Abstract A significant ideological shift has occurred in jurisprudential understanding of the social contract. Reading a landmark opinion from Justice Rehnquist—Paul v. Davis (1976)—as a pivot point for this shift, I identify a specific form of parsimonious judgment that has shaped the contemporary relationship between the individual and the state. Three markers of this form of judgment emerge from the opinion: (1) a claim about risks to state bureaucracy as a significant constitutional interest; (2) a slippery slope argument about institutional competence to discipline linguistic ambiguity; and (3) an interpretive practice that resolves this anxiety by binding precedent around a clear principle. This form of judgment has both ideological and normative significance. The opinion justifies a world of risk management that elevates economic liberty claims to exalted status. It disavows traditional markers of classical prudence, such as reverence for tradition, inflection of personal style as moral character, and orientation toward practical aspects of particular cases. Justifying its authority by performing its own rationale, Rehnquist’s opinion is significant for understanding how strategic invention can alter a democratic culture’s understanding of judgment, including its ethical dimensions.

Rhetorical studies has long worried about its identity as a critical discipline and a practical art. Since the Great Recession of 2008, a myriad of social and political forces has provoked a discourse about the vitality of the liberal arts, which brings this identity crisis to the fore. Defenders of the liberal arts have deployed a negative critical stance, positing the liberal arts as external to liberalism as a public culture. This stance limits criticism’s political potential because it ignores the productive role of liberal cultural constraints in forming social bonds and creating self-understandings. As the liberal arts grapple with an evolving liberty to learn, so too might the rhetorical arts commit to the productive possibilities of simulation and judgment. This path would respond to the needs of students, who find themselves between structural constraints and contingent possibilities for change.