From Positivism to Idealism: A Study of the Moral Dimensions of Legality by Sean Coyle
| Author | Mike Wilkinson |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2009.00763_2.x |
| Date | 01 July 2009 |
| Published date | 01 July 2009 |
have funded the development and makingavailableof two major new therapeutic
medicines’strikes this reviewer as emotive and somewhat partial.
One must agree with the author that the surveyof European jurisdictions and
the various initiatives for reform reveal a confusing picture and a virtue of the
book is the level of detail included. Thereafter the analysis is to some extent
clouded by the presentation.There is no doubt of the need for fresh thinking to
attempt to resolve intractable problems concerning access to justice without
entailing the oppression of industry or the distortion of competition. The value
of this bookis that it sets out to testthe utility rather thanthe structure of available
solutions and accordingly makes a valuable contribution to the debate set in
motion (but certainly not tobe resolved in the short term) by the Commission.
Mark Mil dred
n
Sean Coyle, FromPositivism to Idealism: A Studyof the Moral Dimensionsof
Legality
,London: Ashgate, 2007,198 pp, hb d65.00.
Jurisprudential enquiry intothe nature of lawor the relationship between lawand
morality tends to concentrate on revealing properties central to legal systems in
general or contemplating whether or not those properties make the lawa moral
form of association. But what if law is not systematic or universalisable in this
fashion, butcan be properlyelucidated onlyby referenceto its various and diverse
instantiations? In the sense not only that our theorising is properly restricted to
re£ecting on, say, the form and substance of English Law, or Hungarian Law, or
Roman Law, or speci¢c legal institutions such as the Common Law, or Parlia-
mentary legislation, or constitutional law, but that each of these domains
expresses something uniquely true about the value of law and legality? If so,
rather than philosophical speculation on abstract concepts such as rights or justice,
jurisprudential enquiry ought to begin from the particular, from the history of
actual legal practices and communities.
Sean Coyle’s ambitious book, From Positivism to Idealism, takes this approach a
step further. Not only is the philosophy of law best undertaken with regard to
its historical instantiations; it is ultimately to be accomplishedwith regard to one
particularjuridical practice, understood to embody the truths about the nature of
lawand its relationshipto morality. Coyle is thusserendipitouslyled to the history
of the Common Law of England and, through re£ection on this British Sonder-
weg, to the tradition of civilitythat it mysteriously embodies.The title of his book
is misleading: what we are ultimately presented with is a normative/explanatory
account of the authorityof English private law. This narrow, parochial, and per-
haps atypical aspectof the jurisprudential universe is taken, perhaps mistaken, for
the whole.
The book is introduced as a work in applied legal philosophy, understood not
in the sense of applying a general theoryof law to a speci¢c legal domain or con-
n
Law School,Nottingham Trent University
Reviews
677
r2009 The Authors. Journal Compilationr20 09 The Modern LawReview Limited.
(2009) 72(4) 669^692
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