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Showing papers by "Emilios Christodoulidis published in 2002"



Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In contrast to the impatient, straccato idiom of the rest of the book, this is a careful account of the legal profession in process and the ideological workings behind bringing the law to the people as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: ZENON BAŃKOWSKI was my doctoral supervisor. Having just come from Athens, from an LLB where the course in legal theory had been steeped in Geny, Jellinek and Karl Engisch, the first thing I decided I should do when I arrived in Edinburgh was to sit down and read some of Zenon’s texts. I read two: an early article titled ‘Anarchy Rules OK’ and the book he wrote with Geoff Mungham, Images of Law (1976). Hard to pin it down as Wissenschaft, I thought, but how refreshing this Anglo-American tradition of Jurisprudence! The elation did not last long; the first term of the Masters programme, spent reading Raz’s Authority of Law, did much to drive it out of us. And yet Images survived that onslaught to remain to this day one of my favourite books. Images is not a book in the tradition of critical legal theory but should be read, sometimes in spite of itself, as an anarchist manifesto. I insert the ‘in spite’ because there is a crucial ambivalence at the heart of the book, to which I will return. But why is this not a book in critical legal theory? Because if critical legal theory is understood as popularized by the CLS movement, that is primarily as a methodology that exploits and builds on the ambivalences that haunt legal practice, then the book’s central insight is that reform and revolution are irreconcilable alternatives and that reform, to repeat the revolutionary’s standard indictment, makes the oppressive practice less heinous and thus more difficult to abolish. The dilemma is patently visible in Bańkowski and Mungham’s critique of legal aid and welfare law in the uncharacteristically long, empirical analysis of chapters 3 and 4. In contrast to the impatient, straccato idiom of the rest of the book, this is a careful account of the ‘legal profession in process’ and the ideological workings behind ‘bringing the law to the people’. This is a revolutionary’s critique of reformism, of the ideological function that systems of signification perform in sustaining oppression. ‘When we came’, Roberto Unger famously announced at the end of his CLS manifesto, ‘they [the orthodoxy] were like a priesthood that had lost their faith but kept their jobs. They stood in tedious embarrassment before cold altars. But we turned away from those altars and found the mind’s opportunity in the heart’s revenge’ (Unger, 1983: 119). Unger finds the legal ‘mind’s