Dangerous Supplements

Confronts jurisprudence with subversive knowledge from which it has been shielded so as to sustain its authority and identity. The outcome, as Smart argues in her chapter on feminism, has to be either a radical transformation of juridprudence or, failing that, its abandonment. This challenge is at its most dramatic in those chapters on feminism, semiotics and postmodernism - areas which jurisprudence has largely failed to assimilate. Other areas explored in this collection appear more comfortably accommodated in jurisprudence - such as Marxism, linguistic philosophy and the liberalism of the New Right. But the challenge here lies in a more extensive engagement with these areas than is allowed in a jurisprudence shorn of their dangerous dimensions. The entry of this excluded knowledge opens the way for a jurisprudence that is necessarily more responsive, varied and deeply contested. The contributors are Anthony Carty, Peter Fitzpatrick, Peter Goodrich and Yifat Hachamovitch, Alan Hunt, Carol Smart, David Sugarman and Alan Thomson.