The place of law /

The Place of Law is the latest entry in the Amherst Series in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought. Like its predecessors, this volume is rich and provocative. At the highest level of abstraction, all of the essays engage the relationship between the rule of law and the sense of "place" as a legal concept comprised of both horizontal and vertical dimensions. They remind us that the place of law itself "is never a given" but is instead always negotiated and contingent. All of the essays are impressive, but especially interesting is an essay by Dimock that explores the intersection of law and place and literary culture in the life of poet Osip Mandelstam. Three of the chapters, unsurprisingly, consider law and place in the digital world. Of these, the chapter by Richard Ford is quite good, especially insofar as Ford argues, "In cyberspace, as elsewhere, the definition of space is part of a normative struggle, not a fact that can resolve it." ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. J. E. Finn Wesleyan University