Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-29-2010

Abstract

This Article responds to two critiques of postmodern legal scholarship published by Dennis W Arrow in the Michigan and Texas Law Reviews Arrow raises the modernist criticisms that are most often leveled against postmodern legal scholars If Arrow and the other critics were to be believed postmodernists are muddleheaded thinkers who write indecipherable jargonfilled nonsense Even worse they are irresponsible nihilists who lack political convictions Such criticisms of postmodernism are unpersuasive because the typical modernist depiction of postmodern legal thought is seriously inaccurate It is little more than a caricatureThe modernists in other words are imprecise and downright wrong Now some of the critics including Arrow might be smiling and thinking their response Aha You can't even use the word ÔÇÿwrong' without contradicting yourself because after all you're a postmodernist And postmodernism repudiates concepts like truth and falsity and rightness and wrongness And precision How can a postmodernist demand precision with a straight faceBut this modernist response is precisely the problem The typical modernist characterization of postmodernism as rejecting all conceptions of rightness goodness and judgment is wrong And I use that word again purposefully to stress that concepts like truth and falsity rightness and wrongness and so forth are entirely consistent with postmodernism Indeed as explained in this Article postmodernism explains how we understand such concepts in the first place

First Page

2351

Download

Share

COinS