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Mac Amhlaigh on Panu on Power and Law

By Lawrence Solum

Cormac S. Mac Amhlaigh (University of Edinburgh - School of Law) has posted Book Review: Panu Minkkinen Sovereignty, Knowledge, Law on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

This Working Paper is a review of Panu Minkkinen's 'Sovereignty, Knowledge, Law' (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009).

And from the introduction:

The question of the relationship between power and law is one of the enduring controversies of modern liberal political and legal theory. The struggle for supremacy between law and power in modern society can be framed in a variety of ways, including democracy versus rule of law, security versus liberty, and might versus right. This conflict also runs to the core of the concept of sovereignty where it is expressed in the more abstract register of sovereign power versus the sovereignty of the norm. More specifically, the tension in the register of sovereignty represents rival attempts to give content to the notion of ultimate authority, the hallmark of the concept since Bodin and Hobbes. In his recent book, Sovereignty, Knowledge, Law, Panu Mikkenen interrogates the concept of sovereignty from both sides of the tension?norm and power?as well as, more abstractly, an epistemology of sovereignty.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on September 30, 2010 (boomark / email).