The new approach to American law is rooted in a poststructuralist analysis of knowledge and power, and a recognition of the complex ways in which reality and subjectivity are socially constructed though largely unrecognized discursive practices. Those social arrangements which seem natural, essential, inevitable and immutable are merely representations, created and sustained by patterns of human perception, language and narrative. Language actively inscribes rather than transparently describes the world. To tell one's stories to an audience, then, is to operate within a discourse that shapes social reality; one either consciously or unconsciously perpetuates or challenges prevailing relationships of power. No one who talks or writes can choose not to participate in this process, whether the manifest topic is war, economics, medicine, gender or race relations, or law.

This central insight involves a fundamental deconstruction of the objectivist theory of truth, which has supported American law as well...