Ideological Drift and Legal Semiotics
Balkin coined the term ideological drift to describe a phenomenon by which ideas and concepts change their political valence as they are introduced into new social and political contexts over time. Along with Duncan Kennedy, Balkin developed the field of legal semiotics. Legal semiotics shows how legal arguments feature recurrent tropes or topoi that respond to each other and whose opposition is reproduced at higher and lower levels of doctrinal detail as legal doctrines evolve. Hence Balkin claimed that legal argument has a self-similar "crystalline" or fractal structure. Balkin employed deconstruction and related literary theories to argue that legal thought was structured in terms of "nested oppositions"—opposed ideas or concepts that turn into each other over time or otherwise depend on each other in novel and unexpected ways. Although he draws on literary theory in his work on legal rhetoric, Balkin and his frequent co-author Sanford Levinson contend law is best analogized not to literature but to the performing arts such as music and drama.
Read more about this topic: Jack Balkin
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