Deconstructing and Reconstructing Constitutional Rights: Jacques Derrida’s General Strategy of Deconstruction and the Constitutional Rights of Canada’s Indigenous Peoples
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For roughly three decades, Jacques Derrida’s general strategy of deconstruction was a trendy interpretive methodology in the American legal academy. The now-faded U.S.-based movement demonstrated how that strategy undermined the ability of any interpretive method to definitively ground legal meaning. Attempts to resolve that crisis proved self-defeating because they fell back on the same interpretive foundations that the strategy destabilized. Following those failures, deconstruction fell out of fashion within the American legal academy. In Canada, the movement never even achieved fleeting popularity. The problem is that there remain key unanswered questions: how can one speak of a stable, predictable, and acceptable legal order and recognize and combat injustice after the deconstruction of law?This dissertation will answer those questions through a more faithful reading of Derrida’s work. In doing so, this thesis advances three broad reasons for reviving, expounding, correcting, and improving the American approach. First, Derrida’s work shows how the crisis is worse than supposed, going beyond the liberal ideology and rights examined by his American adherents, to the very structure of meaning, language, law, and rights. Second, the deconstruction shows how relatively stable norms of interpretation enable comparatively determinate legal meaning. Third, deconstruction has an inbuilt impetus to pursue infinite justice, which can guide constitutional interpretation. That drive pushes interpreters to reconstruct deconstructed rights in ways that shape new, more just relationships in every given case. An intersectional-deconstructive perspective, which recognizes and resists the paradoxical matrices of oppression in concrete circumstances, helps apply that goal in practice. This thesis shows how that approach can be used to pursue more just interpretations of the constitutional rights of Canada’s Indigenous peoples. In all, the general strategy of deconstruction has enduring critical, descriptive, and constructive value. For those reasons, deconstruction has continued relevance for the interpretation of Canadian constitutional rights. More broadly, the strategy is still important to the interpretation of constitutions, rights, and laws. At a fundamental level, deconstruction remains germane to the study of meaning and interpretation. Accordingly, the general strategy is more powerful, wide-sweeping, and accurate than the sympathetic U.S.-based legal scholarship supposed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.103 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".