Superficially, anyway, there would seem to be a very real connection between the two. And in the eyes of at least one of the authors we read-Hans-Georg Gadamer-it is, I think, acknowledged. Certainly his hermeneutics draws heavily upon a venerable civil law tradition of the same name, and I think it is probably fair to say that his conception of literary criticism is based on an analogy to what a lawyer might call Equity.' I may go further: consistent with the stated purpose of this seminar, one of the few things that I myself have seen, however dimly, weaving its way through our texts and discussion has been the notion of interpretation-and, of course, interpretation is closely associated with law, and, if I may say so, familiar to and very well developed by generations of lawyers. If (as we are told) there was, in the beginning, the Word-that word-whether God, Logos, or whatever-was quickly translated into a peculiarly authoritative kind of word, one carrying the force of (God's) authority. The authoritative word is law.