Before his death on the battlefields of the First World War, the young philosopher Adolf Reinach was a rising star—prime assistant to Edmund Husserl; mentor and friend to a generation from Max Scheler to Edith Stein. Since then, his influence has waned. To be sure, he developed something like speech act theory decades before John Austin—but Austin appears to have come to it on his own. Reinach’s work has, indeed, fallen into relative obscurity—his method of “realist phenomenology” alien to both …
Read moreBefore his death on the battlefields of the First World War, the young philosopher Adolf Reinach was a rising star—prime assistant to Edmund Husserl; mentor and friend to a generation from Max Scheler to Edith Stein. Since then, his influence has waned. To be sure, he developed something like speech act theory decades before John Austin—but Austin appears to have come to it on his own. Reinach’s work has, indeed, fallen into relative obscurity—his method of “realist phenomenology” alien to both sides of the contemporary analytic-Continental divide; his contributions to legal philosophy idiosyncratic among his contemporaries and largely ignored in Anglophone jurisprudence. That is, until recently. In the past decade or so, citations to Reinach’s masterwork The Apriori Foundations of the Civil Law have begun reappearing in English law and legal philosophy. His work, as has become increasingly apparent, has much to say to contemporary private law theory, particularly of the “New Private Law” school—a push to take the linguistic structure of private law seriously in different ways, in contrast to the thorough-going conceptual nominalism of classical Law and Economics and Legal Realism. Reinach, as many of today’s theorists, rejected the rising nominalism about legal concepts of his age and offered a provocative and difficult alternative: that the basic organising concepts of private law are metaphysically real and epistemically a priori, like the basic concepts of arithmetic and logic. The new volume, Reinach and the Foundations of Private Law, edited by James Toomey, Marietta Auer, Paul Miller and Henry Smith, is out now with Cambridge University Press and available Open Access through Cambridge Core. It aims to rejuvenate, situate, and interrogate Reinach’s legal philosophy for a contemporary audience. Bringing together the work of both legal scholars and philosophers, the essays in the volume shed light on Reinach’s methodology, place his insights in contemporary debates about the foundational structure of private law, and engage in original, Reinachian analysis of legal concepts.
