Conclusion

Abstract

In the final analysis I suspect that the major obstacle in the path of the development of an adequately critical and transformative rhetoric of law is not so much one of intellectual coherence as of academic and institutional politics. For all its obviousness, the displacement of the exegetical tradition of jurisprudence and the concurrent elaboration of a concept of legal discourse — a deviant theory of the legal text and of its reading or reception — faces debilitating rhetorical problems of its own: to diagnose an illness is merely the precondition to the possibility of a cure. In the ensuing analysis I will briefly recapitulate the substantive goals of the theory of law as social discourse and the institutional opposition to them, and will then proceed to tabulate the various contexts within which this account of legal language and of law as communication may contribute — as one aspect among many — to the furtherance of what has come to be known as the critical legal studies movement.²

Surprise at resistance: because we see through a thing we think that in future it will be unable to offer us any resistance whatsover — and we are surprised at finding that we are able to see through it, and yet unable to run through it. This foolish sensation and surprise are similiar to the sensation which a fly experiences before a window pane.¹