Justice & Law Quote by Stanley Fish

A lot of public argument is really a performance of certainty; Fish is refusing the costume. The first sentence plants a flag in an ideological camp - "I do not support abortion rights" - using the clean, declarative syntax that culture-war debates reward. Then he undercuts it with a second sentence that functions like a trapdoor: "Although what I would support in this vexed area is not clear to me". The pivot isn’t just humility; it’s a critique of how opinion is usually packaged. He stages the reader’s expectation of a hot take and then denies the gratification.

Fish’s intent is characteristically meta: he’s less interested in abortion as a policy topic than in the rhetoric of "rights" and the social incentives that make people speak as if moral complexity were a failure of character. Calling it a "vexed area" is doing quiet work. It marks the issue as structurally conflictual rather than solvable by the correct slogan, and it gives him permission to stay unresolved without appearing evasive. Subtext: the rights framing may be inadequate, but so is the easy alternative. He’s not offering a third position; he’s spotlighting the uncomfortable gap between moral intuition and actionable doctrine.

Context matters: Fish, a literary critic famous for dismantling claims of interpretive neutrality, often argues that arguments are never detached from institutions, communities, and power. Here he performs that insight as self-disclosure. The line reads like a small act of resistance against pundit culture: a public intellectual admitting that not knowing what you support is sometimes the most honest position available.