Robert W. Gordon 184 however, the argument refers to a definite historical location; it calls for adherence to the original understanding of a text or the original intentions of a founding legislator. Sometimes it privileges a particular time and place as having special authority because especially worthy of respect or imitation. In the static modes, lawyers tend to treat the past as on a timeless horizontal plane with the present: past texts and practices are to be read exactly in their times as they are in ours, or exactly in our times as in theirs. Strict textualism- the view that interpreters should look only to the words of the text and ignore the context - often poses as a static mode (“The words of the Constitution mean today what they have always meant”) but in actual practice is a dynamic mode, since the reader of words who is allowed to ignore their cc^ntext will necessarily read into them the conventional meanings of his own time and place. The words are left free to float and soak up later and changing meanings. In the dynamic modes, lawyers argue that the interpretation and practical content of legal texts and rules and principles does and must change over time, to adapt to changing conditions. Lawyers working in this mode recognize historical change, but establish connections between past and present through narratives that integrate theminto a reassuring story of continuity. In American legal practice, dynamic argument usually relies upon narratives of recovery, progress, or teleology. A narrative of recovery - often accompanied by a jeremiad lamenting recent lapses and corruptions — is in one which the legal systemis seen as ready to be guided to recover the purity of its original principies. A narrative of progress or “Whig history” is one in which the lawis seen as obeying a long-termprocess of historical transformation - e.g. fromfeudalismto liberal capitalism, status to contract, hierarchy to equal rights, irrational to rational modes of proof, formal rules to functional rules, full legal rights for the fewto equal rights for all. Ateleological narrative is one which shows legal forms working themselves pure over time to reveal their essence of immanent principle. Of course there are also dynamic narratives of decline - the decline of republics, the fall of empires - but in our optimistic nation these have been until recently muted and minor themes. Static and dynamic modes have in common that the lawyer appeals to history for authority - to the authority of an original text or tradition or founding moment, or to the authority of the course of history itself - changing circumstances or long-run evolutionary trends that dictate the need for a change in rules or a novel interpretation. History is read not simply as exemplary, a source of examples of right and noble laws to admire and of horrors to avoid, but as normative: if we interpret the past correctly, we will know what the law commands us to do now. What I will call critical modes by contrast are used to destroy, or anyway to question, the authority of the past. They assert discontinuous breaks - epistemic and normative - between past and present. In conventional legal argu-
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