extent.

In Lessons of Everyday Law Roderick MacDonald shows that stories of everyday law are revealing not just for what they can teach about policy-making and law reform but as accounts of practices internal to the little legal systems of everyday life. The norms governing ordinary encounters reveal how human beings make sense of their relationships with each other and translate these relationships into discrete, culturally determined legal forms and values.

Law's Empire is a 1986 text in legal philosophy by Ronald Dworkin, in which the author continues his criticism of the philosophy of legal positivism as promoted by H.L.A. Hart during the middle to late 20th century.

This book provides a comprehensive and critical account of Gadamer's hermeneutical philosophy. Robert J. Dostal shows that at the heart of Gadamer's enterprise is the thesis that "being that can be understood is language

This book offers a radical challenge to accounts of the common law's development. Contrary to received jurisprudential wisdom, it maintains there is no grand theory which will explain satisfactorily the dynamic interactions of change and stability in the common law's history. Offering original readings of Charles Darwin's and Hans-Georg Gadamer's works, the book shows that law is a rhetorical activity that can only be properly appreciated in its historical and political context.