Book review: ANTONY DUFF, Answering for Crime: Responsibility and Liability in the Criminal Law. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2010, pp. xx + 322, ISBN 9781849460330, £22 (pbk)
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| Author | Findlay Stark |
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
| DOI | 10.1177/09646639110200030704 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
settings and nomospheres. Delaney sees these individuals as ‘significant world makers
and destroyers’ (p. 158). Central to his argument is the notion that the maintenance of
nomospheres is tied to the maintenance of specific forms of social and legal order.
I applaud David Delaney’s unwavering commitment to what many might describe as
the intractable task of theorizing legal spatiality. More importantly, his book introduces
new areas of interest in the field. In particular, I welcome his attention to the gendered
body, embodiment and intimate spaces such as the womb, as other critical nomospheres.
Thus, I view this book as a positiveattempt to lead critical legal geography and socio-legal
studies into other spaces of intellectual possibility.
This is a challenging book. For example, the author chooses not to explain his neolo-
gisms in the context of other methodologies such as poststructuralism that have a specific
interest in performativity and discursivity.I appreciate that time spent on contextualizing
his project might impede his overall aims and objective. Yet, in terms of accessibility to
all readers, I felt that some sections would benefit from some theoretical grounding in
order not to alienate those new to the field. This brings me to my next related point.
I understand we devise language to define and explain new phenomena. Yet, I am not
convinced that concepts like the nomosphere and the nomic alone break through the
impasse in critical legal geography. I found that I had to read and re-read passages to
remind myself of how Delaney defines and uses each concept.This may of course be part
of the process of learning a new theoretical language,and certainly this is no reason not to
persevere. Nevertheless, I found the author’s continual jumping between spheres, traces
and settings to be confusing to the point of beingcounter-productive. In fact, the language
of the nomospheresometimes got in the way of my understanding.In particular, I found that
Delaney’s empirical examples animated his thesis whenhis conceptual language did not.
Second, the public/privatespace distinction is a familiar preoccupation for geographers,
legal scholars and social scientists alike. However, I found that Delaney’s treatment of
public/privatespace such as the home revisited well-rehearsed argumentsabout public and
private space in geography,particularly feminist geography. In fact, this theme seems to be
written with critical legalscholars rather than critical geographers in mind. Again this may
very well be a product of the author’s attempt to demonstrate to those less well versed in
spatial theory the merits and importance of thinking spatially. Notwithstanding these
points, this book is a compelling read and an important contribution to critical legal
geography and socio-legal studies. I welcome its inclusion into a growing body of work,
and I look forward to future endeavours that may grow from it.
Sharron A Fitzgerald
Aberystwyth University, UK
ANTONY DUFF, Answering for Crime: Responsibility and Liability in the Criminal Law.
Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2010, pp. xx þ322, ISBN 9781849460330, £22 (pbk).
Answering for Crime seeks ‘to sketch the normative and logical structures that any
[theory of criminal law] should embody – to provide the skeleton to which flesh would
then need to be added and which could be fleshed out in a variety of ways’ (p. 7).
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