Professor Laurence Tribe has recently made some interesting observations on the usefulness of analogies from the physical sciences in understanding constitutional law and the role of the Supreme Court. [FN1] Tribe's observations are made more valuable by his good sense in not pushing them too far: he does not suggest that constitutional law is "just like" quantum mechanics, or that lawyers can derive concrete legal answers from the paradigms of modern physics. Rather, he suggests that just as classical constitutional thought was strongly influenced by Newtonian paradigms of clockwork precision, regularity, and objectivity, [FN2] so modern constitutional thought might gain from an appreciation of post-Newtonian concepts like "observer effects" and the ability of objects to influence one another at a distance by distorting the very fabric of the space they occupy.
Tribe makes a number of interesting points, but he does not discuss one aspect of modern science that seems particularly applicable to current constitutional debate. That aspect is "chaos" theory, invented by mathematicians and widely used by scientists, which has to do with the discovery that even seemingly simple and determinate systems are capable of displaying apparently random-and genuinely unpredictable- behavior.
This sounds interesting...
