Document Type
Article
Repository Date
2010
Keywords
judicial opinions, legal determinacy, legal indeterminacy, U.S. Supreme Court
Subject Categories
Law | Legal History | Legal Theory | Public Law and Legal Theory
Abstract
Deconstruction has already happened on the Supreme Court. Not only can no member of the Court really believe that "the law" (self-invented by the very Court it is supposed to govern!) can constrain the result in any individual case, but its members have also convinced themselves that they have no time to be concerned with dispensing justice to the parties. The justificatory legal language used in judicial opinions is not what our law teachers told us it was. The justificatory legal language is not provided to explain—much less constrain—the result in the case. Rather, it is a mode of couching the personal legislative preferences of unelected judges in the publicly venerated language of a judicial decree.
Repository Citation
D'Amato, Anthony, "Aspects Of Deconstruction: Refuting Indeterminacy With One Bold Thought" (2010). Faculty Working Papers. 66.
https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/facultyworkingpapers/66
