Book Review: Feminist Perspectives on Tort Law
| Published date | 01 March 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663912466499a |
| Author | Carl F Stychin |
| Date | 01 March 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Social & Legal Studies 22(1)
he may have been influenced by his parents, his wider family and the community in
which he grew up. We learn that, from 1947 to 1952, Selznick taught at University of
California, Los Angeles and that, for most of this period, he was also a research associate
in the social sciences division at R&D, an influential ‘cold war’ ‘think tank’, and this
experience undoubtedly influenced the thinking that led to his book The Organisational
Weapon. We also learn that, in 1952, Selznick was invited to join the Sociology Depart-
ment at University of California, Berkeley and that, a few years after that, he started
auditing courses at the Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law. We are told about the
periods he spent at the University of Chicago Law School and the Center for Advanced
Study of the Behavioural Sciences at Stanford and about some of the colleagues he
encountered there. However, these accounts are rather ‘thin’ and, given the importance
Selznick came to attach to the ideals like ‘piety’ and ‘civility’, too thin to enable us to
understand how he came to adopt them or where they came from. Although, the book
is an intellectual biography rather than a personal biography which seeks to assess
Selznick’s work rather than his life, it would, in my view, have been enriched if it had
contained a fuller account of Selznick’s personal life and lifetime experiences, and
speculated about the ways in which they shaped his intellectual output.
Notwithstanding these criticisms, this is a magnificent book, which does justice to a
really interesting and important thinker and helps to secure his place among the most
interesting social and legal thinkers of the 20th century.
MICHAEL ADLER
University of Edinburgh, UK
JANICE RICHARDSON AND ERIKA RACKLEY (eds), Feminist Perspectives on Tort Law. Abingdon:
Routledge, 2012, pp. 232, ISBN 9780415619202, £80 (hbk).
It is both surprising to me that it is 14 years since the first of the Feminist Perspectives on
the law school curriculum was published and that it is only now that we see a volume on
tort. Given the focus of tort law on duty and responsibility, its centrality to a common law
education, and the significant body of explicitly feminist scholarship in the field, tort law
would seem to lend itself to an intervention. In any event, the publication of this volume
is a welcome addition to a subject that remains too often dominated by academics
wedded either to a corrective justice model or to economic analysis. One of the chal-
lenges for the editors has been to impose some conceptual unity on what is inevitably
a wide ranging set of contributions. In this regard,...
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