Institutionalization of Meaning , Recollective Imagination and the Potential for Transformative Legal Interpretation

In his New Science,1 Giambattista Vico provided us with four axioms, which if followed, could help prevent us from falsifying our knowledge of history and our understanding of ourselves.2 Although all four axioms are relevant, the last two-"the conceit of nations" and "the conceit of scholars"-are particularly important as reminders to American legal scholars who all too often fall prey to the very dangers Vico seeks to warn us against.3 The third axiom, "the conceit of nations," points to a nation's mistaken belief "that it before all other nations invented the comforts of human life and that its remembered history goes back to the very beginning of the world."" The fourth axiom, "the conceit of scholars," points to the mistaken belief of scholars "that what they know is as old as the world,"' and indeed, that the significance of the history of knowledge and of philosophy-if such history has any significance at all-lies in its prefiguration in a primitive form of more recent scholarly insights and truths.' The scholarly conceit, in other words, is the belief that the work of scholars before