Images of Images of Law
| Date | 01 September 2002 |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466390201100311 |
| Published date | 01 September 2002 |
| Author | Zenon Bańkowski |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
IMAGES OF IMAGES OF LAW
ZENON BAN
´KOWSKI
University of Edinburgh, UK
Das Pergament, ist das der heil’ge Bronnen
Woraus ein Trunk den Durst auf ewig stillt?
Erquickung hast du nicht gewonnen,
Wenn sie dir nicht aus eigner Seele quillt.
(Goethe’s Faust)
TWENTY-FIVE years on what does one say about a book that was
written at the beginnings of an academic career, in the heat of the
political times, with as yet an unformed vision? As Peter Goodrich,
quoting Aristotle, says in his contribution to this volume, ‘youth wants
everything too much, and “all their mistakes are on the side of excess or
vehemence”’. It is also hard when it is a joint-authored book. Goodrich is
right, I was always more the anarchist than Geoff Mungham and what I write
is my reaction and not his. Geoff has moved on to teaching and researching
journalism and to work in practical politics; I have stayed in legal and social
theory.1
Peter Goodrich says that I have never disavowed, changed or edited
Images and have just moved on, leaving it as it were as ‘a blast from the past’.
Well, yes and no. I am not so postmodern as to think that the person I was
then is not connected to the person I am now; that what I did then has
nothing to do with what I do now. And that is not merely a contingent causal
connection. Images of Law has never been far away from me – for the
concerns that fuelled it are still there. I am, and my work is, both different
from and the same as what it was then. Since this was a colloquium on reac-
tions to this book, I will not so much reply to the criticisms and reactions
presented here but add just another view, my own, to them.
Images of Law, I flatter myself, was written, with passion, from the soul.
What refreshment, or craving, did I seek for myself; what did I hope to satisfy
in others? In the book it is clear that what was sought for both went under
the nebulous name of ‘freedom’. Law was an ‘Imperial Code’ we said
(thereby anticipating Dworkin), and we sought to provide an escape from it.
It was not really a dispassionate look at law from a Marxist point of view,
though some parts did look at law dispassionately – more in a sociological
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (200209) 11:3 Copyright © 2002
SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi,
Vol. 11(3), 445–453; 027074
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