Rightly or wrongly, the belief is widely held by the practicing profession that this Court no longer respects impersonal rules of law but is guided in these matters by personal impressions which from time to time may be shared by a majority of Justices. Whatever has been intended, this Court also has generated an impression in much of the judiciary that regard for precedents and authorities is obsolete, that words no longer mean what they have always meant to the profession, that the law knows no fixed principles.

-- Justice Robert Jackson, Brown v. Allen, 344 U.S. 443, 535 (1953) (opinion concurring in the judgment).

If law is to be law and not whim, then words must have the power to constrain.  If the power to interpret words has no limit, if words are infinitely elastic and can be stretched to support whatever result the interpreter wishes, then the people do not have the power to govern themselves through the democratic process.  The laws and constitutions they enact are nothing but staff recommendations to the interpreters, who make the actual decision.

In the current issue of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy (vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 583-630). Professor Richard Epstein has an article titled Linguistic Relativism and the Decline of the Rule of Law.  It is well worth reading.  Readers of this blog may be particularly interested in pages 607-610, on the "judicial adventurism" of the Supreme Court's misinterpretation of the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause.