Kristen Rundle, Forms Liberate: Reclaiming the Jurisprudence of Lon L. Fuller, Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2012, 222 pp, hb £42.00.
| Date | 01 September 2013 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12035 |
| Author | Charles Barzun |
| Published date | 01 September 2013 |
REVIEWS
Kristen Rundle,Forms Liberate: Reclaiming the Jurisprudence of Lon L.
Fuller, Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2012, 222 pp, hb £42.00.
In Forms Liberate: Reclaiming the Jurisprudence of Lon L. Fuller, Kristen Rundle
offers a perceptive and sympathetic interpretation of the mid-century Harvard
law professor’s published and unpublished work in the philosophy of law.
According to Rundle, legal philosophers have long misunderstood and
underappreciated Fuller because they have viewed his work within the terms of
a debate that were not of his own choosing. If we look at Fuller’s specific
arguments about the connections between law and morality within the broader
context of his scholarly ambitions as a whole, she argues, we can see that he was
primarily concerned with exploring how law’s distinctive form entailed a respect
for human agency and thus implicitly set limits on lawgiving authority. Although
Rundle’s account leaves some questions about, and objections to, Fuller’s philo-
sophical claims unanswered, she makes a persuasive case for putting some of
Fuller’s concerns – such as the moral implications of adopting particular insti-
tutional forms and methods – back on the jurisprudential agenda.
After a lengthy introduction to the book’s themes in chapter 1, Forms Liberate
divides roughly into two parts. Chapters 2 to 5 contain the core interpretive
argument of the book. There Rundle proceeds chronologically through Fuller’s
major published and unpublished work and argues that Fuller was principally
concerned with identifying the way in which the formal features of law necessitate
a certain kind of respect for human agency and a concomitant limit on lawmaking
power. Rundle devotes the last three chapters (chapters 6 to 8) to showing the
continuing relevance of these themes by drawing connections between Fuller’s
thought, on the one hand, and the work of such leading philosophers of law as
Joseph Raz, Ronald Dworkin, and Scott Shapiro, on the other.
From his earliest jurisprudential writings, Fuller was as concerned with the
purpose of jurisprudence as he was with the purpose of law. Rundle helps set the
stage for a Fullerian interpretation of the famous ‘Hart-Fuller Debate’ by explain-
ing that for Fuller the task of legal philosophy was always to give a ‘profitable and
satisfying direction to the application of human energies’ (29, quoting Fuller). For
him this meant studying the institutions of law in order to ask questions about what
those institutions seemed to imply about law’s purpose. What, for instance, did it
say about the nature of adjudication that even when the relevant law bearing on
an issue in dispute seems unclear, parties make arguments to the effect that they
are legally entitled to something as a matter of right? Fuller thought that by asking
such questions we might learn something not only about how law functioned,
as a descriptive matter, but also about why law is valuable, as a moral matter.
Specifically, by offering individuals subject to law an opportunity to express
themselves and make arguments based on claims of right, adjudicatory processes
necessarily treat people as agents deserving of respect (41–42).
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© 2013 The Authors. The Modern Law Review © 2013 The Modern Law Review Limited. (2013) 76(5) MLR 935–948
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
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