Abstract

This dissertation examines the nature of the legal discourse concerned with interpretation of laws and, accordingly, the meanings of justice. It explores how the rhetoric of legal interpretive theories disguises the political and ideological purposes of the discourse. It considers the relationship of literacy to political empowerment and to the delivery of social and individual justice. I note that when we subject the discourse of legal interpretation to critical scrutiny we discover that, despite its claims to a scientific detachment in the name of disinterested justice, it is no more free of ideological bias and political and economic influence than any other discourse; in short, it is a rhetoric with all the limitations and conditions that all rhetorics share. ;In the conversation about literacy the idea prevails that the production of literacy ought to be fair, an idea that is founded in the broadly American ideological view of ourselves as a nation with an unusual devotion to fairness, particularly in dealings between the state or the society and the individual. ;This dissertation examines the relationship of literacy to political empowerment and raises the question whether, if only a small minority of citizens grasps their legal rights, would they be capable of defending those rights against their expropriation by a totalitarian government. I suggest that a special literacy should be promoted by radical intellectuals as a means of assuring democratic participation of the citizenry. ;I argue for the conclusions that: justice is always contextual, arising only out of actual cases and is the product not of the law but of the application of law by just interpreters of the law; since all theories of legal interpretation are rhetorical, they are all ideological; dominant ideologies are easily maintained by a ruling hierarchy when the public that is subject to that ideology is disempowered by cultural illiteracy; and a people enjoys social justice in direct proportion as it is able to read critically and is politically and intellectually empowered