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Cardozo Law Review

Abstract

This Essay could perhaps be titled "Why Lieber Now?": for this seems to me an unavoidable question when reviving a figure who has seemingly been lost in the archives. We encounter problems on all fronts, and just to ignore them and go about resuscitating Lieber would only provide an opportunity to quip that the operation 'was successful, though the patient died (was actually long dead). Even at the time of its publication, William Kent, Chancellor Kent's son, remarked of Lieber's Legal and Political Hermeneutics," 'What, in God's name, made you choose 'Hermeneutics'? ... Had you called your... book 'principles of Interpretation,' . . . many an honest fellow, now frightened away, would have read & enjoyed the writings.' " Yet I think this is exactly what draws some of us to Lieber today. For legal theory in the guise of hermeneutics is very much the fashion nowadays, and it seems to us something new. So to rediscover a nineteenth-century American thinker who speaks of Hermeneutics is both conversational and controversial-as some few cognoscenti have discovered, it is also profoundly relevant.

Keywords

Civil War, War, Legal History, Sociology, Social Studies

Disciplines

Law | Legal History | Sociology

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