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CHOICE Review

A philosophy professor's book about how antithetical metaphysical and epistemological theories have shaped the major approaches of postwar American jurisprudence. Chapters on natural law, positivism, Dworkin's legal idealism, law and economics, and interpretivism contrast with others on Marxism, critical legal studies, and MacKinnon and Scales's "feminism unmodified." Belliotti's treatment of these "mainstream" and "critical" accounts of legal theories and institutions mirrors the philosophical debate between objectivism and relativism (especially in the form of foundationalism versus postmodernism), the jurisprudential debate between formalism and realism, and the political debate between liberals and leftists. Belliotti regards these often dogmatic debates as fruitless and offers, rather tentatively and abstractly, his "critical pragmatism," which preserves American judicial powers from leftist demolition but "takes seriously" the leftists' philosophical and political visions. Belliotti's balanced, evenhanded expository critiques of principal thinkers are generally accessible to the nonspecialist, educated reader, although some may be jarred by the "politically correct" pronouns in the author's numerous examples. Junior-senior undergraduates and graduate students. B. Pencek; University of Nevada, Las Vegas