Voice, Incarnation and the United States Supreme Court

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate what we mean by "voice" in legal documents. Whose voice is speaking in a Constitution? Does a code of laws have a voice? And, above all, can a Judge be said to be a "voice" of the law?

As we shall see this question of the voice speaking in a legal document is not commonly afforded. Henceforth we should make reference to literary techniques, to reappraise the meaning of legal documents from the standpoint of searching the voice speaking in a legal text, trying to start new approaches to the legitimation of these documents, and of their own reading. In this way we shall try to reframe the problematic relation between the judge as a reader, and the texts he is interpreting. A point which is a key issue of actual debates in United States about the reading of the Constitution, and which constitutes also a key factor in comparing different jurisdictions: that’s to say a central point in comparative law and its effort to portray a geography of the Nomos through the "representation" of the various "legal voices" that unite, or divide, the different judicial spaces of world governance.

Keywords: American Constitution, American Law, Literary Studies, Law and Literature, Comparative Law, Political Theology, Theology, Constitutional law, European law