Ugly American hermeneutics

Abstract

This article is part of a Symposium that provides a forum for comparing legal hermeneutics as articulated by four scholars from the United States and four scholars from Brazil. The article embraces this cross-cultural event by asking whether American legal hermeneutics is “ugly” and is practiced by “ugly Americans.” The pejorative cast of this terminology is obvious and intentional, but it is also ambiguous and multi-layered. The Essay unfolds various dimensions of ugly American hermeneutics and suggests that - ugly though they may be -American scholars still can make some important contributions to the worldwide conversation regarding legal hermeneutics. It is their plain-faced pragmatism, perhaps, that is the source of our contribution even as it casts them (sometimes unfairly) as the ugly Americans. The Article discusses the political spectacle of appointment of new Supreme Court Justices, and the reductive efforts of some Justices to reduce judgment to simplistic history by means of the theory of “new originalism”.

Key words: hermeneutics, United States, Brazil, America, justice.