Speech and strife.

Law and Contemporary Problems, June, 2004 by Tsai, Robert L.

But no one can make his way into a strong man's house and plunder his property unless he has first tied up the strong man. (1)

INTRODUCTION

The anthropologist Clifford Geertz once observed that "[a]t the political center of any complexly organized society ... there is both a governing elite and set of symbolic forms expressing the fact that it is in truth governing." (2) In the spirit of Geertz's remark, I endeavor to capture the subtle, inventive, and self-retrenching ways in which the Supreme Court employs language to signal how we ought to think about its authority. Now that the Rehnquist Court has reshaped the constitutional topography in earnest, we would do well to examine its rhetorical legacy as scrupulously as its substantive record. ...

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