Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine. By Assaf Likhovski
| Date | 01 March 2007 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2007.00641_2.x |
| Published date | 01 March 2007 |
| Author | Zeina B. Ghandour |
Given the importance assigned to history by the authors, it is perhaps surpris-
ing that the history presented here runs only from the eighteenth century, and is
largely grounded in the French Code de proce
Łdure civile 1806, in turn based on the
Code Louis of 1667, and the German gemeines Recht.BoththeCode Louis and the
gemeines Recht were strongly in£uenced by the civil law, and yet Europe’s deep-
rooted civilian tradition appears to receive relatively little attention as a source of
modern legal traditions. There are passing references to civil law origins, such as
that the procedure of the English Court of Chancery ‘resembled, at least to some
extent,the Roman-Canonical modeladopted by the superior Continental courts’
(p.140).There is no clear statement, however, of what thatmodel consisted of,nor
of how we move from the old civil law procedure to the civil procedure of the
ninetee nth through twenty ¢rst centuries.
As Gino Gorlaremarked in his DirittoComparato e DirittoComune Europe (Milan:
Dott.A. Giu¡re
', 1982, p. 52) the dramma of comparative lawi s thatit is ofte n neces-
sary to spend a great deal of time and space laying out the nature of the legal
systems being compared, leaving only a small space at the end actually to do any
comparative work. In the current book, the editor has made a substantial e¡ort to
draw together common themes regarding European civil procedure in his intro-
ductionsto each section.There appears, however, to have been insu⁄cienttime or
space to understand and explain these commonalities in anydetail. Thecontribu-
tors to this book have produced a very valuable and much needed piece of scholar-
ship,that providesa singlepoint of introductionto a range of procedural issues in
western Europe. It is hoped that it will provide avery useful springboard for pro-
jects to understand in more detail our common European procedural traditions.
De
Łirdre M. Dwyer
n
Assaf Likhovski,Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine,Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 2006,312 pp, hb $49.95.
Palestine is conspicuously absent from the indexes of the literature that covers
British colonial history. Spanning India and Africa, subjects addressed include
the psychologyof the colonialist, the techniques of rule in the colonies, custom-
ary law, evolutionary theory and the in£uence of anthropology, and the cultural
legacyof colonialism in terms of symbolism and imagery.
For some reason however, Palestine has remained a case apart, escaping com-
parison.And despite EdwardSaid’s Orientalism, even postcolonial studies / cultural
studies are halted in their tracks when faced with the post WW1 Middle East.
A collection of radical writers, known as the Subaltern Studies Group emerged
in 1982. Mainly scholars of literature drawing on postcolonial theoryand addres-
sing South Asia, they sought to challenge theAnglocentric Cambridge school of
History, claiming that it focused on the activity and creativity of the imperial
state, which was in turn seemingly undertaken and chronicled by robust white
n
PembrokeCollege, Oxford
Reviews
345
r2007 The Authors.Journal Compilation r2007 The Modern Law Review Limited.
(2007) 70(2)MLR 339^348
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