Making the perspective of insiders critical to a theory of law, including particularly those who accept and enforce legal standards, has been the hallmark of corrections to John Austin’s theory at least since Hart’s The Concept of Law. Burge-Hendrix’s book continues this tradition and brings its insights to bear on the particular dispute between inclusive and exclusive positivists. That being said, the project has always seemed to me to be incomplete. If the participant’s perspective is indeed the critical one, then the recognition that participants make normative claims about the concept of law itself (not just about their legal standards) surely deserves its own proper place in a legal theory. Those normative claims about law range, at the very least, from claims that coercion is (morally) justified to claims of (moral) authority. If these claims turn out to be false in cases of laws that are extremely unjust, then either they are not “laws” at all according to the participants’ own views(in which case the natural law theorists are correct.) Or, participants will have to give up their normative claims about law and recognize that all that counts is pedigree and the power to coerce. In that case, we will be back to Austin’s coercive account of law, and much of the dispute between exclusive and inclusive positivists will be irrelevant.

This volume contains eleven previously published essays on criminal law together with a new “Reply to Critics” by the Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford, John Gardner. The principal themes of the essays, covering offences, defences, and punishment, are summarized in this review, which also highlights areas of controversy and various lines of criticism.