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Metaphors And Modalities: Meditations On Bobbitt's Theory Of The Constitution, Ian C. Bartrum

Ian C Bartrum

This article builds on Philip Bobbitt’s remarkable work in constitutional theory, which posits a practice-based constitution based in six accepted “modalities” of argument. I attempt to supplement Bobbitt’s theory—which has a static and exclusive quality to it—with an account of interpretive evolution based in Max Black’s interaction theory of metaphors. I suggest that we can (and do) create constitutional metaphors by deliberately overlapping Bobbitt’s modalities of argument, and that through these creative acts we can grow the practice of American constitutionalism. I then present case studies of this metaphoric process at work in three fields of constitutional practice: from constitutional …