Abstract
The introductory chapter of Communities and the(ir) Law, on “Law as the DNA of Communities” (pp. 7–24), outlines the concept of “community” and how it relates to law and then presents a brief overview of the subsequent chapters. These sixteen chapters are divided into three parts: a theoretical one, a comparative one, and a part on “old and new community forms.” The final pages contain the authors’ bios, showing that they derive from various academic fields (notably, law, sociology, and political science).
This book can be understood and read in three different manners: First, as also stated in the Introduction, it is part of a wider project that understands law as part of a society's culture (p. 7). This statement about the relationship between law and society challenges the views of scholars who have suggested that law is typically shaped by elites and thus is often detached from a country's society and culture (notably the research of Alan Watson, 1933–2018). Thus, “law as culture,” as the overall project was called, had the ambitious aim to explore the meaning and role of law in today's society from a non‐legal perspective, including insights from literature, film, architecture, and visual arts.
The underlying center, the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities on “Law as Culture,” was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research from 2010 to 2022 as part of a general funding initiative to promote international and interdisciplinary research in the humanities (the “Käte Hamburger Kollegs”). The book discussed here is published as Volume 31 of the Center's series and is thus a continuation of previous discussions on, for example, Max Weber's sociology of law (volumes 7 and 17), “Legal Cultures in Transition” (volume 10), “Law and the Arts” (volume 18) and “Corona Normativities” (volumes 23 and 27).
A second reading of the book focuses on the individual chapters. They cover a wide range of topics under the general headings of the respective parts. The five theoretical chapters (pp. 27–129) are most closely connected to the general aim of the book, namely the understanding of the relationship between law and community. They draw on the notion of “community” as developed by Tönnies (chapters by Bond, pp. 27–50; and Noguchi, pp. 51–64) but also, for example, Durkheim (Cotterrell, pp. 65–84) and Arendt (Barshack, pp. 85–102).
The subsequent chapters are, by contrast, relatively dispersed and cover many geographical and thematic units, some dealing with the current, others with historical cases and some also with future developments. It is thus difficult to see what connects, for example, a case study of the Peranakan Chinese in Indonesia (pp. 133–66), the EU as a community of law (pp. 215–26), and topics on climate change (pp. 293–308), digital communities (pp. 309–22), and the COVID pandemic (pp. 323–40). This (modest) criticism does not mean that these and other chapters are not interesting. Yet one wonders whether the editors could have steered the authors closer to a common theme, or whether they could have added a general conclusion that would have drawn together the various examples and ideas of the previous chapters. It is also noteworthy that all but two chapters are authored singly by scholars from a particular discipline, and thus disciplinary preconceptions are clearly visible in the individual chapters.
A third possible reading of the book would mainly be interested in the principal idea that the editors had in publishing this book. The “the(ir)” in the title already indicates that the relationship between communities and “the” or “their” law is not straightforward. Indeed, the introductory chapter by Gephart and Witte is helpful in discussing the complex interactions between these two terms. For example, this chapter mentions the more precise term “legal communities” (p. 9) but then also notes that the notion of “legal pluralism” means that many factual communities could fall under this term if we apply a wide notion of law. Indeed a few pages later, the chapter suggests that there can be communities constituted through their “anti-legal orientation,” for example, referring to protesters against Corona measures. This also connects to a further point that this introductory chapter addresses, namely whether we should think about communities as something usually good for society as well as the implications any such normative assessment would have for legal rules. This point may finally also be connected to the distinction between different scales of communities, for example, the debate about emerging universalistic communities (p. 12) and the role of neighborhood communities in today's world (p. 17). Thus, one can agree with the editors that the topic of “law and community” is indeed an interesting framework under which one can explore many key topics of law and society today.
To conclude, this is an interesting book that should appeal to scholars in many academic fields. The main criticism made in this review is that the good general idea becomes more and more dispersed in the substantive chapters of the second and third part of the book. Searching for the title of the book on the web, one finds that it is based on a 2021 conference that, due to the COVID pandemic, only took place via Zoom. Possibly, this may illustrate that building a community of authors and exchanging ideas is more challenging if a conference cannot take place in person due to legal restrictions (and, in this respect, it may even be a case study that also illustrates the topic of the book).