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having available to them authoritative decision-makers in the per–
sons of courts and judges. The legal system offers procedures that
can resolve disputes through, "for example, pronouncements by the
highest court. . . . The presence of such procedures and a hierarchy
of authority resolving disputes that could potentially divide or
destroy an interpretive community is one of the distinctive features
of legal interpretation ." Ultimately, then, the judge is "a combina–
tion of literary critic and moral philosopher. But that is only part of
the picture. The judge also speaks with the authority of the Pope ."
Fiss writes as a partisan of the post-1954 Supreme Court.
Unlike Glazer, he supports its decisions and is appalled by those
who counsel disrespect, let alone disobedience. He defends them,
though, as exemplary
adjudications
and not simply as desirable
political interventions by the judiciary. As Fiss notes, "The idea of
adjudication requires that there exist constitutional values to inter–
pret , just as much as it requires that there be constraints on the in–
terpretive process." And for Fiss it isjudges who are "in the best posi–
tion to discover the true meaning of our constitutional values."
Without a belief in such judicial competence, says Fiss, "adjudica–
tion is not possible, only power. " Yet it is precisely the possibility of
"truthful adjudication" that is denied by the critical legal scholars .
By now it is clear that interpretive arbitrariness is a deep con–
cern in both the legal and literary communities. And the tone of
debate in both is similarly heated. M. H. Abrams has denounced in
these pages those "newreaders" who introduce their own idiosyn–
cratic interpretive strategies "when reading someone else's text, but
tacitly rely on communal norms when undertaking to communicate
the methods and results of [their
1
interpretations to [their
1
own
readers ." Abrams is attacking partisans of indeterminacy who em–
phasize the lack (or, what may be much the same thing, the over–
whelming multiplicity) of communal norms or the inability genu–
inely to recapture the authorial intent that for both Abrams and
E . D. Hirsch is the grounding of the interpretive effort.
Both contemporary legal theory and literary criticism are
united by a pervasive anxiety generated by what Professor Mary
Robertson of the University of Texas has well described as "the loss
of the sense of doing and speaking in the name of someone or some–
thing recognizable and unquestionably valid ." Without such a so–
cially shared sense, of course , it is difficult to know what it could
