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Statutory Construction and the Coordinating Function of Plain Meaning

The Justices have not been reading their Derrida. Indeed, despite the lengthy importunings of legions of law professors, the Justices have been neglecting to read not only Derrida, but Foucault, Gadamer, Rorty, and Heidegger as well. Instead, as the statutory construction cases of the 1989 Term demonstrate, they have been spending their time reading (Noah) Webster, relying, both in fact and in articulated justification, on notions of plain meaning routinely derided in contemporary legal scholarship. A number of explanations for the move to plain meaning are possible, and there is no reason to suppose that one is true and the others false. Any of these explanations, however, would have to start with the premise that plain meaning is to the Justices a usable tool. Why plain meaning is usable is debatable, but that debate is more about the explanation of a phenomenon than of its existence. Occurrence precedes explanation, and just as the inability to explain the source or composition of the rings of Saturn does not show that they do not exist, so too does the inability of philosophers or linguists or literary theorists yet to explain satisfactorily the deepest nature of the workings of language say little about the ability of language to serve some number of important and obvious social functions. The Justices may not read Foucault or talk to Derrida, but they read the newspapers