A Response to Professor Bix

Legal academics study the legal process to understand how lawyers think and act. This article builds on Professor Bix by focusing on the influence lawyers and legal academics can have on the marriage debates. Lawyers and legal academics influence the marriage debates using their vocabulary, which allows them to craft solutions in a language alien to the general public, and render the marriage debate less understandable. Lawyers and legal academics influence the marriage debates through adversarial argumentation, which causes them to destabilize and shift settled understandings, and render the marriage debate distorted and impoverished.

Although Professor Bix advocates deference on certain aspects of the marriage debates, the author concludes that deference is unlikely because lawyers and legal academics are accustomed to exercising political power and influencing public debate.