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to a community that focuses on the cacaphony of answers. The ques–
tion is how we decide among the different interpretations.
Practically everyone now admits that "texts" can be interpreted
only in "contexts." Then the obvious question becomes the ability to
"read" contexts. So long as everyone reads a text in the same way,
the question is almost entirely of academic interest only. Legal
disputes, however, most often arise precisely when there is no such
common reading. The easy resolution of conflict by arguing that
"everyone knows what X means" is made impossible by the very fact
that the litigant does challenge the asserted commonality. In the
absence of a belief in judicially cognizable "right answers" derived
from techniques of "right reading," are we left with Glazer's descrip–
tion of "arbitrary rule"?
Given these ambiguities of interpretation, many legal theorists
have substituted for the hermeneutics of texts what Gerald Graff has
recently termed a "hermeneutics of power," where one simply em–
phasizes the political and social implications of one reading as op–
posed to another. Indeed, it can even be suggested that the major
reason for preferring that reading is the political consequence occa–
sioned by it . Here again the ghostly presence is that of Nietzsche:
Whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and
again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and
redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the organic
world are a subduing, a
becoming master,
and all subduing and be–
coming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation
through which any previous "meaning" and "purpose" are neces–
sarily obscured or even obliterated.
Our Constitution not only enables us to pretend that past
linguistic acts can control future action. It also is meant to prevent
the rise of Nietzschean "masters." The denial of a genuine alternative
to a hermeneutics of power, though, brings in its wake an equal
denial of the possibility of doing without such "masters," including
those individuals called 'judges." The results of judicial inquiry can
scarcely be praised as the rule of impersonal law . Instead the judge,
like all other interpreters, "simply beats the text into a shape which
will serve his own purpose," as Richard Rorty, not at all meaning to
be condemnatory, put it.
One reads, for example, the assertion in the
Harvard Law
