THE TIES THAT BIND
| Date | 01 November 1988 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1988.tb01786.x |
| Published date | 01 November 1988 |
| Author | Neil Duxbury |
REVIEW ARTICLE
THE TIES THAT BIND
MAKING
LAW BIND:
ESSAYS
LEGAL
AND PHILOSOPHICAL.
By TONY
HONOR&
[Oxford: Clarendon.
1987.
x
and
274
pp.
&30-00,
hardback.]
I
FEW
modern legal academics have been as catholic in their interests
as Tony HonorC. Many tend to regard him principally as an
innovative interpreter of Roman law’; yet the final chapter
of
a
recent
Festschrift
in his honour reveals that his publications embrace
a diverse collection of subjects including,
inter ah,
Roman law,
property, trusts, jurisprudence, philosophy and linguistics.2
Making
Law
Bind
comprises a collection of essays written by Honor6 on
the broad theme of legal philosophy over the last quarter-century.
Two of the essays included were written specifically for this book,
though the rest have been published before. Most remarkable
about this collection is the manner in which it demonstrates
HonorC’s unswerving consistency in developing a small number of
themes over a long period of time. And because most
of
the
essays
address a number
of
shared issues (albeit often from different
angles), the book reads not as a volume
of
disparate pieces linked
only by the tenuous rubric of “legal philosophy,” but rather as a
distinctive jurisprudence in itself, with its own voice, its own
theses, its own critical perspectives and defences.
In spite of his claim that his “views do not fall squarely within
any particular school or tradition” (p.vi)
,3
HonorC’s legal philosophy
is in many ways firmly rooted in the tradition of post-war Oxford
philosophy which was spearheaded by,
inter
alios,
J.
L.
Austin,
Hare, Strawson, Urmson, Woozley, Hart, and Honor6 himself. As
with all of these philosophers, nowhere is Honork’s indebtedness
to this tradition clearer than in his endeavour at all times to
articulate and convey ideas assiduously and precisely through
language. That this should be
so
is hardly surprising. After all,
axiomatic to this entire tradition is the idea “that we should pay
close attention to the way people speak and write. We repeated
the salutary maxim that everything is what it is and is not something
else” (p.88). Yet what is most interesting
of
all about HonorC’s
legal philosophy as it is presented in
Making
Law
Bind
is that he
does not simply produce an account of this philosophical tradition
On this matter, see HonorC’s own modest apologia: Tony Honor6, “New Methods in
Roman Law”
(1984)
3
Rechtshisrorhches
Journal290-305.
*
Barbara Tearle, “The Publications
of
Tony Honor&:
1950-1985”
in Neil MacCormick
and Peter Birks (eds.), The Legal
Mind:
Essays
for
Tony
Honor6
(Oxford,
1986),
pp.307-312.
AU
page references in the text are
to
Making
Law
Bind.
790
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