Imaginary Boundaries of Justice: Social and Legal Justice Across Disciplines
| Published date | 01 January 2006 |
| Author | Ben Golder |
| Date | 01 January 2006 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2006.00579_5.x |
argues that modernity’s experience of contingency exceeds anything that could
still be jointly mastered.
In closing, it should perhaps be said that the reception of Luhmann’s work in
Anglo-Americantheory has been reluctantand that its in£uence has been limited.
There are a number of reasons for this. One is the theory’s ‘high entry costs’, as
Luhmann himself put it once, the use of a linguistic idiom that requires some
e¡ort and high abstraction; another concerns foundational misconceptions and
biases that have been directed at his work since at least his ¢rst, much discussed,
exchange with Habermas in 1971, critiques that relegate systems theory into a spe-
cies of neo-Darwinism, evolutionary theory, social technology, Parsonian sociol-
ogy or functionalism. Yet another reason concerns the largely unimpressive work
undertaken under its banner and ‘using’ its i nsights, much of it exhausted in trans-
lating social problems into the idiom of systems theoryand either, in some cases,
extracting ready-made solutions from it, or in others, advocating inertia in the
face of complexity. None of this should be taken at face value, and Luhmann
should be returned to and studied carefully. I cannot think of a better place to
begin than Law as a Social System.
Emilios Christodoulidis
n
Ronnie Lippen s (ed),Imaginary Boundaries of Justice: Social and Legal Justice
Across Di scipli nes,Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2004, viii þ202pp, pb d22.00, hb
d45.00.
It is always a risk encountered by collections of this sort,a risk perhaps moreperi-
lous for the interdisciplinary than for the more doctrinal collection, that the
assembled essays will read more like a set of disjointed virtuoso performances
than a cohesive scholarly ensemble.The volume under review here, which arose
out of a workshop run by the O•ati International Institute for the Sociologyof
Law, negotiates this risk handsomely^Imaginary Boundaries of Justice contains some
excellent individual essays, all of which arewell integrated into the overall theme
and structure of the book. Indeed, it is evident from reading these essays that the
contributors have not only grappled with the same issues (albeit from di¡erent
theoretical perspectives) but have collaborated to great e¡ect in doing so. The
result of their collective and individual endeavours is a thoroughly interesting
and well-rounded book.
The book’s central concern is with the relation of ‘the imaginary’ (images, ima-
gery, and the imagination are all within theframe of reference) to social andlegal
regimes. More precisely, Lippens’s contributors all address the various ways in
which representations produce, and reproduce, visions of social and legal justice
and how these visions function within and outside their respective regimes.The
explorations of this central theme range in theoretical abstraction from quite
complex considerations of Luhmannian autopoiesis and German philosophy, to
more situated engagements with particular visual texts such as political cartoons,
n
Universityof Edinburgh.
Reviews
129The Modern LawReview Limited 2006
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