Costas Douzinas and Adam Gearey, Critical Jurisprudence: The PoliticalPhilosophy of Justice, 370 pp, pb d 22.00, Oxford and Portland, Oregon: HartPublishing, 2005, ISBN: 184113452X

As the authors point out at the beginning, most English language works of Jur-isprudence are boring, dry as dust.This book is di¡erent. It is enjoyable. It is alsowell-written and does not succumb to the tendency to equate critical writingwith linguistic barbarism. It is alsowide-ranging in its coverage and in the sourcesupon which it draws. Judicious use is made of American critical legal literature,especially where Americans are the main generators of particular themes or sub-¢elds within the general ¢eld (eg critical race theory) but there is no bowingdown at American altars as if these map out the ¢eld. Instead, the book is ¢rmlyand knowledgeably grounded in European thought., and this of a broad kind ^Foucault, Levinas, Lacan etc; in other words, its source material is not limited to‘legal theory’whatever that is supposed to be.

There is not exactly an argument ^ why should there be? ^ but there is a sensi-bility.The authors claim (I quote from the blurb) that ‘all legal aspects of the eco-nomic, political, emotional and physical modes of production and reproductionof society are part of critical jurisprudence’. I am not entirely sure what this meansbut I think I agree. They continue: ‘This widening of scope allows a radicalrethinking of the nature of rights, justice, sovereignty and judgement.’ ‘Law’scomplicity with political oppression, violence and racism has to be faced beforeit is possible to speak of a new beginning for legal thought, which is in turn thenecessary precondition for a theory of justice.’ Critical jurisprudence, they claim,(andwhich theyde¢ne in amanner inwhich‘it’speaks through them rather in theway that ‘Philosophy’spoke through Hegel (according to Hegel)): ‘o¡ers an ethicsof law against the nihilism of power and an aesthetics of existence for the melan-cholic lawyer’.

There is a kind of Salvationism embedded in these proclamations and it is notclear on what basis other than hope itself these statements of intent are based.Tomake somuch turn on justice and ethics, especially in a pedagogical context, runsthe risk of encouraging the next generation of lawyers to reproduce the rathermindless (at its worst) or casuistic (at its best) contribution which lawyers havemade to the current disorder of the ‘new world order’.The ‘nihilism of power’ is,in this context, not a very useful target. I am not sure how to explain it, butwhat we seem to have today is a loss of the subtlety, in contemporary political dis-course, ofWeber’s long-established distinction between the ethics of intention andthe ethics of responsibility. Perhaps this distinction itself is a re£ection of thenihilism of power, although, in the spirit of Weber, one might suggest thatneglect of the distinction is a symptom of the recklessness of our age and that thein£ation of ethics in the international sphere is a double-edged sword thewieldingof which might better be avoided in the interests of a nihilism of power whichis attuned to the dangerousness of the world. In other terms, we should putto one side the (hardly new, or critical, or postmodern) dream of governing bymorality.

The aesthetics of existence is another matter. This Foucauldian notion ^broadly similar to what Judith Butler calls performativity ^ is entirely

Reviews

517r 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilationr 2007. The Modern Law Review Limited(2007) 70(3) MLR 505^522

apposite to our age (to the extent that it has not withdrawn into a swathe of ¢c-tive ‘authentic’ identities).The intrinsic plasticity at work inside this notion is oneof the issues with which law in practice is learning to deal with and notalways without di⁄culty. How should the law negotiate the politics of iden-tity? How do these politics relate to the emergent ¢eld of human rights? Thediscussion of these themes is assured and sophisticated. And this discussion linksinto a stimulating discussion of postcolonial jurisprudence, with a provocativebackward glance at the imperial context of ‘orthodox’ jurisprudence.

This book can be approached on a number of levels.Tome, themost importantis perhaps not the particular positions they take on particular issues or authors somuch as that they show what can be done with all these postmodern authors orwhatever one wishes to call them. As acquisition of a PhD is becoming increas-ingly important internationally for entering into an academic career (what a fate!)and as having something ‘interesting’ to say becomes a growing expectation (atleast in the UK) for publication in non-specialist academic journals, it becomesincreasingly necessary to have some signposts to navigate the vast torrent ofwordswhich are‘out there’.Who to read? Andwhy?Where is the relevance? This book isa very useful navigational aid.This is not to dismiss or diminish it as a handbook.It is much more than that ^ erudite but also passionate, political, and personal.Di¡erent books have di¡erent passions ^ or none at all. But what is the value ofa book without passion? Information only, which dates more rapidly thanpassions.

TimMurphyn

A von Hirsch and AP Simester (eds), Incivilities: Regulating O¡ensiveBehaviour, 304 pp, d35.00, Oxford and Portland, Oregon: Hart, 2006

The contributions to Incivilities, as the editors explain in their preface, are intendedto explore and develop principles that would limit the scope of the regulation ofo¡ensive behaviour.The explicit context for this endeavour is the recent reemer-gence of the problem of incivilities in criminal justice policy on both sides ofthe Atlantic, and the regulation of anti-social behaviour (ASB) in the UK inparticular. Half of the book’s chapters, therefore, explore aspects of the criminali-sation of o¡ensive behaviour in general terms, and the other half consider thecriminalisation issue in the speci¢c context of contemporary UK regulation,and in particular of its most controversial element, the Anti-Social BehaviourOrder (ASBO).

Most of the individual chapters are as interesting as one would expect from thehigh calibre of the contributors, and several make important contributions to thedevelopment of the principles that the editors seek. At the same time, there is anunresolved confusion in the book that limits its relevance to the contemporaryASB context. The problem is that the half of Incivilities that is addressed to the

nLaw Department, London School of Economics.

Reviews

518r 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilationr 2007. The Modern Law Review Limited

(2007) 70(3) MLR 505^522