The Critical Legal Studies movement is heavily influenced by the deconstruction movement. Jack Balkin explains how deconstruction as a literary and philosophical tool migrated into the law, in his 2005 Cardozo Law Review article Deconstruction's Legal Career:

Deconstruction began as a series of techniques invented by Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and others to analyze literary and philosophical texts. These techniques, in turn, were connected to larger philosophical claims about the nature of language and meaning. . . .

When deconstruction moved from literature departments to the legal academy, it was modified further. Legal academics on the left, particularly feminists and members of the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) movement, saw deconstruction as a way of challenging legal orthodoxies. They assumed pretty much without question that they could adapt deconstructive techniques to critique unjust legal doctrines and advocate more just arrangements. Once again, this assumption is rather puzzling. It is true that many literary deconstructionists identified with the political left. But they were using deconstruction to show the impenetrability, mutability, and conceptual incoherence of all texts, not simply the texts produced by political conservatives.

So the indeterminacy of texts is a double-edged sword, which ultimately can be wielded by conservatives against cherished liberal principles. My friend and colleague Mike Seidman elaborates, in his excellent recent article Critical Constitutionalism Now (now published in the Fordham Law Review):

[The Critical Legal Studies movement's] indeterminacy claim was that standard legal materials -- statutes, constitutions, and precedent -- often failed to dictate a single outcome. Critical scholars demonstrated over and over again that legal rules and conventional methods of interpretation could, in the right hands, produce wildly different results. Some scholars went beyond this claim to assert that not just legal materials, but also underlying ideologies, were indeterminate . . . .

Events of the last six years provide a stunning confirmation of the claims critical constitutionalists made during the last century . . . . In a wide variety of contexts -- from the legal defense of an aggressive war, to the assertion of constitutional power to hold American citizens indefinitely without legal process, to the claim that the president has inherent constitutional power to utilize torture and warrantless wiretapping, to assertions that the filibuster is unconstitutional and that mid-decade gerrymandering of congressional districts is constitutionally permissible, to the unprecedented search of the office of an incumbent congressman -- the Bush administration and its allies have used legal rhetoric to hold and consolidate power. . . .

Although they can take small comfort from this fact, this complex interaction of legal consciousness with politics vindicates the key claims of critical constitutionalists. It turns out that constitutional principle is sufficiently elastic easily to accommodate the Bush revolution . . . .

And, of course, critics of this "Bush revolution" (rightly or wrongly) pile a lot of blame on one particular Executive Branch actor: John Yoo.

Perhaps this view (that the indeterminacy critique of constitutionalism can easily cut in a conservative direction), together with its associated warning (that progressives who, in the name of indeterminacy, try to undermine rule-of-law norms, will find this biting them back in the end), deserves a name. I suggest: the Yoo-De Man thesis.