Abstract: In his insightful article, From Universalistic Law to the Law of Uncertainty, Karl-Heinz Ladeur addresses a hotly debated issue within the American critical legal studies movement. What would be the effect on our understanding of the nature of law, he asks, if we really accepted the post-modernist claim that neither social reality nor our conception of the self has a fixed or determinate meaning? In the United States, the issue Professor Ladeur discusses is usually presented as an argument about the role of post-structuralism or deconstruction in a critical legal analysis. Do these ways of interpreting law, it is asked, go too far in asserting the openness of the legal system and thereby erode the political impact of critical legal theory?