Law’s Iconoclasts
| DOI | 10.1177/096466390201100304 |
| Published date | 01 September 2002 |
| Date | 01 September 2002 |
| Author | Emilios A. Christodoulidis |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
EMILIOS A. CHRISTODOULIDIS
University of Edinburgh, UK
ZENON BAN´KOWSKIwas my doctoral supervisor. Having just come
from Athens, from an LLB where the course in legal theory had been
steeped in Geny, Jellinek and Karl Engisch, the first thing I decided I
should do when I arrived in Edinburgh was to sit down and read some of
Zenon’s texts. I read two: an early article titled ‘Anarchy Rules OK’ and the
book he wrote with Geoff Mungham, Images of Law (1976). Hard to pin it
down as Wissenschaft, I thought, but how refreshing this Anglo-American
tradition of Jurisprudence! The elation did not last long; the first term of the
Masters programme, spent reading Raz’s Authority of Law, did much to drive
it out of us. And yet Images survived that onslaught to remain to this day
one of my favourite books.
Images is not a book in the tradition of critical legal theory but should be
read, sometimes in spite of itself, as an anarchist manifesto. I insert the ‘in
spite’ because there is a crucial ambivalence at the heart of the book, to which
I will return. But why is this not a book in critical legal theory? Because if
critical legal theory is understood as popularized by the CLS movement, that
is primarily as a methodology that exploits and builds on the ambivalences
that haunt legal practice, then the book’s central insight is that reform and
revolution are irreconcilable alternatives and that reform, to repeat the revol-
utionary’s standard indictment, makes the oppressive practice less heinous and
thus more difficult to abolish. The dilemma is patently visible in Ban´kowski
and Mungham’s critique of legal aid and welfare law in the uncharacteristi-
cally long, empirical analysis of chapters 3 and 4. In contrast to the impatient,
straccato idiom of the rest of the book, this is a careful account of the ‘legal
profession in process’ and the ideological workings behind ‘bringing the law
to the people’. This is a revolutionary’s critique of reformism, of the ideo-
logical function that systems of signification perform in sustaining oppres-
sion. ‘When we came’, Roberto Unger famously announced at the end of his
CLS manifesto, ‘they [the orthodoxy] were like a priesthood that had lost
their faith but kept their jobs. They stood in tedious embarrassment before
cold altars. But we turned away from those altars and found the mind’s oppor-
tunity in the heart’s revenge’ (Unger, 1983: 119). Unger finds...
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