CARING FOR DECONSTRUCTION

Abstract

Displaying an uncharacteristic lack of grace, Robin West states in her recent book, Caring for Justice, that "for feminist reformers concerned with doing something with law to end patriarchy, as a tool of analysis deconstruction has all the usefulness of an unhinged steering wheel in avoiding a collision with a wall."' West is wrong about deconstruction, but she is wrong in an interesting way, and it is interesting that she goes so far out of her way to be wrong about deconstruction. In an oeuvre otherwise marked by attentive and careful readings of texts by all sorts of authors, from Franz Kafka to Richard Posner and the United States Supreme Court, and from Pauline Reage to Northrop Frye, West's offerings on deconstruction have amounted to little more than careless potshots.