Incivilities: Regulating Offensive Behaviour by A von Hirsch and AP Simester (eds)

DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2007.00650_2.x
Date01 May 2007
Published date01 May 2007
apposite to our age (to the extent that it has not withdrawn into a swathe of ¢c-
tive‘authentic’ identities).The intrinsic plasticity at work inside this notion is one
of the issues with which law in practice is learning to deal with and not
always without di⁄culty. How should the law negotiate the politics of iden-
tity? How do these politics relate to the emergent ¢eld of human rights? The
discussion of these themes is assured and sophisticated. And this discussion links
into a stimulating discussion of postcolonial jurisprudence, with a provocative
backward glance at the imperial context of ‘orthodox’jurisprudence.
This bookcan be approachedon a numberof levels.Tome, the most important
is perhaps not the particular positions they take on particular issues or authors so
much as that they show what can be done with all these postmodern authors or
whatever one wishes to call them. As acquisition of a PhD is becoming increas-
ingly important internationally for entering into an academic career(what a fate!)
and as having something ‘interesting’ to say becomes a growing expectation (at
least in the UK) for publication in non-specialist academic journals, it becomes
increasingly necessary tohave somesignposts to navigatethe vast torrentof words
which are‘out there’.Who to read? Andwhy? Whereis the relevance?This book is
a veryuseful navigational aid.This is not to dismiss or diminish it as a handbook.
It is much more than that ^ erudite but also passionate, political, and personal.
Di¡erent books have di¡erent passions ^ or none at all. But what is the value of
a book without passion? Information only, which dates more rapidly than
passions.
Tim Mur phy
n
A von Hirsch and AP Simester (eds), Incivilities: Regulating O¡ensive
Behaviour, 304 pp, d35.00, Oxford and Portland, Oregon: Hart, 2006
The contributions to Incivilities, as the editors explain in their preface, arei ntended
to explore and develop principles that would limit the scope of the regulation of
o¡ensive behaviour. The explicit context for this endeavour is the recent reemer-
gence of the problem of incivilities in criminal justice policy on both sides of
the Atlantic, and the regulation of anti-social behaviour (ASB) in the UK in
particular. Half of the book’s chapters, therefore, explore aspects of the criminali-
sation of o¡ensive behaviour in general terms, and the other half consider the
criminalisation issue in the speci¢c context of contemporary UK regulation,
and in particular of its most controversial element, the Anti-Social Behaviour
Order (ASBO).
Most of the individual chapters are as interesting as one would expect from the
high calibre of the contributors, and several make important contributions to the
development of the principles that the editors seek. At the same time, there is an
unresolved confusion in the book that limits its relevance to the contemporary
ASB context. The problem is that the half of Incivilities that is addressed to the
n
Law Department,London School of Economics.
Reviews
518 r2007 The Authors.Journal Compilation r2007. The Modern Law Review Limited
(2007) 70(3)MLR 505^522

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