1. Forthcoming titles encompass: critical analyses of family, tort, land, trusts and contract law, as well as work on law in the information society, a jurisprudence of race, class and gender, and a potentially intriguing Critical Lawyer's Handbook.

2. I say this in full recognition that some excellent progressive jurisprudential scholarship has emerged from Britain in the last decade or so, but also with the awareness that this has remained peripheral because of the domination of neo-positivist jurisprudence.

3. I am not suggesting here that legal historical analysis is not valuable, for certainly the past can tell us much about where we currently are and how we might proceed. Rather, my point is one of emphasis, and I think that in this book insufficient analysis is paid to the links between the past, present and future.

4. See for example Galloway, Donald, “Critical Mistakes” in Devlin, Richard, ed., Canadian Perspectives on Legal Theory (Toronto: Emond Montgomery, 1991) at 255Google Scholar, and my reply “Doubting Donald” (forthcoming).

5. One counter argument to my suggestion here is, given that Fitzpatrick is not a member of those communities who suffer the negative impact of racist structures, it is neither possible nor desirable for him to develop positive anti-racist programmes. Given the cultural construction of the “self-Fitzpatrick,” for him to articulate the perspective of the other would be to assimilate or appropriate that “otherness.” This doubt as to “imperial scholarship” [Delgado, Richard, “The Imperial Scholar: Reflections on a Review of Civil Rights Literature” (1984) 132 U.Pa.L.R. at 561CrossRefGoogle Scholar] is alwaysareal concern, but there are possibilities. For example, one could float an idea, fully acknowledging even highlighting—one's own status, that is developed in consultation with “the others,” and is introduced into the discursive economy contingently and is admitted to be “up for grabs.” Or, one could acknowledge or refer to proposals developed by “others” as to possible anti-racist strategies.

6. Derrida, Jacques, “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority” (1990) Cardozo L.R. 921 at 1025Google Scholar.

7. To be clear, I am not suggesting that the left should ignore the right, for undoubtedly that would be foolhardy given the current politico-historical context of both Britain and North America. Rather, my point is one of contextualism: in the British jurisprudential environment, liberalism and neo-positivism are the dominant discourses.

8. One of the more problematic elements of several of the essays in the book is that although they espouse “postmodernism,” very little is provided in terms of what the authors mean by this concept. Given that this is a contested concept, such a gap in the work leaves the reader unsure as to some of the key elements of the authors' positions. Clearly, this is not the occasion to attempt to map out the different themes, components and debates within postmodernism, but I want to be clear that mine is not a critique of postmodernism per se, rather it is a concern with some variants of it. It seems to me that one of the great achievements of postmodern analysis is that by highlighting the incommensurability of difference it helps us to recognize the inevitability of radical (in the Greek sense of “going to the root of”) heterogeneity. In so doing in the context of law, politics and jurisprudence, it helps to decentre the perspective and normativity of whitist, Eurocentric male thought thereby creating space for the articulation of perspectives of those who, traditionally, have been the feared “other”: women, people of colour, First Nations people, the dispossessed. For elaborations of further discussions of these points in relation to politics and law, respectively, see Young, Iris Marion, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Minow, Martha, Making All the Difference (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

9. It is obvious that I am still operating on the assumption that there is a role for “human agency” and some might object that this is premised on a humanistic/modernist conception of the self that is incompatible with postmodern conceptions of the fundamentally contingent self. It seems to me, however, that to recognize antiessentialism and the relational self does not lead to an eradication or annihilation of the self, but rather that it is simply reconstituted to what SeylaBenhabib (following Adomo) calls a “situated self” [“Critical Theory and Postmodernism: On the Interplay of Ethics, Aesthetics and Utopia in Critical Theory” (1990) 11 Cardozo L.R. 1435 at 1445Google Scholar]. Because this situated self is located in the interaction of the multitude of relations, there are endless opportunities for such a self to participate… though there is no guarantee that its actions will be uncontroversial or effective. Those questions will depend upon a host of other variables. Indeed, I might go further to suggest that because the situated self is in relation with other selves—i.e., that it is in part constituted by and itself constitutes such other selves—that one has responsibilities to them. In other words, because of its interdependence with others the situated self has a responsibility to engage.

10. (1984) 97 Harvard L. R. at 1277Google Scholar.

11. This is not to be interpreted as suggesting that I think that “rights discourse” is the appropriate way to go. Rights discourse itself can be deconstructed to highlight its ethnocentric bias, as Turpel, Mary Ellen has demonstrated in her “Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian Charter: Interpretive Monopolies, Cultural Differences” in Devlin, Richard, ed., Canadian Perspectives on Legal Theory (Toronto: Emond Montgomery, 1991) at 503Google Scholar. My point is that at least Hunt is making some suggestions as to how we might, in the words of Spike Lee, “do the right thing.”

12. See more generally, Unger, Roberto Mangabeira, Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987)Google Scholar. For a suggestion of the utility of deviationism to feminism, see my “On the Road to Radical Reform” (1989) 29 Osgoode Hall L. J. at 641Google Scholar.

13. See, for example, Hirsch, Marilyn and Keller, Evelyn Fox, eds., Conflicts in Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar.

14. For a much more elaborate version see Schlag, Pierre “Le Hors de Texte C'est Moi” (1990) 11 Cardozo L.R. at 1631Google Scholar.

15. London: Routledge, 1989.

16. For examples of several efforts within literary criticism which pursue such an approach (though not always successfully) see Arac, Jonathan, ed., Postmodernism and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Jameson, Frederic, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; and Lentricchia, Frank, Criticism and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)Google Scholar.