The Maison française d’Oxford in co-operation with the Kent Centre for European and Comparative Law is organizing a critical and interdisciplinary workshop entitled "Law’s Hermeneutics: Other Investigations" to take place in Oxford on 5-6 June 2015. The aim of this workshop, which will be open to the public, whether lawyers or non-lawyers, is to gather approximately 10 leading academics hailing from different scholarly and cultural horizons with a view to revisiting legal hermeneutics by making particular reference to philosophy, linguistics and translation studies. 

Argument

The Maison française d’Oxford in co-operation with the Kent Centre for European and Comparative Law is organizing a critical and interdisciplinary workshop entitled ‘Law’s Hermeneutics: Other Investigations’ to take place in Oxford on 5-6 June 2015. The aim of this workshop, which will be open to the public, whether lawyers or non-lawyers, is to gather approximately 10 leading academics hailing from different scholarly and cultural horizons with a view to revisiting legal hermeneutics by making particular reference to philosophy, linguistics and translation studies. On the assumption that other disciplines have much to teach legal theory, the writings of such intellectuals as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Paul Ricœur and Ludwig Wittgenstein will receive special consideration. As it explores the matter of reading the law and as it inquires into the emergence of meaning within the dynamic between reader and text against the background of the reader’s worldly finiteness, the workshop wishes to contribute to an improved appreciation of the merits and limits of law’s hermeneutics which, it argues, is emphatically not to be reduced to a simple tool for textual exegesis. In this regard, the workshop purports to supplement and update the body of work to be found in such texts as Gregory Leyh (ed.), Legal Hermeneutics (University of California Press, 1992) and Marcel Senn & Barbara Fritschi (eds), Rechtswissenschaft und Hermeneutik (F. Steiner Verlag, 2009)

See more at: http://www.mfo.ac.uk/en/events/law-s-hermeneutics-other-investigations#sthash.83IBchQh.dpuf

Program

Friday, 5 June 2015

2:30 PM Registration/Refreshments

Welcome Address

• Dr Fabien Girard, Maison Française d’Oxford
• Dr Simone Glanert, University of Kent

3:00 PM Opening Keynote Presentation

Professor Jean Grondin, Université de Montréal, On Gadamer’s Interest for Legal Hermeneutics

4:00 PM Coffee/Tea Break

4:30 PM Panel 1 – A Matrix and a Dissent

• Professor Oren Ben-Dor, University of Southampton, Estranging Hermes Or, Heidegger ‘After’ and Nearer Plato
• Dr Simone Glanert, University of Kent, How Germane Is Gadamer to the Interpretation of Foreign Law
• Professor Pierre Legrand, Sorbonne, Derrida’s Gadamers

7:00 PM Dinner  (Details to Follow) 

Saturday, 6 June 2015

8:30 AM Panel 2 – Concurrences

• Fabien Girard, Maison Française d’Oxford, Ricœur’s Legal Hermeneutics: Between Critique and Argumentation
• Professor Francois Ost, Université Saint-Louis, Brussels, Interprétation et narration: la place du récit dans l’interprétation juridique
• Dr Paul Yowell, St. Hilda’s College (Oxford), Dworkin, Interpretation, and Legal Chance

10:30 AM Coffee/Tea Break

11:00 AM Panel 3 – Variances

• Dr Julia Tanney, University of Kent, Wittgenstein on Rule-Following and Interpretation
• Dr Cosmin Sebastian Cercel, University of Notthingham, Law’s Disappearance: The State of Exception and the Destruction of Experience
• Professor William Outhwaite, Newcastle University, Habermas, Law and the EU

1:00 PM Sandwich Lunch/Refreshments

2:00 PM Closing Keynote Presentation

• Professor Ralf Poscher, Universität Freiburg, The Hermeneutic Character of Legal Construction

3:00 PM Closing Address

• Dr Fabien Girard, Maison Française d’Oxford
• Dr Simone Glanert, University of Kent