Amanda Cooke, Pensions and Legal Policy: Lessons on the Shift from Public to Private, Oxford: Hart Publishing, 229 pp, hb £70.00
| Published date | 01 January 2022 |
| Author | Stephen Hawes |
| Date | 01 January 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12658 |
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REVIEWS
Simon Stern, Maksymilian Del Mar and Bernadette Meyler (eds),The Oxford Hand-
book of Law and Humanities, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020, xix+
892 pp, hb£125.00
This Handbook nds its origin in the output of two conferences convened in
2018. It is a hefty volume containing 45 well-researched chapters,evenly dis-
tributed over four parts and covering a wide range of topics.It explicitly strikes
out on its own,in a dierent direction from that taken by earlier scholarship in
the interdisciplinary eld of Law and Literature. That eld helped develop the
claims that ‘Law has always been part of the humanities’ and ‘Now,more than
ever,law needs the humanities’ (xxiv). The renewed study of the bond between
law, literature, and theother humanitiesbegan inthe1970s. Very soonschol-
arship in the emerging eld was subdivided, honouring the heuristic tripar-
tite division of law-in-literature as delineatedby JohnWigmore, law-as-literature
as promoted by justice Benjamin Cardozo, both in the 1920s,and the third
strand of the regulation of literature by law.NotsothisHandbook. The acionado
will nd no reference to Cardozo or any of the founding fathers of Law and
Literature,with the exception of James Boyd White.The novice should not
expect a historical overview. Now that the eld has morphed into the much
broader Law and Humanities,the interrelations of the disciplines brought to-
gether by this conjunction are being viewed with dierent lenses, such as that
of genre,or ‘generic models’ (xxvii) proposed in Part IV. While in earlier in-
terdisciplinary scholarship the one discipline was often analysed in terms of its
auxiliary function or specic disciplinary relationship to the other, the Hand-
book provides richer understandings. It has given its authors free rein to explore
what they consider to be the ‘most urgent’(xxi) topics for the future of Law and
Humanities.
In their Introduction,the editors explain that the combination of law and
the humanities is conceptually challenging given the history of the humanities
and its quidditas, or whatness(and, Iwould add, thatoflaw) sothatit isbetterto
approach the various disciplines within the humanities as an umbrella concept,
dened as ‘the whole range of elds that use interpretative methods to study
creativity, expression, andtheimagination’ (xxiv), by meansof‘certainattitudes
and sensitivities’ (xxii). Thelatterinclude, amongstothers, ‘sensitivity …tothe
irregular and the unpatterned’, ‘sensitivity to the blind spots in our abilities to
sense what is in danger,suering, or vulnerable’,and ‘sensitivity to the appar-
ently supercial, superuous, unneccessary, insucient, marginal, transitional,
or the by-the-by’(xxiii). These sensitivities are the lenses with which to view
‘practices ofmaking: making things, makingmeaning, making sense’ (xxiii).
Thus, the conjunction is taken most seriously and the individual chapters all
© 2021 The Author.The ModernLaw Review © 2021 The Modern Law Review Limited.(2022)85(1)MLR 268–294
Reviews
aim to ‘show what occurs when we place legal ideas,forms, devices,methods,
and sensibilitiestogetherwiththeircorrelates, cognates, variants, andantitheses
in humanisticdisciplines’ (xxv). PartI, Methodologies, oerschapterson topics
as varied as book history,legal historiography, and law and performance, while
Part II, Themes,discusses well-known concepts of personhood and free speech,
but also the topic of law’s spatiality,and much else besides. The Areas of Law
that PartIIIaddressescontains chapters onfamilylaw, indigenous law, intel-
lectual property, and immigration.The Legal Genres that Part IV is devoted
to encompasses not only the maxim, the treatise, and the emblem, but also the
police record and the legal code.All chapters oer keen observations,written
in an engaging style and with great clarity and depth; all chapters provide the
reader with many suggestions for further reading.
With a work of this size,however,to review is to choose. I will therefore
discuss some topics that I consider the most promising and rewarding, both for
the future of the academic eld,and its possible connections with and contri-
butions to legal practice,on the (subjective) view that the humanistic study of
law should be a praxis,ie a merger of reection with action if it is to have an
impact of the kind desired by academic leadership.The editors who cherish
reexivity will surely not hold that against me.My choices obviously do not
imply that the topics or chapters not specically addressed are in any way less
relevant.Having said that,some chapters such as those on family law, property,
maxims, responsa, and code, whilehighlyinformative asanintroductiontothe
topic,fail to full the editorial ambitions, ie they underexpose the humanities’
side of the conjunction.
A note on the four Parts to begin with. The reader-legal professional may
ask herself why a specic topic is situated under Methodologies rather than
Themes, or Areas of Law. For example, Chapter 32,‘Uncovering Credibility’
nds its place in Areas of Law, whereas another chapter dealing with evidence
is located under Themes; Chapter 4 on book history is part of Methodologies
rather thanofThemes. To me,theuidityofdisciplinaryanddoctrinalbound-
eries is precisely what this Handbook cherishes. Crossingbordersisthecore
business of this project.Legalities are broadly conceived; for example in Chap-
ter 45, ‘Comics’, inwhichHillaryChutepointstotheappearanceofcomicsin
contract law, so that illiterate employees may understand what they sign up to
by means of the semiotics of the cartoon.
Important topics in Part I are,rst of all, materiality and visuality. Chap-
ter 2 by Hyo Yoon Kang with Sara Kendall delineates materialist approaches
within legal theory.One such approach,initiated by the late Cor neliaVismann’s
seminal study Files, and Br uno Latour’s The Making of Law, anethnographyof
the Conseil d’État,is highlighted by means of an analysis of work by Alain Pot-
tage and Christopher Tomlinson that engages with these materialist approaches,
demonstrating that an interrogation of ‘the contribution of materials and things
to the making of legal meaning’ (21) helps us move beyond the linguistic realm
historicallyprevalent inlaw anditshumanisticstudy. Thus, ‘legal mattering’ –
the choice for this rather than the other of ‘law’s constitutive physical materials’
– literallymatters, ie, it‘acquire[s]meaningand signicance’ (37). Oneday in
a courtroom also shows the importance of visual studies that has,as Carolin
© 2021 The Author.The ModernLaw Review © 2021 The Modern Law Review Limited.
(2022) 85(1) MLR 268–294269
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