Reading Ricoeur through Law

This is the first collection of essays examining Paul Ricoeur's writings on law, bringing together eminent Ricoeur scholars from around the world to demonstrate the importance of Ricoeur's philosophy for the juridical field while offering new paths to extend and build on his work.

Reading Ricoeur through Law, edited by Marc de Leeuw, George H. Taylor, and Eileen Brennan, is the first collection of essays solely focused on Ricoeur’s thinking about law, bringing together both established and emerging scholars to offer a systematic and critical examination of Ricoeur’s legal thinking. The chapters not only explore the specific contribution Ricoeur makes to the field of jurisprudence but also examine how Ricoeur’s work on law fits, complements, or changes his overall anthropology, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. The book provides a complex insight into how law, ethics, and politics intertwine both from within law as normative rule setting, as well as through the wider social-political and historical context in which law and legal institutions affect our inter-subjective and communal life as lived “with and for others in just institutions.” The collection also makes available in English “The Just between the Legal and the Good,” a key text in Ricoeur’s reflections about law and justice. The core topics of this collection are rights, justice, responsibility, judging, interpretation, argumentation, punishment, and authority, but contributors also offer original insights in how Ricoeur’s philosophical reconceptualization of symbolism, action, ideology, narrative, selfhood, testimony, history, trauma, reconciliation, justice, and forgiveness can be made productive for our understanding of law and legal institutions.

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Reading Ricoeur Through Law

Marc De Leeuw, George H. Taylor, Eileen Brennan

Introduction to Paul Ricoeur’s “The Just Between the Legal and the Good”

1. The Just Between the Legal and the Good

Paul Ricoeur

2. The Plurality of Instances of Justice

Paul Ricoeur

Reply to Paul Ricoeur

Ronald Dworkin

3. Juridical Precedents and Reflective Judgment

Roger W. H. Savage

4. The Subject of Rights and Responsibility in Ricoeur’s Legal Philosophy

Guido Gorgoni

5. Symbolism and the Generativity of Justice

Antoine Garapon

6. Ricoeur, Narrative, and Legal Contingency

George H. Taylor

7. Ricoeur’s Juridical Anthropology: Law, Autonomy, and a Life Lived-in-Common

Marc De Leeuw

8. The Unbearable Between-ness of Law

Francis J. Mootz III

9. Law and Metadiscourse: Ricoeur on Metaphysics and the Ascription of Rights

Geoffrey Dierckxsens

10. Between Truth and Justice. Ricoeur on the Roles and Limits of Narrative in Legal Processes

Marie-Hélène Desmeules

11. Law and (Dis)empowerment: On Ricoeur’s Phenomenology of Judging

Hans Lindahl

12. The “Crisis of Witnessing” and Trauma on the Stand: Attending to Survivors as an Obligation of Justice

Stephanie Arel

13. The Interaction Between Love and Justice in the Legal System

Walter Salles

14. Forgiveness at the Border of Law

Oliver Abel

15. Law and Evil in Paul Ricoeur’s Thought

Bertrand Mazabraud

About the Contributors