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Book Review: Law, Modernity, Postmodernity: Legal Change in the Contracting State.

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
AuthorRoger Cotterrell
DOI10.1177/0964663905049530
Published date01 March 2005
Date01 March 2005
Subject MatterArticles
BOOK REVIEWS
BRENDAN EDGEWORTH, Law, Modernity, Postmodernity: Legal Change in the
Contracting State. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, x + 304 pp., £55 (hbk).
This book certainly does not lack ambition. It aims ‘to offer a large-scale conceptual
map of contemporary legal change’ (p. viii). While it is not entirely clear which legal
systems are included in this focus, the general premise is that ‘the law of the modern
interventionist welfare state’ is changing so profoundly that ‘an historically different
type of legal order’ is arising (p. vi). Globalization, the dismantling of welfare safety
nets, the contractualization of governmental functions and their partial replacement
by market mechanisms, and many other developments, have their impact on previ-
ously established ideas about the role of law and the state.
While these established ideas underpinned a distinctive law of the welfare state,
qualitatively different from earlier liberal law, Brendan Edgeworth sees them as now
drastically weakened or perhaps already redundant. His book’s longest chapter
presents a sweeping panorama of legal change (admittedly almost entirely restricted
to common law systems), as ‘an overview of some of the empirical evidence indicat-
ing the general direction of the most recent phase of legal development’ (p. 133).
Among the matters considered are aspects of privatization and deregulation, shifts in
ideas of public responsibility, tendencies towards dematerialization of law, weaken-
ing of collectivist mechanisms for asserting employees’ rights, changing approaches
to welfare rights, the development of gay rights and human rights, the decline of
citizenship in favour of consumerism, the rise of informal justice systems, and changes
in professional organization of law and access to justice. Edgeworth concludes that a
‘more fragmented, contractualised and pluralistic legal order has started to make a
clearly identifiable institutional appearance’; a legal polycentricity ‘resonant of the
broader fragmentation, or disorganisation, characteristic of advanced capitalist
societies’ (p. 176).
What...

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