Raymond Wacks' very short introduction to Philosophy of Law is just 107 pages of text, plus a short preface, with some photographs of the philosophers he discusses, along with a few other pictures.  The pages are small, yet so is the font, allowing more words on the page, but possibly generating eye-strain in those readers whose eyesight is not perfect.  There are no footnotes, but the block quotations from other authors are in even smaller font. 

The book has six chapters, which cover the main approaches to understanding the nature of the law.  The writing is aimed at a general reader and would be appropriate for undergraduates.  Wacks explains ideas clearly, especially in the early chapters when covering the central theories of law. 

The first chapter sets out the main theories of natural law.  Wacks quickly summarizes the central ideas of the Stoics, Aquinas, and Grotius, and then moves on to Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau.  He emphasizes the importance of the Nuremberg war trials where judges employed, implicitly at least, principles of natural law.  Finally, he devotes a little more time to twentieth century philosophers Lon Fuller and John Finnis. 

The second chapter explains legal positivism.  Here Wacks devotes more space to discussing each philosopher, going through Bentham, Austin, Hart, Kelsen, and Raz.  It is notable that the third chapter is devoted to just one philosopher, Ronald Dworkin: if one judges the importance of the philosophers by the space they are allotted, this makes Dworkin the most important philosopher of law.  Some philosophers will disagree with such a prioritization, although it is true that his view of law as interpretation is both innovative and influential. 

These first three chapters are useful in outlining the three major approaches to philosophy of law should be useful to students in a philosophy of law course who are having difficulty seeing the wood for the trees.  Inevitably, some of the explanations are very brief and so miss out most of the subtleties of the discussion.  Furthermore, some readers may still find the main ideas hard to understand since philosophy of law is a challenging area that can mystify people even after devoting considerable time to working out what is at issue.  Using a book such as this one in combination with a longer exposition or the original papers or books by the philosophers in question will probably be the best strategy for those struggling to grasp these central debates.

The second half of the book is more of a patchwork of ideas.  The fourth chapter examines the concepts of rights and justice, setting out the contrast between Utilitarian approaches and Kantian theories of justice.  He also includes a brief mention of Posner's economic analysis of law, but he clearly has little sympathy for it, and rightly so.  Wacks devotes more space to explaining Rawl's theory of distributive justice, but still it is an extremely difficult task to do this adequately in just a few pages.  The whole topic of rights is very broad, so there are many ways Wacks could have approached the topic.  He chose to address some broad theoretical and conceptual issues, and he says little about more obvious controversies concerning particular rights. 

The fifth chapter departs from the standard philosophical approach to law and moves to the sociological theories of Durkheim, Weber, and Marx, and then ends with very brief expositions of Habermas and Foucault.  The final chapter goes into critical approaches: postmodern legal theory, Lacan, Derrida, feminist legal theory, and critical race theory.  In attempting to sketch out in to chapters such vast terrains leaves the impression that Wacks is reproducing notes on these figures and theories rather than providing anything like a real explanation of the issues.  This impression is heightened by the disjointed nature of the writing, where the different ideas are set out with little connection, and the book even ends without any summary or conclusion.  I would be hesitant in recommending these last two chapters to readers except as a source of references to other readings. 

The photographs in the book are well chosen, but the captions underneath them are often rather odd.  This is especially true for one of two men wearing jackets with "I DO" written on the backs, apparently as an example of a gay couple who want to marry.  The caption reads, "Homosexuality, same-sex 'marriages', and marital infidelity offend the principles of natural law."  While it is true that natural law has been associated with conservative and especially Roman Catholic theorists, there is no a priori reason why a natural law theorist would have to be associated with sexual conservatism: the basic claim is that the law is necessarily tied to ethical truth, and this leaves open the possibility that sexual progressives could also believe in a natural law theory.   

Wacks' Philosophy of Law attempts the impossible and so its faults are not surprising.  Yet there are few if any competing books that aim to set out the central issues in this area with such brevity: one might look to the entries in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or other philosophy encyclopedias, and gather information there, but the entries will generally be written by different people and so will lack the unity of a single text.  Those who read Wacks' book will at least have a passing knowledge of this important area of philosophy, which will enable them to go on to more detailed and sustained investigation of philosophy of law.

© 2007 Christian Perring. All rights reserved.

Christian Perring, Ph.D., is Academic Chair of the Arts & Humanities Division and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island. He is also editor of Metapsychology Online Reviews.  His main research is on philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Philosophical