Review Article: The Province of Jurisprudence Demolished
| Date | 01 June 2011 |
| Published date | 01 June 2011 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663910394741 |
| Author | David Campbell |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Review Article
The Province of
Jurisprudence
Demolished
David Campbell
School of Law, University of Leeds, UK
ALLAN C. HUTCHINSON The Province of Jurisprudence Democratized. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2009, xii þ223 pp., ISBN 9780195343250, £55.00 (hbk).
This provocative and provoking book is even more ambitious than its title would
lead the reader to believe. It is not really about John Austin, who must of course fea-
ture because he was the ‘parent’ (p. 29)
1
of analytical jurisprudence, but whose own
specific thought is now ‘almost universally dismissed’ (p. 29) as of ‘no lasting worth’
(p. 3), and so receives no sustained treatment. If The Province of Jurisprudence
Determined is a ‘canonical’ (p. 3) or ‘seminal book’ (p. 29), this is not because it pos-
sesses any particular intrinsic value but because Austin successfully ‘pulled off ...
the jurisprudential crime of the centuries’ (p. 3) when he ‘highjacked’ ‘the general
study of law’ (p. 1) to make ‘analytical jurisprudence ... the default theory of the
legal world’ (p. 5). Professor Hutchinson attempts to show that the ‘fundamental
claim’ of analytical jurisprudence ‘is offensive’ (p. 1), and so, not merely the differ-
ences between Austin and Hart but between many of the leading post-Victorian con-
tributors to analytical jurisprudence (pp. 29–36), including, for these purposes, Fuller
(pp. 69–70) and Dworkin (p. 118), are downplayed in order to attack the analytical
tradition tout court, or even, as that tradition so dominates jurisprudence in the com-
mon law world, ‘jurisprudence tout court’ (p. 3). Jurisprudence, which has ‘seen better
days’ and ‘has become much less than what [it] could or should be’ (p. 19), ‘would be
much better if the analytical project were abandoned’ (p. 2). Hutchinson says things
which seem to ameliorate the implications of his attack on jurisprudence for an assess-
ment of Austin (p. 22) and Hart (p. 45) personally, and does even more in this vein in
respect of living scholars (p. 5), but it is not easy to see how they can be let off
the hook when, ‘more intent on perpetuating their own prestige and authority
Corresponding author:
David Campbell, School of Law, University of Leeds, UK
Email address: i.d.campbell@durham.ac.uk
Social & Legal Studies
20(2) 253–262
ªThe Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663910394741
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