Despite Derrida's insistence that deconstruction is not a
method, but an activity of reading, deconstruction has tended to
employ discernable techniques. Many deconstructive arguments
revolve around the analysis of conceptual oppositions. A famous
example is the opposition between writing and speech (Derrida
1976). The deconstructor looks for the ways in which one term in
the opposition has been "privileged" over the other in a particular
text, argument, historical tradition or social practice. One term
may be privileged because it is considered the general, normal,
central case, while the other is considered special, exceptional,
peripheral or derivative. Something may also be privileged
because it is considered more true, more valuable, more important,
or more universal than its opposite. Moreover, because things can
have more than one opposite, many different types of privilegings
can occur simultaneously.
One can deconstruct a privileging in several different ways.
For example, one can explore how the reasons for privileging A
over B also apply to B, or how the reasons for B's subordinate
status apply to A in unexpected ways. One may also consider how
A depends upon B, or is actually a special case of B. The goal of
these exercises is to achieve a new understanding of the
relationship between A and B, which, to be sure, is always subject
to further deconstruction.
Legal distinctions are often disguised forms of conceptual
oppositions, because they treat things within a legal category
differently from those outside the category. One can use
deconstructive arguments to attack categorical distinctions in law
by showing that the justifications for the distinction undermine
themselves, that categorical boundaries are unclear, or that these
boundaries shift radically as they are placed in new contexts of
judgment. (Schlag 1988).
Perhaps the most important use of deconstruction in legal
scholarship has been as a method of ideological critique.
Deconstruction is useful here because ideologies often operate by
privileging certain features of social life while suppressing or
deemphasizing others. Deconstructive analyses look for what is
deemphasized, overlooked, or suppressed in a particular way of
thinking or in a particular set of legal doctrines. Sometimes they
explore how suppressed or marginalized principles return in new
guises. For example, where a field of law is thought to be
organized around a dominant principle, the deconstructor looks for
exceptional or marginal counterprinciples that have an
unacknowledged significance, and which, if taken seriously, might
displace the dominant principle
