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Margaret Davies: Law Unlimited: Materialism, Pluralism, and Legal Theory

Document Cited in Related
AuthorJennifer Hendry
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12146
Published date01 March 2019
Date01 March 2019
Book Reviews
Winner of the SLSA's 2018 Socio-Legal Theory and History Prize
LAW UNLIMITED: MATERIALISM, PLURALISM, AND LEGAL THEORY
by MARGARET DAVIES
(Abingdon: Routledge GlassHouse, 2018, 175 pp., £36.99)
`Theory is about understanding yourself, don't you think?' says Margaret
Davies, in response to my observation that her book Law Unlimited appears
to have been drawn from a career's worth of ideas. I interviewed the SLSA
2018 Theory and History Book Prize winner in autumn 2018 to discover
more about the author's influences and motivations in writing this book, and
to consider further the role of socio-legal theoretical approaches in the task
of unlimiting law.
Davies has plainly had a long-standing interest in this task. Her 1996
monograph Delimiting the Law, which provided a deconstructionist critique
of the parameters and tradition of analytical legal philosophy, can perhaps be
read as the first step along this path, but it is clear that the author considers
this latest book to be a different conceptual project:
Delimiting was very much developed in the spirit of a rejection of the tradition
of analytical legal theory, but also in frustration with where critical legal
theory was at that point in time. Over time I thought, however, it wasn't just
about the deconstructive thing, it was about trying to imagine outside.
Deconstruction leaves the limits in place . . . you haven't imagined something
different.
Law Unlimited is thus more overtly creative: the book opens with the stated
aim `not to delimit law but rather to unlimit it ± to suspend law's
conventional conceptual, doctrinal, and institutional boundaries in an effort
to imagine different modalities for understanding law' (preface, p. viii,
emphasis in original). The boundaries under challenge are, first, those
distinctions Davies considers to have become embedded in the Western legal
imaginary ± nature/culture, subject/object, mind/matter, for example ± and
second, the legal theoretical constraints she sees as restricting possibilities of
thought and as (pre-emptively) closing down potentially new modes of
understanding. She explains this latter problem early in the second chapter:
`Restricted' legal theory has traditionally been limited by several factors: it
looks mainly at the law of the nation-state . . . it constructs its theory from the
perspective of an insider to this law but who is nonetheless regarded as
capable of making objective pronouncements about it, and it takes a decidedly
Western philosophical approach to the analysis of law (p. 23, emphasis in
original).
169
ß2018 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2018 Cardiff University Law School

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