GENERAL JURISPRUDENCE: UNDERSTANDING LAW FROM A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE by WILLIAM TWINING
| Date | 01 December 2009 |
| Author | RODERICK A. MACDONALD |
| Published date | 01 December 2009 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2009.00487.x |
GENERAL JURISPRUDENCE: UNDERSTANDING LAW FROM A
GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE by WILLIAM TWINING
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, xxiii + 517 pp., £75.00
(hbk) £35.00 (pbk)
This is the mature reflection of a mature scholar, with all the virtues ± and as
I explain shortly, there are many ± as well as some of the vices that such an
endeavour entails. For well-nigh fifty years, Twining has been a regular
contributor to scholarly debates about law, law teaching, and jurisprudence.
My first thought, upon receiving this book, was to another liber magisterium
half a century ago. In 1959, Roscoe Pound published a summation of his
life's work in the law: Jurisprudence.
1
Pound's multi-volume opus can-
vassed topics that had preoccupied him through out his career: the end of
law; the nature of law; the scope and subject matter of law; sources, forms,
modes of growth; application and enforcement of law; analysis of general
juristic conceptions; the system of law. In his own manner, Twining covers
the same ground in General Jurisprudence, and how he does so reveals much
about the two authors and the five decades of legal scholarship that separate
their two works.
In 1959, Pound was able to convince the West Publishing Company to
market five volumes totaling 3,120 pages, on heavy paper and in large type.
In 2009, Cambridge University Press offered Twining some 550 pages on
trade paper in regular typeface, with links to a website where three other
chapters totalling 76 pages (which are characterized as Part C of this work),
and three appendices comprising 18 pages can be found.
2
In 1959, Pound
drew together ideas about which he had been publishing articles and mono-
graphs for almost 70 years. The basic frame of inquiry was that developed in
his essays on `sociological jurisprudence' written during the second decade
of the last century, shortly after his fortieth birthday. In 2009, Twining has
accomplished a similar synthetic feat, collecting, revising, and supple-
menting essays previously published in disparate sources, most framed by a
conception of the province and function of jurisprudence that crystallized
during the 1970s ± again about the time of his fortieth birthday. In 1959,
Pound sought to present a work of general jurisprudence in the grand
tradition of Holland, Salmond, Paton, Friedmann, Stone, and Patterson,
offering his own theory of law as counterpoint and unifying idea. In 2009,
Twining does likewise, with two salient (and welcome) differences: because
Twining never propounded his own dogmatic conception of law, he is
592
1R.Pound, Jurisprudence,5vols. (1959).
2Despite the indication (p. xvi) that these additional materials could be found
(presumably without much effort) at , I spent over 30
minutes trying to access this material prior to discovering the relevant link. Perhaps
those more familiar with the layout protocols of Cambridge University Press would
not have experienced the same difficulty.
ß2009 The Author. Journal Compilation ß2009 Cardiff University Law School
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