Post-modernism can misinterpret either judicial or literary texts

I was perusing the foreword to Scalia and Garner's Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts and came across this wonderful passage about the ability of post-modernism to distort literary texts as well as judicial ones:

Distortion of text to suit a reader's fancy is by no means limited to the law. In the field of literature, T.S. Eliot warned about literary critics who forget they are dealing with a text and instead find in a work such as Hamlet "a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization." They substitute "their own Hamlet for Shakespeare's." The practice of injecting one's own thoughts into texts has long been given free rein in some schools of scriptural exegesis -- so long, in fact, that scholars have given the practice its own disreputable name, eisegesis. The antonym of exegesis, the term eisegesis denotes the insertion of the reader's own ideas into the text, making the reader a full collaborator with the original author and enabling the introduction of all sorts of new material. For eisegetes, the possibilities are endless.

Liberation from text is attractive to judges as well. It increases their ability to do what they think is good. Unlike Shakespeare producers and theologians, judges are pressured by the environment in which they operate. In our adversarial system, one side -- the side with a bad argument -- has an incentive to urge departure from (or distortion of) text. It was about early non-textual expositors that John Locke wrote when he asked: "[Does] it not often happen that a man of an ordinary capacity very well understands a text or law that he reads, til he consults an expositor, or goes to counsel, who, by the time he [has] explain[ed] them, makes the words signify either nothing at all, or what he pleases?"

More on post-modernism's distortions of legal texts to come soon.