3.3 Postmodernism

Core claim: there is no single foundational vantage ("Reason," "Progress," "the Author," "the Meaning") from which truth or law can be read off once for all — only perspectives, discourses, and local knowledges; grand narratives have lost their credibility (Lyotard's phrase: postmodernism is "incredulity toward metanarratives"). The philosophical toolbox (one line each — attribute precisely): Lyotard: the collapse of the grand narratives (Enlightenment progress, Marxist emancipation, legal formalism's "objectivity"). Derrida: deconstruction — texts (including statutes and judgments) subvert their own claims; meaning endlessly defers; the exclusions a text performs are where to read it (law's binary pairs: lawful/unlawful, public/private, reason/passion — each privileging one term). Foucault: power/knowledge — truth is produced by institutions (the clinic, the prison, the exam — and the law report); discipline works through norms and surveillance, not only sanctions; law is one regime among many in modern "governmentality." Rorty: truth as what our peers let us get away with saying — pragmatism without foundations. What postmodernism does to law (the exam's core): Anti-foundationalism: law cannot claim to rest on Reason or Nature — its authority is interpretive all the way down (law-as-discipline, Foucault; law-as-text, Derrida). Deconstruction of doctrine: the "plain meaning" of statutes dissolves into interpretive choice; legal categories (reasonableness, sanity, consent) are revealed as contingent constructions with histories. Legal pluralism's ally: by dethroning state law's…