Social process is discourse by various means. Yet texts contain rules, and rules contain texts. Discourse depends on the rules that discourse produces. Rules and the choices they afford connect arguments over liberal premises to people's practical concerns. Post-modern scholars err in equating what scholars do as scholars with what everyone does all of the time.
People can and do argue.
They must deal with rules. Dealing with rules prompts people to talk about reasons for following them, and involves them in the many arguments to which rules relate. Nevertheless, all such talking must in the first instance refer to rules as if they exist apart from the reasons and arguments they elicit. By virtue of such talk, rules do exist - not just as inferences, but as things, however protean or transitory. This site is part of the Academy of European Law online , a joint partnership of the Jean Monnet Program at Harvard Law School , the Jean Monnet Center at NYU School of Law and the Academy of European Law at the European University Institute.