Several readers have suggested that The Law of Interpretation is vulnerable to a problem of infinite regress. (Indeed, here’s a short essay laying out the criticism.) As I understand it, the argument is that the law of interpretation will itself need to be interpreted, and so we will have new interpretive disputes, which will need new laws of interpretation, and so on.

As a general matter, I think it’s important to distinguish regress from infinite regress. We often have a thick nesting of legal rules — a debt obligation that comes from a judgment that comes from a court’s judicial power that comes from a jurisdictional statute that comes from Congress that comes from an election that comes from the Constitution that comes from some kind of popular will, to take a simple example.

But the regress isn’t infinite. Folks who dispute the validity of the debt can agree on the judgment. Folks who dispute the validity of the judgment can agree on the jurisdictional statute. And so on.

Read more at The Washington Post