Where Law and Morality Meet
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2006.00579_2.x |
| Published date | 01 January 2006 |
| Date | 01 January 2006 |
things, always a tricky enterprise that risks falling into various forms of biogra-
phical reductionism as well as being hampered in other ways by the individualis-
tic focus that the genre demands. After reading this book, I am persuaded that
Hart’s inner con£icts are germane to an understanding of his career, but I am left
feeling that they may be of only limited relevance to characterising his thought.
That activity, the activity that Hartwas so supremely goodat, is inherentlyhistor-
ical and dependent upon a world of social practices and cultural assumptions that
inevitably exceed the biographer’s remit. It is no criticism of Lacey’s excellent
book to re£ect that Hart himself would have been among the ¢rst to acknowl-
edge theways in whichthinking well about lawneeds, like lawitself, to be under-
stood as a social practice.
Stefan Collini
n
Matt hew H. Kram er,Where Law and Morality Meet,Oxford:OxfordUniversity
Press, 2004, 301pp, hb d50.00.
Anyone familiar with Matthew Kramer’s past work will not be surprised by this
book. His penchant for words like ‘animadversions’ and ‘transmogri¢cation’ is still
here, as is his fondness for turning adjectives into unusual nouns using the‘ness’
su⁄x and his occasionally odd writing style: sentences like‘the truth of his theses
is accompanied by the misplacedeness of their priorities and by their consequent
unilluminatigness’ (p 7) are not rare. In addition, for the most part the book is a
long series of replies (or as Kramer often calls them, ‘ripostes’) to the work of
others.Thus, Chapter 1is a response to acertain argument o¡ered by Scott Sha-
piro; Chapter 2 is a response to the response by Shapiro to the previously pub-
lished version of chapter 1; and Chapter 5 is a response to a review of Kramer’s
previous book on this subject. A similar approach pervades most of the book.
Together with Kramer’s tendency to pick on trivial points in the writings of his
opponents, and his insistence on bringing home every point by repeating it over
and over again, theresult is often somewhat heavy going.
But let us notdwell on stylistic matters. Despite its title, most of the bookdeals
with the rather narrow questionwhether law and moralityare necessarilyor con-
tingentlyrelated.To those unfamiliar withthe recent historyof this debate, here is
a brief synopsis: in the beginning there was H.L.A. Hart, who sought to explain
law as a complex array of rules. Then came Ronald Dworkin, who argued that
Hart’s account is mistaken because it leaves out certain moral principles that are
not validated by anything like Hart’s rule of recognition, but are nonetheless leg-
ally binding. Joseph Raz and others replied that it is true that the law contains
principles, but they can be easily accommodated within a positivist account of
law.This is the point where most observers lost interestin the debate, butit is here
that the origins of the issues discussed in Kramer’s bookare found.The positivists’
answers to Dworkin revealed a discrepancy among themselves: some, later to
be known as ‘inclusive’ or ‘soft’ positivists, have conceded much of Dworkin’s
n
Universityof Cambridge.
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114 rThe ModernLaw Review Limited 2006
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