Liquid Society and Its Law by Jiří Přibáň (ed)
| Author | David M. Seymour |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2009.789_4.x |
| Date | 01 January 2010 |
| Published date | 01 January 2010 |
crux of successfully implementing the CRPD is to break down national exclu-
sionary practices and not rationalise the existing inequalities as reconcilable with
the CRPD: ‘the true test will be whether itcan help reshape ‘‘normal politics’’to
the point that a consideration of the just claims and the rights of persons will
become a natural re£ex rather than an after-thought’ (218). Monitoring is singled
out as a keyprocess to achieve this. A second important elementi nthis e¡ort is to
strike down reservations to the CRPD which are irreconcilable with its spirit.
Much, then, will depend on how actively the monitoring body established by
the CRPD, the Committee on the Rights of Personswith Disabilities, will inter-
pret the provisions of the CRPD on the basis of the Optional Protocol and how
restrictively it will apply the reservations made by States parties to the CRPD.
This is a generally excellent collection of paperswhich draws the attention of
the reader to the debates and challenges which the CRPD and disability studies
bring with them.The book is immensely valuable to anyone wishing to engage
in the ¢eld of disabilitystudies, whethershe has prior knowledge of disabilitylaw
or not.Practitioners in bothhuman rights as well asEU law will bene¢t fromthe
detailed analyses of disability issues in these legal areas, as the book is teeming
with ideas and arguments for further developments in human rights protection
and non-discrimination for disabled persons.
Andreas Dim opoulos
n
Jir›|¤Pr›iba
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›(ed), Liquid Society and Its Law,Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, 224 pp, hb
d55.00.
Zygmunt Bauman is probably best known for his work, Modernity and the
Holocaust (Cornell, 1989) and the thesis that the extermination of European
Jewry should be seen not as the antithesis of modernity, but rather as a ten-
dency inherent within it. In that work, law appears more by implication than
by design, as an expression of formal abstract right and equality against and
beneath which the ‘gardening’ ambitions of the state driven by an obsession
with order.
As is often the case, the almost immediate success of Modernityand the Holocaust
(for which Bauman was awarded the prestigious Amal¢ Award) along with the
trilogy of which it was a part ^ Legislators and Interpreters (Cornell, 1987) and Mod-
ernity and Ambivalence (Cornell,1991) ^ served to obscurethe diverse corpus of Bau-
man’s interests as a whole. In fact, Bauman has contributed to, if not inaugurated,
debates on sociological methodologies and questions of class and its meaning. He
has written on matters Marxian and Marxist, on epistemology, on ethics and on
utopias. His worksare notable forgoing against thegrain of popular conceptions,
but far from rejecting the canon of modernsocial and political thought, they can
best be read as a critical engagement with it.
As the chronologyof his bibliography reveals, Bauman has an almost uncanny
ability to pick up on the zeitgeist. His sensitivity to social and academic tremors
n
Lawyer, Athens Bar
Reviews
166 r2010 The Authors. Journal Compilation r2010The Modern Law ReviewLimited.
(2010) 73(1) 155^173
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