Deconstruction's Legal Career

Deconstruction began as a series of techniques invented by Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and others to analyze literary and philosophical texts. These techniques, in turn, were connected to larger philosophical claims about the nature of language and meaning. One such assertion is that the repetition of a text in a new context often subtly changes its meaning. There could be no better example of this principle than the career of deconstruction itself. To be adapted to the needs and concerns of the legal academy, deconstruction had to be translated and altered in significant ways, making it more flexible, practical, and attentive to questions of justice and injustice. This essay describes some of the changes that deconstruction underwent as it moved from philosophy to literature and then to law. Its transformation eventually produced a deconstructive practice that emphasizes sensitivity to changes in interpretive context, a pragmatic approach to conceptual distinctions, and careful attention to the role of ideology and social construction in legal thought. Deconstruction was first imported from Continental philosophy to American literature departments and later migrated to American law schools. Deconstruction became fashionable in America at about the same time as reader response theory, which held that the meaning of a text is produced as the reader encounters it. As a result, deconstruction became wrongly associated with the improbable claim that texts mean whatever readers want them to mean. This notion is not only a misinterpretation of deconstruction, but also of reader response theory. This idea would have seemed especially silly in Europe, where deconstruction arose out of an earlier philosophical movement called structuralism. Because deconstruction was understood as a reaction to structuralism, it is sometimes called a “post-structuralist” philosophy. Both deconstruction and structuralism are antihumanist theories; that is, they emphasize that people’s thought is shaped by structures of linguistic and cultural meaning. Both deconstruction and structuralism asserted that people are culturally and socially constructed, and that they