ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that it may be during "unsettled cultural periods" that "de-constitutive" moments are most likely. It describes the Italian Corte di Cassazione case that prompts the revisiting and elaborates the constitutive perspective. The Corte di Cassazione is the highest appeals court in Italy. Italy's Supreme Court overturned a rape conviction on the grounds that the woman was wearing blue jeans at the time. The Corte di Cassazione decision and the angry response it provoked are difficult to explain from the constitutive perspective. Catharine MacKinnon exposes the ideological implications of laws that exclude women from the workforce, limit their citizenship and political rights, restrict their sexuality, and/or deny them reproductive choice. The chapter demonstrates that law and legal practices are constitutive of a variety of powers—political, economic, symbolic—and that, cross-culturally, the power of law is at once hegemonic and oppositional.
