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The Domestication of Law and Literature
Balkin, Jack M.
Balkin, Jack M.
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Abstract
How should a deconstructionist go about reviewing Judge Richard Posner's new book, Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation? As Judge Posner tells us, deconstructionists "take an ostensibly serious prose passage and immediately get hung up on the first word, which may be an unintended pun or a homonym or a false cognate or may contain a subordinate meaning ... at war with the surface meaning" (at 213). Indeed, deconstructionists do much worse things. They deliberately look for the marginal, the obscure, the disregarded in texts (and in thought), believing that this will shed light on the problems of a text, its blindnesses, or its ideological presuppositions.