Verda Delp

Herbst Theatre

My sweet son Shanan and I heard a great great talk by Associate Justice Steven Breyer on Thursday night at Herbst Theatre. Breyer spoke about his interpretive philosophy of the law and how he goes about making decisions: He considers text, history, tradition, precedent, purpose [of a statute], and [perhaps most importantly] the consequences of competing interpretations. Breyer is deeply concerned with how the court makes decisions--decisions that bring about or expunge laws that affect people's lives and how they live them. Further, [and I am most grateful for my new understanding of this], a dissenting opinion is critically important because it provides, with the permanency of its words, a crucial documentation of a position--of an argument-- [filled with notions of history, precedent, purpose and consequence] that stands, with what should be equal weight, next to the majority position. These so-called dissenting words, and the ideas and ideals and principles they represent, may be revisited and reconstructed over time.

[This is so much like my theories about teaching literature and writing. How we must read the words of others with both humility and authority; how we must bring forth our own "linguistic-experiential reservoir" of ideas and place them next to the author's words so that we can see and understand and [then] construct new meaning for ourselves; and, in our writing about these new ideas, how we must must set down these words of our own right up against/right next to those of others . So then, we can discover their potential/ possible influence they may have on ourselves and others and, over time, their consequence.] In this way, we honor our own "dissentions" and make room for them [for ourselves] in the world around us.

[I am not sure I captured these ideas as I would like, but I post them nonetheless.]

As Breyer mentioned during his talk, the Herbst Theatre was the site of the signing of the United Nations Charter on June 26, 1945