University of California Press, 2000. Reviewed by Lief Carter, Department of Political Science, The Colorado College. Desmond Manderson has here converted a dissertation completed in the 1990s at the McGill University Institute of Comparative Law into an ambitious book. Judging by his youthful photo on the dust jacket, he is an ambitious and successful scholar, for he already holds the post of Senior Lecturer and Director of the Julius Stone Institute for Jurisprudence at the University of Sidney. For a small audience, the book will no doubt succeed as fully as has Manderson's career.
People routinely applaud or condemn legal and political expressions.
Manderson does not follow that intriguing path. He divides the book into three corresponding parts with two or three section in each part. Each section begins with a page of musical manuscript. Manderson's purpose throughout the book is to undercut superficial coherence theories of justice. In doing so he raises the disturbing possibility that we should give up coherence standards for judging academic work as well.