Citizens United’s logical strain reveals a new set of meanings being crafted

Evidence

Clearly, Justice Kennedy is flailing a bit: the first declarative is wild, especially insofar as it depends on the second, which repeats the formal conceit about the independence of PACS that no one believes. … And the lack of logical entailment from one sentence to the next is almost painful. However, these strange stipulations and leaps of logic can also be explained by the radically new set of meanings for which the justice is reaching and for which a new idiom must be crafted. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 345

Categorization

• QUESTION: The interpretive claim that logical incoherence in legal reasoning signals the imposition of new meaning rather than error deserves further testing against other cases.
• XREF: connects to: Citizens United remakes the political subject as an economic one — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 306; Citizens United turns neoliberal rationality into a constitutional hermeneutic governing law. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 328; Citizens United redefines influence as following the money and super PACS as independent speech — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 345 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• A crucial rhetorical shift produces a new political narrative #expands (0.90) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 134
• Citizens United created a corporate right no natural person can enjoy #expands (0.85) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 384
• Machine metaphors smuggle in unnoticed separations that become politically problematic #complicates (0.70)