Foucault's Law by Ben Golder and Peter Fitzpatrick
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2010.00841_3.x |
| Date | 01 January 2011 |
| Author | Alain Pottage |
| Published date | 01 January 2011 |
The intellectual incoherence of the subject that is often noted by scholars thusmay
derive not only from scholarship itself but also from how we as scholars instinc-
tively respond to that scholarship.This is not an argument against pluralism in
scholarship, just that it might be useful to re£ect on how that pluralism operates.
Overall, Abbot should be credited for a careful and sober charting between
ranges of di¡erent bodies of scholarship.The end result is a good foundational
work which contributes to thinking more carefully about environmental law
and regulation. Indeed, I have found myself recommending Enforcing Pollution
Control Regulation to my students and others as a good launching o¡ point for
understanding enforcement. This is particularly when, as a work, its concerns
overlap with much of the current thinking in regulatory enforcement (R.
Macrory, Regulatory Justice: Making Sanctions E¡ective (2006) and the Regulatory
Enforcement and Sanctions Act 2008). I have also found myself hoping that
Abbot will write more on the topic.
Liz Fisher
n
Ben Golder and Peter Fitzpatrick, Foucault’s Law,Abingdon: Routledge, 2009, 143
pp, hb d80.00.
Foucault’s Law proposes‘a reading of Foucault’s stance on law [that is] radically dif-
ferent from the now orthodox understanding that Foucault relegated law to a
position of inferiority or irrelevance in modernity’ (2). The authors start from
the premise that Foucault had a theory of law; indeed, that law was actually one
of his central‘theoretical objects’.Their purpose is to‘retrieve’this theory from the
grip of prevailing orthodoxy, which holds that Foucault ‘failed to take proper
account of law’s constitutive role in society’, or that he o¡ered only ‘a straitened
portrait of law as a mere instrument of repression which is superseded by more
productive and expansive modern modalities of power’ (13). Given the profusion
of studies in which Foucauldian concepts or idioms colour some aspect of law, it
comes as a surprise to learn that Foucault’s Law is, as the publisher’s blurb puts it,‘the
¢rst book in al mo st ¢fteen years to address the questio n of Foucault’s posi tion on
law’. Golder and Fitzpatrick explain that many of these Foucauldian takes on law
are not really ‘exegetical’; although they draw on Foucault’s analyses of (say) gen-
ealogy or disciplinary power, theirobject is not to develop a sustained re£ection
on his ‘overall position on law’.What they o¡er is only ‘a piecemeal Foucauldian
jurisprudence’ (5).The orthodoxy from which Foucault’s l aw has to be ret rieved is
generated by those studies which purport to identify this‘overall position’. Law
has been traced into the social and historical articulations of sovereignty, disci-
pline, bio-power and governmentality in various ways, andthese variationsre£ect
the productively indeterminate modes in which Foucault distinguished and
recombined these diagrams. But according to the authors most commentaries
n
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
Reviews
159
r2011The Authors.The Modern Law Review r2011The Modern Law Review Limited.
(2011) 74(1) 150^170
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