Book Review: Law and Reflexive Politics

AuthorElizabeth Kingdom
Published date01 March 2000
Date01 March 2000
DOI10.1177/096466390000900113
Subject MatterArticles
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SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 9(1)
means a commitment to analysing configurations of the locally powerful and changing
state forms, albeit a ‘state’ understood as ‘a rapidly moving target’ (Hay, 1996: 3).
This useful book will be of interest to practitioners and students of social control.
Overall the message it carries seems to be that although CCTV is set to stay, its status
as an ‘electronic guardian angel’ cannot be assumed. This has to be placed particularly
in the light of persistent social divisions and denials of social justice that current trends
in surveillance as ‘crime control’ only seem to exacerbate within an intensified but not
particularly ‘new’ culture of stigma and blame.
REFERENCES
British Security Industry Association (1996) Security Direct: The Official Annual
Directory of the British Security Industry Association. Bungay, Suffolk: Hour
Glass Publishing.
Coleman, R. and J. Sim (1998) ‘From the Dockyards to the Disney Store: Surveillance,
Risk and Security in Liverpool City Centre’, International Review of Law,
Computers and Technology
12, 1: 45–63.
Hay, C. (1996) Re-stating Social and Political Change. Milton Keynes: Open Uni-
versity Press.
ROY COLEMAN
Centre for Criminal Justice, School of Law and Applied Social Studies, Liverpool
John Moores University, UK

EMILIOS A. CHRISTODOULIDIS, Law and Reflexive Politics. Dordrecht, Boston and
London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998, vii–xvii + 309pp., £75.00 (hbk).
The impeachment of President Clinton is an imbroglio of constitutional law, bipart-
isan politics, sensationalist media coverage, evident public distaste, strenuous attempts
at redefining the limits of privacy and the responsibilities of public office, and an only
minimally successful resumption of feminist debates on the media’s pornographic rep-
resentations of sexual harassment. How best to theorise these episodes? The cynical
reduction of the interplay of law, politics and media to political...

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