This edited volume covers the debates, discussions and controversies surrounding the foundations of legal hermeneutics, the question of methods and legal techniques of interpretation, and the conditions for a fair legal interpretation. Primary questions addressed in this work include:

• Are there legal methods of interpretation more appropriate than others? 
• Can we do without any method of interpretation and leave complete freedom in the assessment of legal texts to the Judge? 
• Is legal interpretation solely an act of will of the Judge? 

The substantial contributions are written by philosophers and jurists working in the history of legal hermeneutics: the Ancients (Juridico-Talmunic law, Roman law), the Middle-Ages (Roman-Canonical law), the Modern (Schleiermacher, Savigny, Ecole de l'Exégèse) and the contemporary era (Betti, Gadamer, Dworkin, Ricoeur, Fisch).  The book is aimed at students and researchers working in philosophy and legal theory.

Johann Michel is Professor of philosophy and political science at the University of Poitiers, a researcher attached to EHESS (Paris), and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France.He is a specialist in hermeneutics and social theory, and is the author of around fifteen works that have been translated into several foreign languages (English, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic), notably Homo Interpretans, Towards a transformation of hermeneutics (2019), The reparable and the irreparable (2023) and What is Hermeneutics ? (2026). He has been Professor or keynote speaker in more than 40 foreign universities. He is a Laureate of the 2023 research prize from Academy of Moral and Political Sciences (France).