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central characters, etc., or so Dworkin argues. (He does not argue,
though, that the two authors presented with the same materials will
necessarily write the same successor chapter, only that they will cor–
rectly feel under many of the same constraints.)
So, in a mature legal system, judges are similarly confined. A
complex legal system is well into the heart of its textual narrative:
whatever individual freedom might have been available to initiating
judges is lacking for contemporary judges. They can be expected to
search only for the singular solution to problems presented by the
earlier chapters of the enterprise.
Fish, however, argues that both the freedom of the initiator and
the constraint imposed upon the last author in the chain are equally
chimerical. No science of interpretation exists so that an external
observer could necessarily predict in advance the reading of the
materials that would be given by the author of the last chain. How–
ever committed to a "right answer" the last author might be, the in–
terpretive possibilities available would simply make it impossible to
state that one and only one reading was open to the conscientious
participant in the chain novel project. The thirteenth chapter-or
the next case - could thus go off in directions entirely unanticipated
by either the authors of the earlier materials or any given reader.
Fish accuses Dworkin of being ultimately committed to the pos–
sibility of objective interpretation such that the subjective belief of
the judge is in fact also a mirroring of a text unmediated by inter–
pretive bias. Dworkin denies any such commitment: The point of his
own approach, he says, is "to describe interpretation rather than to
establish the objectivity of interpretive judgments." Indeed, he
regards the "whole issue of objectivity, which so dominates contem–
porary theory ... [as] a kind offake." What Dworkin emphasizes is
that we are constantly
making
interpretations unless we are catatonic;
we are constantly asserting that one way of viewing a problem,
whether it is the meaning of a poem or of a constitution, is better
than another way. Dworkin does not deny that radically different in–
terpretations may be presented by different persons. The point,
though, is to distinguish the activity of
interpretation
from that of sheer
invention,
and Dworkin argues that Fish has no way of doing this.
Nor can Fish supply guidance even to distinguish "better" from
"worse" interpretations. All interpretations are created equal in
Fish's universe, whereas Dworkin believes that he can supply criteria
to assess the quality of interpretations, both literary and legal. For
