Edward Mussawir, Jurisdiction in Deleuze: The Expression and Representation of Law, Abingdon: Routledge, 2011, 192 pp, hb £75.00.
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12009_3 |
| Author | Nick Piška |
| Published date | 01 January 2013 |
| Date | 01 January 2013 |
scholars: one only hopes they will be able to locate the valuable contributions
contained within.
Lorne Neudorf*
Edward Mussawir,Jurisdiction in Deleuze: The Expression and Representa-
tion of Law, Abingdon: Routledge, 2011, 192 pp, hb £75.00.
If we were to caricature the trajectory of law and legal scholarship in the last
century or so we might say that at the moment law was framed as a discipline by
the textbook writers of the nineteenth century, faith in law as an autonomous,
coherent discipline began to disappear.Whether this was a consequence of the
triumph of other emerging disciplines, such as economics and sociology, or the
emergence of new forms of governmentality which did not place such a strong
emphasis on law isn’t important; what is important is that this fragmentation of
law introduced (or perhaps re-introduced) a turn to inter-disciplinarity in legal
scholarship.Although ordinarily manifested as the coupling of law with another
discipline or empirical object (law-and-economics; law-and-sociology; law-and-
society), in self-avowedly ‘critical’ scholarship there has been a tendency for law
to disappear under the weight of questioning as to its ontological status. Critical
theory can consequently appear a little removed from both the everyday life of
the law and the practices and concepts specific to ‘positive law’,the perennial foil
of critical legal theory.
It is in relation to this trajectory that Edward Mussawir’s Jurisdiction in Deleuze:
The Expression and Representation of Law must be situated.That this is the case isn’t
immediately obvious. The title of the book suggests an investigation of the
concept of jurisdiction in the work of Gilles Deleuze, but it soon seems that
Mussawir’s objective is to deploy Deleuze in thinking about the concept of
jurisdiction (1). However, as Jurisdiction in Deleuze progresses the principal objec-
tive that emerges isn’t the concept of jurisdiction but rather the re-invigoration
of jurisprudence in the face of interdisciplinary scholar ship, and critical legal
studies in particular. Regarding interdiscipinary scholarship, Mussawir believes
that it ‘expresses a loss of faith that jurisprudence still offer s us a contemporary
critique of law’ (104).Regarding critical scholarship,Mussawir considers it to be
too metaphysical, too detached from the material and local encounters of law,
simply too intoxicated not only with denouncing law but also with particular
philosophers and theorists, with whom critical lawyers have become too enam-
oured. In place of such ‘radical’ critiques of law, he makes the case for a more
local, a more sober, jurisprudence.
It is in developing a distinctive approach to jurisprudence that Mussawir
deploys Deleuze as an ally.Instead of using Deleuze in order to inaugurate ‘radical
novelty in the context of legal theory’, Mussawir works within a Deleuzian
framework which distinguishes representation and expression. However,
*Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge.
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© 2013 TheAuthors. The Modern Law Review © 2013The Modern Law Review Limited.
184 (2013) 76(1) MLR 178–190
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