Chaos and the Court

Abstract

Inspired by Laurence Tribe's "The Curvature of Constitutional Space," this Essay looks at some constitutional theorists' desire for certainty and predictability in law, and notes that such certainty and predictability is much less available even in the hard sciences than is generally believed, with simple and determinate systems sometimes producing wildly unpredictable results. It suggests that predictability of results may be a difficult goal for legal theorists, and offers some thoughts on alternative approaches.

Keywords: chaos, complexity theory, Laurence Tribe, Robert Bork, constitutional law