Book Review: WILLIAM TAYLOR (ed.), The Geography of Law: Landscape, Identity and Regulation. The Oñati International Series in Law and Society. Oxford: Hart, 2006, 176 pp., ISBN 1841135577 / 9781841135571, £22.00 (pbk)
| DOI | 10.1177/09646639070160040803 |
| Published date | 01 December 2007 |
| Date | 01 December 2007 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
on the second mountain of intellectual unenlightenment (pp. 62–3, 210–21). This
negative appraisal is directed toward himself as much as anyone else. Wolcher is
enquiring into the potential for a modest realism in law and philosophy, and he does
not excuse his own penchant for intellectual idealism.
By his own terms (pp. 87–8, 121), the author will appreciate this reviewer’s assess-
ment that Beyond Transcendenceis a noble failure. Wolcher cannot overcome his own
version of logical transcendence in the form of his evident longing for, and attachment
to, the idea of the third mountain, and his apophatic suggestion that true freedom will
be found there (pp. 165, 222). But, then, all systems of philosophy necessarily unravel,
and fresh insight is ample recompense for ambitious failure. Wolcher’s ultimately
(indeed, inevitably) flawed mediation on ‘the compassionate pursuit of the ordinary’
(p. 117) is a valuable gift to his readers.
This accessible book will profit anyone with an interest in critical legal theory or
comparative philosophy. Birkbeck Law Press, a new and dynamic boutique imprint,
is to be commended for adding Beyond Transcendence to its growing list of impres-
sive titles.
REFERENCES
Horney, Karen (1992) Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis. New
York: W. W. Norton.
Nagatomo, Shigenori (2006) ‘Japanese Zen Buddhist Philosophy’, Stanford Encyclo-
pedia of Philosophy, URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/japanese-zen/
Reps, Paul and Nyogen Senzaki (eds) (1998) Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of
Zen and Pre-Zen Writings. Boston: Tuttle.
Wolcher, Louis E. (2006) ‘Universal Suffering and the Ultimate Task of Law’, Windsor
Yearbook of Access to Justice 24: 361–99.
THOMAS DENHOLM
University of Detroit Mercy, USA
WILLIAM TAYLOR(ed.), The Geography of Law: Landscape, Identity and Regulation.
The Oñati International Series in Law and Society. Oxford: Hart, 2006, 176 pp., ISBN
1841135577 / 9781841135571, £22.00 (pbk).
The law already performs acrobatics when put together with other disciplines through
the conjunction ‘and’ – thus, law and geography, literature, aesthetics, and so forth.
But when the possessiveness, enclosure, roundness, prioritization, intentionality and
so on, of an ‘of’ appears in the title, then the stakes become significantly higher, and so
do the reader’s expectations. The Geography of Law is an ambitious book that relates
‘. . . notions of space and representations of landscape to concerns for individual
identity and autonomy, as these are framed by practices of governance or codified by
law’ (p. 1). Having read the book, however, I am inclined to replace the above terms
with an epistemologically diluted version of landscaping, an even more diluted
version of space, and an ever so light version of law. With this in mind, it can be said
without too high a risk of disappointed expectations, that the collection makes a
contribution to a general understanding of the relation between geographical aesthet-
ics and normativity.
BOOK REVIEWS 619
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