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judicial review (and interpretation) as a constitutive practice of our
community, and the brunt of his book is an examination of the vari–
ous conventions of interpretation open to members of the inter–
pretive community. He delineates the various ways we do, in fact,
conduct constitutional argumentation without searching beyond
those accounts for some kind of additional legitimation.
One of the central metaphors in Richard Rorty's account of our
intellectual lives is that of the "conversation," which he wishes to con–
trast with "argument," at least where the latter refers to the search for
final intellectual solutions. Bobbitt, too, presents a similarly attrac–
tive account of our "constitutional fate," where we are all engaged in
a collective conversation about the meanings we shall give our pur–
ported foundation document.
Yet a principal social reality of law is its coercive force. The
disruptions that can be generated by a legal decision are not conver–
sations, any more than a Maoist revolution is a tea party. Or, at
least, they are not conversations from which one can gracefully exit.
As Holmes emphasized, courts, and the law in whose name they pro–
fess to speak ultimately incarnate not reason - or even civility - but
the coercive force of the state. One aspect of our contemporary crisis
is precisely an increased perception of law as simply the collision of
competing ideologies, none able to ground its claims in a way satis–
factory to those who feel victimized.
The "turn toward interpretation" has thus led to what might be
described as a plethora of interpretations, with none establishing
itself so solidly within the professional community as to constitute a
paradigm. Each interpreter seems especially skilled in criticizing
others; the moves by which one undermines (or deconstructs) one's
opponents are increasingly well known. Only a brave few present
even themselves as speaking in the name of "something recognizable
and unquestionably valid," so deep is our modernist awareness of
the importance of perspective, convention, and ideology . The "con–
versation" continues, albeit with increasingly Pinteresque silences,
mumbles, incomprehension, and ill will.
Political theory and jurisprudence have always been inter–
twined with wider developments within the culture. Instabilities of
interpretation that initially may plague only the teacher of poetry or
the anthropologist come to plague the legal interpreter as well . The
only difference is that the consequences of the latter cannot be
