Casting Light on Dracula: Studies in Law and Culture
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1993.tb01904.x |
| Author | Maria Aristodemou |
| Published date | 01 September 1993 |
| Date | 01 September 1993 |
fie
Modem
Law
Review
[Vol.
56
(instalments of the project are published in a large number of American law
journals to which many British jurisprudents will have no direct access). The
remaining two essays in the collection are a debate between Ernest Weinrib and
Joseph Raz. The debate seems tangential to the concerns of the natural law
tradition. Certainly, it does not impact head-on with the three concerns sketched
above.
IV
Taking
Stock
Are the essays in this volume a success? As is clear, the majority
of
them address
in varying degree the three concerns
of
the natural law tradition without tackling
the difficulties in establishing that those concerns are indeed ours and were indeed
concerns of the exemplars of the tradition. That shortcoming could be overlooked
were the essays to shed more and better light on the nature of those concerns. This
they undoubtedly do: all the essays attempt to take the argument a few further steps
onwards by addressing either fashionable bodies of thought (virtue theory or
philosophical pragmatism) or developing new arguments or reformulating old
ones. For that they deserve commendation. Moreover, this does not conflict with
the many gripes and criticisms
I
have raised of some of the arguments in some of
the essays. It could only do
so
were one to make a mistaken assumption; namely,
that good books are those about which nothing much can be said. Were a book or
collection of essays to leave one nothing to say, it could not,
I
think, have
stimulated one’s thoughts and driven one to argument. That is a very serious
failing. It is not one, as is evident, from which this collection suffers.
Casting Light on Dracula: Studies in Law and Culture
Maria
Aristodemou
*
June
M.
Guines,
Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law,
London: British Film Institute,
1992, 340
pp, pb
$14.95.
Declining belief in the viability of autonomous disciplines is perhaps one of the
most welcome features of contemporary scepticism towards grand meta-
narratives.
No
discipline can maintain today to have a privileged claim to, or
method
for,
discovering ‘The Truth,’ not least because, according to some
theorists, the latter is nothing more than an illusion masking underlying power
struggles over the right to define our world. This lesson has been learned by many
legal writers who have, in recent years, abandoned the view that law can be
understood in isolation from the context in which it operates and are making
increasing use of insights from, amongst other fields, philosophy, sociology,
economics, literary theory and psychology. The breakdown in disciplinary
boundaries has also been accompanied, in varying and conflicting degrees, by an
abandonment of the search for a single theory, or a single method, with which to
interpret one’s field of inquiry; the emphasis is instead on ‘contextuality,’
‘perspectivism’ and ‘situationality
.
’
Whilst few doubt the benefits to be derived
from such inquiries, many
of
us may find the idea of engaging in unfamiliar
*Faculty
of
Law, University
of
Bristol.
760
0
The Modem
Law
Review Limited
1993
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