UNDERSTANDING LEGAL UNDERSTANDING - THE LEGAL SUBJECT AND THE PROBLEM OF LEGAL COHERENCE

Jurisprudence traditionally approaches the law as an external object; the jurisprudential scholar generally seeks to describe legal doctrine in terms of its objective and observable properties. Professor Balkin argues that seemingly fixed, inherent characteristics of legal doctrine-most notably, whether or not a given body of law is ''coherent'' or possesses ''integrity''-are better understood as projections from the individual observer. Judgments about legal coherence are in reality the result of only one of many interpretive postures an observer might take, but one that implicates the integrity of the observer's own world view. Furthermore, this process of interpretation does not leave the observer untouched, for the process of interpretation itself constructs the observer.