Book Review: Justice and the Slaughter Bench: Essays on Law’s Broken Dialectic
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663918797376 |
| Author | Claes Lernestedt |
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
on this. Nonetheless, it is worth emphasizing a point made in passing, though not
developed in her text, namely that this contrast is sometimes reversed. Soft law rhetoric
can mask hard power politics, especially in the context of relations between global north
and south. Critical international law scholars have recounted how the insistence of Third
World countries on their formal rights as sovereign states in the 1960s and 1970s was
thwarted in the 1970s and 1980s. The moment of challenge was deflected and reversed
through the imposition of global governance, or soft law strategies, such as loan con-
ditionalities, measurement techniques and peer review, realized through the enforcement
activities of actors above and below the level of the nation state.
The insurgent south was disciplined, through structural adjustment regimes, first in
the economic core of the state and later in social sectors such as health. Apart from their
often-disastrous consequences for the welfare of citiz ens, these measures have been
persistently criticized for their anti-democratic nature and their replication of colonial
modes of domination. This tendency is also clear in areas beyond the scope of Sekalala’s
book such as infectious disease control. For example, the World Health Organization’s
(formal) International Health Regulations are supplemented and enforced by (informal)
governance mechanisms such as real-time on-line outbreak notification by non-state
sources, all underpinned by the scientific output of the US government’s Centres for
Disease Control. As David Fidler has argued, the crystallization of this hybrid regime
during the SARS outbreak in 2003 saw China, which had been reluctant to make noti-
fication, effectively sanctioned for ‘acting Westphalian in a Post-Westphalian world’.
Both these cases show the potential for mixed motives whereby soft global health law
also serves to advance the strategic economic and security interests of established
powers.
These queries indicate the value of Sekalala’s work in offering fresh and engaging
insight on a much-studied field. The discussion is authoritative and measured through-
out. Legal, institutional and political detail is presented in accessible and coherent terms.
For its theoretical contribution, Soft Law and Global Health Problems will be recognized
as an important moment in the development of global health law scholarship. It deserves
a wide readership.
JOHN HARRINGTON
Cardiff University, UK
ALAN NORRIE, Justice and the Slaughter Bench: Essays on Law’s Broken Dialectic. Abingdon:
Routledge, 2017, pp. 221, ISBN 9781138563957, £36.99 (pbk).
Criminal law is regularly characterized as society’s most powerful tool. Moreover, the
core functions of this part of the law are destructive and primitive, and some of its
sanctions extremely harsh (including, in some jurisdictions, death). The criminal law’s
basic modus operandi is restricting the freedom of individuals: through punishment and,
at the earlier stage, through connecting a threat of punishment to the conduct rule.
Book Reviews 801
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