no one has a lower credibility index than the inhabitants of the upper regions of the legal profession: professors of constitutional law, supreme court justices, and so on, because no one short of scholastic theologians has as elaborate a machinery for making things come out however they want. no one has more intentionality about rationalizing their way to whatever factual claims prop up their ideologies: infinite equipment of quibbling hermeneutics. and no one is less honest about what they are actually doing, less self-reflective, less sincere even as they throw out a volcano of passion about how they are constrained by rules and documents and precedents and filter out their own opinions. really it's the least wholesome thing one can imagine: a thousand layers of self-delusion.
ronald dworkin is a beautiful example (sorry about the pay wall at nyrb). give him a liberal court and he'll give you back a living constitution. he'll be impressed by the quality of the reasoning almost no matter what, if he agrees with the conclusion. give him a conservative court and he goes fundamentalist: he's outraged by every slight departure from precedent. but here all he does is attack the reasoning for every decision whose result he rejects: that is, every decision not in keeping with a left-liberal ideology, while describing the dissents as 'devastating' or whatever.
there would be a simple way for him - or for any of us - to establish a provisional credibility: show the fallacies or weaknesses in arguments for positions he agrees with, or the strengths of the arguments for positions he disagrees with, in a serious way. people need to understand this; it is so entirely clear. in its absence, just realize that there's no commitment to the truth. you know what ronald dworkin thinks about the quality of a judge's reasoning by knowing ronald dworkin's political orientation, but that political orientation is irrelevant to the question of the quality of the reasoning. the right response - obviously, i tell you - is just to dismiss the whole huge body of work on such matters.
on the other hand what the conservative justices are doing is exactly the same thing. in the context of american jurisprudence there is always a way to get wherever you want to go: there are thousands of precedents and a hundred different approaches to precedents; a thousand interpretations of the constitution, and a hundred different approaches to constitutional interpretation.
so what you end up with is one of the most pathetic spectacles imaginable: all these apparently sort of intelligent people engaged in a series of arguments that are just at their heart virtually demonstrably either breathtakingly disingenuous or disturbingly self-deluded. in no area of human life does people's account of what they're doing have less to do with what they're actually doing. a waste of brain-power and paper: something amusing or disgusting, but with a palpably inverted relation to the truth.
