In Dangerous Supplements expert legal scholars employing a variety of theoretical perspectives—feminism, poststructuralism, semiotics, and Marxism—challenge predominating views in jurisprudence. Prevailing notions of the nature of the law, they argue, have failed to recognize the law’s dependence on social constructs and the indeterminance of language. The contributors further claim that proponents of traditional notions have borrowed knowledge from other fields, only to reject that knowledge as ultimately subversive and dangerous in its ramifications.
Taking as a point of departure H. L. A. Hart’s The Concept of the Law, Peter Fitzgerald shows how Hart adopted Wittgenstein’s linguistic theory to overthrow J. L. Austin’s “simple” conception of rules and habits in law, only to jettison this theory in order to locate the essence of law in its evolution from a “primal scene.” Other chapters examine the way in which the setting of English law above social relations has masked an imperial mission; how the philosophies of Hayek and Marx, as well as the discourses of liberalism, feminism, semiotics, and poststructuralism, have been assiduously marginalized and rendered inessential to jurisprudence.

Contributors vi
The Abstracts and Brief Chronicles of the Time: Supplementing Jurisprudence / Peter Fitzpatrick 1
"A Hatred of Disorder": Legal Science, Liberalism and Imperialism / David Sugarman 34
Taking the Right Seriously: The Case of F.A. Hayek / Alan Thomson 68
Marxism, Law, Legal Theory and Jurisprudence / Alan Hunt 102
Feminist Jurisprudence / Carol Smart 133
Time out of Mind: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Common Law / Peter Goodrich and Yifat Hachamovitch 159
English Constitutional Law from a Postmodernist Perspective / Anthony Carty 182
Index 207