JUSTICE, LEGALITY, AND THE RULE OF LAW: LESSONS FROM THE PITCAIRN PROSECUTIONS. Ed by Dawn Oliver Oxford: Oxford University Press (www.oup.com), 2009. xxiv + 295 pp. ISBN 9780199568666. £50.

Document Cited authorities (4) Cited in Related
AuthorRoss Gilbert Anderson
DOI10.3366/elr.2010.0308
Published date01 September 2010
Date01 September 2010
Pages516-518

Guests on BBC Radio 4's long-running Desert Island Discs are invited to engage in agreeable discussion of their life's work, all set to a soundtrack of their choice. The discussion and music is the prelude to being banished to a fictional desert island. They are asked to choose a luxury item. But never, I think, has a guest been asked: “to which sovereign state will you bear allegiance?” Or: “which law would you apply on your island?” Perhaps Kirsty Young should add this question to her list, for the answer is fraught with difficulty. “Desert Island scenarios” says George Letsas in his contribution to the present volume, “are the political philosopher's test tube” (157). And so too are they for lawyers: can law exist without legal institutions? Can legal institutions exist without a state or vice versa? In his solitude between 1704 and 1707 on one of the Juan Fernández Islands – renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966 – did Alexander Selkirk need Scots law? Did he need law at all? Does the legal vacuum exist? If not, which law applies? Since 1707, despite their colossal contribution to the British Empire, Scotsmen and Scotswomen, for reasons unexplained, were never able to take Scots law abroad: see (Justice) B H McPherson, “Scots Law in the...

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