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Living Law: Reconsidering Eugen Ehrlich. By Marc Hertogh, ed. Portland, OR: Hart Publishing, 2009. 280 pp. $44.00 paper.
Living Law: Reconsidering Eugen Ehrlich offers the considered opinions of several scholars on the significance of Ehrlich's work from his first publications more than a century ago until today. In reading this volume, one is struck by Ehrlich's prescience. His notion of ''living law'' is a precursor to a wide range of concepts that still shape law and society discourse. It has served as a constructive contrast to Pound's ''law in action'' for many decades now, but it also foreshadowed studies of legal pluralism and legal consciousness.
Editor Marc Hertogh introduces these essays with some reflections on Ehrlich's treatment of opinio necessitatis. Rather than criticize Ehrlich for using such a vague concept to test whether norms are ''legal,'' Hertogh welcomes the tentative and provisional quality of the test as an invitation to research. Ehrlich, after all, hoped to transform lawyers ''From 'Men of Files' to 'Men of Senses''' (the title of Hertogh's introduction) and urged them to observe carefully what scholars would now call the ''legal consciousness'' of social actors. Whether norms are ''legal'' is a matter...