Reviews for The inner experience of law

The average rating for The inner experience of law based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-10-04 00:00:00 Tamara Taylor I wouldn't disagree with four stars. But at times the argument does not feel sustained, and the connection between the first and second parts of the book were not always clear to me. What's more, his conclusion - that governments are owed deference so long as they try to govern in good faith "in the interests of all" - is underspecified. Would adversarial pluralistic democracies then by definition be illegitimate? I think that Soper would reply that the government's attempt to respect the preferred conception of government - adversarial pluralistic democracy - is what demands respect. In other words, that it would be fine for a special-interest dominated government to allocate resources unevenly, so long as it does so consistent in a way that adheres to an accepted meta-notion of "here is how governments in the abstract should act". But those who are frequent losers in such schemes would not likely endorse such a type of government of partiality, and it is not clear that Soper provides a mechanism to adjudicate between the competing claims of whether or not adversarial pluralistic governments attempt to "govern in the interests of all". He provides some suggestions (such as intensity of belief or desire, or the morality of the preferred "rules of the game"), but these do not go far enough to resolve the issue. The possibly problem, in other words, is that the status of the recipients of the government's good-faith efforts is not clear, and that a government's insistence that it is governing in the interests of the excluded does not, on this account, provide enough ammunition to tell these excluded segments of the population that they have an obligation to defer. Certain segments of American society have very good reason that the structure of the US government is such that the government will not try to govern in the interests of all. The government, these people may believe, is not merely trying to govern fairly and failing, but rather that it is structured in such a way as to never take everyone's interests into account (a strong critique), or not to take everyone's interests into account in an equal manner (a weaker critique).

Review # 2 was written on 2016-09-16 00:00:00 John Dignan "So in a democracy the existing laws contain the best and most comprehensive statement of contemporary social reality. They are not a perfect statement. There is always some unrepealed junk that nobody will make the effort to get rid of. Moreover, of its nature the law cannot be immediately responsive to new developments and may need as a corrective the observation of the man up aloft who gauges the strength and direction of the winds of change...until the point is reached when there is strong pressure against a particular law, the ideas of reformers, however well and articulately expressed, are not contemporary sociable reality but wishful thinking about the sort of society they would like to see; and if and when they become contemporary, it is improbable that they take the exact form of the wishful thoughts." pg 126 As a judge, I suppose Patrick Devlin saw himself as a 'man up aloft'. As such was able to come out in support of the decriminalisation of homosexuality, having argued so cogently against it in this book. Devlin's view of the relationship between the law and popular morality had not changed, his view of popular morality had. 'The Enforcement of Morals' is the most compelling thing I have read in jurisprudence since Law's Empire, and it addresses an important weakness in Dworkin's argument. That argument is that Law, or at least a legal system based on precedent is an autonomous system that works over time to make itself rational. The autonomy of the law thus renders us its subjects. The view fails to take into account revolution, where Law's subjects violently change the law to better suit contemporary social reality. Devlin's linkage between popular morality and criminal law recognises that for law to be accepted as such, it must be supported by a important element of popular morality. There are at least two examples where this process is at work today: implementing Brexit in the UK, and restrictions on Islamic dress in France. Rational, liberal arguments about the sovereignty of Parliament in the UK, and the sovereignty of the individual in France seem confused and contradictory when confronted by intense expressions of popular morality. As a Conservative with little sense of conviction on either matter, my clearest hope is that the men and women up aloft gauge correctly, avoid revolution and preserve Law's Empire.