Book Review: FRANZ VON BENDA-BECKMANN, KEEBET VON BENDA-BECKMANN AND JULIA ECKERT (eds), Rules of Law and Laws of Ruling: On the Governance of Law. Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009, xv + 285 pp., ISBN 9780754672395, £65.00 (hbk)
| DOI | 10.1177/09646639110200020705 |
| Date | 01 June 2011 |
| Author | Anthony Good |
| Published date | 01 June 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
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The book’s exploration of the continuities and contrasts of past and present gendered
approaches to welfare law and policy, implores us to forcefully critique the contemporary
neo-liberal regulation of the lives of poor women and never forgot the agency of women
in these struggles for social justice. This timely and extremely diverse collection will
therefore be of particular value to social-legal and feminist academics and students inter-
ested in a historically-grounded understanding of the governance of poor women and the
progressive potential of challenges to dominant welfare ideologies.
References
Chunn DE and Gavigan SAM (1988) Social control: analytical tool or analytical quagmire?
Contemporary Crises 12: 107–124.
Chunn DE and Gavigan SAM (2004) Welfare law, welfare fraud and the moral regulation of the
never deserving poor. Social & Legal Studies 13(2): 219–243.
Gavigan SAM and Chunn DE (2007) From mothers’ allowance to mothers need not apply: Canadian
welfare law as liberal and neo-liberal reforms. Osgoode Hall Law Journal 45(4): 733–771.
Jenny Smith
Keele University, UK
FRANZ VON BENDA-BECKMANN, KEEBET VON BENDA-BECKMANN AND JULIA
ECKERT (eds), Rules of Law and Laws of Ruling: On the Governance of Law. Farnham, Surrey
and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009, xv þ 285 pp., ISBN 9780754672395, £65.00 (hbk).
This substantial book, the latest in a sequence of edited volumes on the anthropology of law
edited by the von Benda-Beckmanns and a series of co-editors, several of whom are among
the contributors here, is the product of a 2006 conference on ‘Law and Governance’ held at
the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. The contributors, who
range in status from doctoral students to very eminent professors, come from a range of lead-
ing universities across Europe and North America, and their topical interests are highly
diverse, albeit held together by the main, unifying aims. These are, as the editors explain,
to ‘examine the emergence, persistence and growth of relatively independent, parallel net-
works and centres of governance authority and the legal forms they bring about’ (p. 4).
The editors intend that the studies in this volume should offer a way out of the impasse
offered by traditional studies of legal pluralism, with their familiar state law/customary
law dichotomy and their focus on government of a more traditional kind. As they point
out in their introductory chapter, this involves addressing the changing role of the state,
and the increasingly important governance roles of non-state actors such as NGOs, inter-
national development agencies and transnational companies, as well as the...
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