ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the connections between the way particular speech acts are clothed with authority, the written word, and the ways in which writing facilitates the transmission of force through time and space. The death should be a mark of authority is truly remarkable and limns the fascination of law with the fixed, the permanent, and the unchangeable. The judge writes from a position of authority. While Ronald Dworkin and Stanley Fish negotiate the 'death of the author' in very different ways, both seek to locate meaning and authority in a strong account of community. Authority is simultaneously personal and institutional. The vesting of authority in particular kinds of texts, and, inevitably, in their silences as much as in what is said, is of enormous importance. Once texts are understood as gendered, questions of perspective and of voice become inescapable.
