‘Positively Postmodern Stanley’ and Other Law Stories
The legal academy stands on the brink of yet another wave of self-evaluation. While the proliferation of interdisciplinary perspectives on law in the past three decades has resulted in much soul-searching within legal scholarship and legal education, it is arguable that the discipline's quest for self-understanding and change is about to reach new heights (or depths) in the light of some theoretical challenges stemming from recent Continental social and political philosophy. The Fate of Law' provides an engaging contribution to this process. The book consists of five substantial essays which examine, the covernote informs us, the 'problems and prospects of law in the late twentieth century.' The editors of the collection state in the Introduction that their aim in soliciting contributions to the book was to 'invite contemplation about how, if at all, law and legal scholarship have responded, or should respond, to feminist and poststructuralist challenges to claims about law's neutrality, objectivity, and capacity to limit and channel the exercise of power in American life' (p 2). In reply, the contributors, along with the editors jointly, have provided essays dealing in quite distinctive ways with a broad range of issues and movements within contemporary American legal thought. Each essay's treatment of these issues reflects in some way the influence of feminist and post-modernist/structuralist thinking upon the legal academy in recent times. To try and identify a common theme for the collection with greater particularity inevitably invites consideration of the significance and appropriateness of the title, in particular the use of the wordfate. Indeed, this issue seems to give rise to sustained self-consciousness by the two editors towards the end of their Introduction. As one might expect in what undoubtedly is a fin-de-siecle exercise, the editors and contributors confront the issue not just of what has law been like and what position has it brought us to, but also what does it portend. The book thus represents a profound exercise in legal reflexivity, an extended self-conscious intellectual stocktaking by legal theorists. It is not revealing too much to state that each contributor reaches a point of accommodation with the idea of the continued relevance of law. Albeit different narratives are told, no essay suggests a demise for law's story. In view of the title, nevertheless, the question may be asked whether the contributors view law's future from a point of detached, almost tragic hopefulness, or whether greater possibilities exist and something more is required of us both as legal scholars and as subjects of late twentieth-century law. The sense the collection leaves one with, having read each contribution carefully, is the latter rather than the former. Just how far each essay takes this line is question-