In The New Rambler: Robert Spoo on Maks Del Mar’s New Book, Artefacts of Legal Inquiry @hartpublishing @ArsScripta

Robert Spoo’s review of Maksymilian Del Mar’s new book, Artefacts of Legal Inquiry: The Value of Imagination in Adjudication (Hart, 2020), appears here in The New Rambler.

Professor Spoo writes in part:

Maks Del Mar’s book brings us back, by a long, learned route, to the human intuitions of adjudication, reminding us that judging is experimental and flawed, a blending of the conscious and the unconscious, a private act expressed in public, shared language, with effects that can be measured only over time in controversies not yet begun or envisioned. Even if law’s artefacts are doomed to fall victim to what Kenneth Burke called the bureaucratization of the imaginative—when the art of terms becomes domesticated as terms of art—we can still trace the work of imagination in the products of judges and advocates. The circus animals perform, after all, before they desert. Del Mar gives us quizzing glasses for viewing those stylized performances and for following their momentous, prosaic consequences, over time, in the common law.

Read a sample chapter here.