Book Reviews: Showing Remorse: Law and the Social Control of Emotion
| Author | Steven Tudor |
| Date | 01 June 2015 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663915575630a |
| Published date | 01 June 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
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has been influenced explicitly or implicitly by critical legal theory. Pirie captures beau-
tifully and reminds us rightly that law is an uncomfortable marriage of the sacred and the
profane. Law, she suggests, is animated by idealism yet is inevitably hampered by its
legalism. It is capable of being used oppressively by the powerful, whilst, at the same
time, can be used by the weak to resist and overturn that oppression. In other words, law
is both doomed to disappoint in some senses and neither one thing nor the other in terms
of power relations within society. The implication of this, it seems, is that we must
remain agnostic about law’s overall functions within society. But such agnosticism will
be a challenge to many sociolegal scholars whose instincts tend towards the critical
depiction of law’s oppressive effects. There is a danger, I fear, that this book will be
regarded as apolitical (a criticism, interestingly, that is sometimes also made of Oxford
jurisprudence). That criticism would, in my view, be unfair, given the nature of the ques-
tion that Pirie asks. Ultimately, however, it may be that sociolegal scholars do not like
her question and so do not give this book the attention that it deserves. That would be a
shame and would overlook the very important implication of her thesis – that we must
explore the relationship between law, hegemony and oppression locally rather than gen-
erally. This, it seems to me, is a sensible approach, theoretically and methodologically,
and one that is true to the anthropological tradition of studying law.
SIMON HALLIDAY
University of York, UK
RICHARD WEISMAN, Showing Remorse: Law and the Social Control of Emotion. Farnham, Surrey:
Ashgate, 2014, pp. 149, ISBN 978-0-7546-7398-9, £65.00 (hbk).
Richard Weisman’s new book is a very fine and welcome addition to the growing mul-
tidisciplinary literature on the complex, contested and crucial role of remorse in crim-
inal justice settings. Weisman brings a richly informed and subtly perceptive
sociological perspective to bear on the expression and non-expression of remorse by
accused and convicted persons and on how such emotional displays are variously
expected, elicited, examined, rejected and accepted by the various players in the crim-
inal justice drama, namely, judges, juries, prosecutors, victims, parole boards and the
general public.
The book is not a long one. It consists of an introductory first chapter, four main chap-
ters and a brief concluding chapter. The second and third chapters, and part of...
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