To many, the works of charles darwin and hans-georg gadamer will seem unrelated. Whereas one toiled in the fields of natural discovery, the other immersed himself in the libraries of textual exegesis. However, there is a deep and shared theme to their work – they both refused to accept that reliance on scientific method did or could lead the way to human understanding. For both, there is no fixed form, core function, or overarching goal to which social life is supposed to conform. Both embrace a thoroughly historicized and contingent view of human life as a perpetual struggle in which form, function, and goal are never given but shift and vary with context and over time. At bottom, neither Darwin nor Gadamer believes that science can offer much help in meeting political and moral challenges. In an important sense, what Darwin did for biological sciences, Gadamer has done for the human sciences. While reference to Gadamer's writings in legal theory are relatively few and far between, their influence is profound. The fact that the understanding of law as an interpretive exercise in which judges must grapple with fixed texts in a changing historical context has become a matter of trite learning is largely due to his influence.