The Myth of the Rule of Law (1995)
The exercise in the article is really fantastic:<p>&gt; Unless your responses were: 1) False, 2) True, 3) True, 4) False, 5) True, 6) True, and 7) True, you chose to interpret at least one of the words &quot;Congress,&quot; &quot;no,&quot; &quot;law,&quot; &quot;speech,&quot; and &quot;press&quot; in what can only be described as something other than its ordinary sense. Why did you do this? Were your responses based on the &quot;plain meaning&quot; of the words or on certain normative beliefs you hold about the extent to which the federal government should be allowed to interfere with citizens&#x27; expressive activities? Were your responses objective and neutral or were they influenced by your &quot;politics&quot;?<p>These days you read a lot of comments about courts &quot;ignoring the Constitution.&quot; I don&#x27;t imagine those same people were upset when the Supreme Court &quot;ignored&quot; the word &quot;speech&quot; in striking down restrictions on video game sales, or conjured up a &quot;right to privacy&quot; that it could not place anywhere within the text of the Constitution.<p>That said, law being political does not mean that adherence to rules is unimportant. The &quot;rule of law&quot; means that people are willing to abide by legal decisions. That willingness depends on judges at least <i>justifying</i> their decisions in terms of broadly-accepted rules.