The pliability of legal texts under a transformative constitution in perspective

Abstract

A long-standing thorny controversy is whether legal texts constrain judges or whether extra-legal factors influence judges in spite of the provisions of law. There is evidence to suggest that most legal practitioners trained under the conservative common law culture do believe in the objective reality of the law and the constraining power of legal texts. There are others, however, like the scholars of the Critical Legal Studies movement (CLS scholars) who believe that legal texts do not constrain judges.