REVIEW ARTICLE: Jens MEIERHENRICH, "The Force of Law" (English Historical Review CXXXIV (2019), nr. 569 (Aug))

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First paragraph:

If Frederick Schauer, the distinguished philosopher of law, is correct, ‘a new conventional wisdom’ has waylaid the study of law: the assumption ‘that force is not the characteristic or identifying feature of law’.1 Relegating the coercive aspect of law to the sidelines of theoretical interest, according to Schauer, is perverse. Relegating the coercive aspect of law to the sidelines of historical interest would be equally problematic. As luck has it, in the last decade or so, historians from different subfields—intellectual history, international history, legal history, political history—have avoided this perversity by burrowing into the crevices of law to locate violence in all its forms. Six new and innovative works have been selected here for closer scrutiny.

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