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134 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 Zealand, would still seem to leave room for other expressions of individual responsibility B showing how tort liability does express them results in a powerful philosophical justification. The second third of the book (chs 5B7) shows how criminal law reflects an attempt to allocate risk and liability on fair terms of interaction. Ripstein provides a nice explication of criminal activity: it >seeks to substitute private rationality for public standards of reasonableness.= The roughly Kantian point of punishment is to vindicate the demand that individuals regulate their conduct in the light of a conception of social life among equals, not private advantage, by both rendering the criminal=s activity irrational (in private terms) and expressing the importance of the public standards. Ripstein goes on to argue for an objective theory of criminal excuses, holding liable defendants with sincere but unreasonable mistaken beliefs, and to defend punishing unsuccessful attempts less than successful ones. While this section of the book is less persuasive, perhaps because individual desert seems to play a greater role in criminal doctrine than the notions of fair allocation of risk highlighted by Ripstein (as opposed to the case in tort), it is nonetheless filled with illuminating examples and asides. The book=s final two chapters contrast Ripstein=s theory of distributive justice with Evgeny Pashukanis=s Marxist alternative, which abolishes individual responsibility for the sake of the utopian goal of perfect community ; and with Ronald Dworkin=s choice-centred view, which turns a general, political question of responsibility for life=s misfortunes into particular moral questions of blame, by over-emphasizing individual choice. The discussion is highly interesting if compressed, fostering hope that Ripstein will pursue these matters further in the future. Equality, Responsibility, and the Law is a powerful and rewarding book, deserving a wide readership, by one of Canada=s most interesting social philosophers. (CHRIS KUTZ) Allan C. Hutchinson. It=s All in the Game: A Nonfoundationalist Account of Law and Adjudication Duke University Press. xiv, 376. us $54.95 Allan Hutchinson=s project is to give an account of law, and of adjudication in particular, which avoids the twin demons of twentieth-century thought: foundationalism, the claim that >it is possible to define the range of available moves and maneuvers with a sufficiently reliable degree of determinacy and detail, such that there are correct and incorrect ways of playing the legal game,= and anti-foundationalism, the >claim that law is nothing more than the residual traces of the unbounded free play of the judicial mind.= The account is, in Hutchinson=s phrase, nonfoundationalist: while it does not seek to explain law as the working out of some unassailable normative HUMANITIES 135 value, it hopes to avoid the nihilist view that the law is meaningless and that adjudication is random. In the book=s governing metaphor, the law is a game, but it is neither a game in which the rules are clear and fixed nor a game in which anything goes; it is rather a game played according to rules which are themselves infinitely contestable and revisable, a political game in which >anything might go.= Descriptively, Hutchinson=s nonfoundationalist account of law has much to recommend it. His description of legal argumentation as a process in which existing rules and standards can be simultaneously constraining and open to new interpretations should resonate with many lawyers and legal academics, while his careful (if sometimes repetitive) examination of the views of many leading legal scholars and the development of several important legal doctrines persuasively demonstrates the difficulty of providing a noncontroversial foundation. But the normative impact of Hutchinson =s project is far less clear, whether we consider the practice of adjudication as traditionally understood or the broader political terrain to which Hutchinson would like to move it. Taking the latter first, Hutchinson =s political commitments might generally be described as leftist or progressive, but he is too thoroughly convinced by his own argument to try to persuade the reader that there is any particular connection between those commitments and nonfoundationalism itself. The most he can bring himself to say is that nonfoundationalism is consistent with a politically progressive critique, in that >[i]t...

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