For today’s post, to be clear, my role is amplifier first, and commentator second.
In case you wondered what academics do for fun, well, sometimes we weird out in corners of academia. This winter's winner from where I'm sitting is the 200-page published review of a 145-page book. No, that's not a typo; the review is longer than the book.
And the thing is, the writing of the review is just so, so, so quotably bad that my colleagues have turned it into a game. You scroll through the review and drop in at random and read a sentence or two, and decide if it's quoteworthy. And the joy of the game is that everyone's a winner. (There's a variant with extra points if your quote contains the word "epistemic" which appears 150 times in the review. And wow, the footnotes too! The whole thing is delicious!)
Credit to @jameschalmers.bsky.social and @benstanley.eu for drawing both review and game to my attention.
So, I have to admit that I delighted in this game. First of all, a review, as a matter of courtesy, should not be more than about 2% of the length of the item reviewed. Okay, maybe 5%. It’s pretty simple math: 300 page book at 5%: you can write a 15 page review if you’re completely nerding out. But that’s your upper limit. After that, you’re just in it for the kicks. And more kicks. Perhaps this meme could be instructive:
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| http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/540658-beating-a-dead-horse |
It gave me all the feels – like watching a senior professor take the time to systematically destroy a graduate student in public during Q&A. (You know who I mean.) The world has no need for that; it’s neither instructive nor helpful nor even, at the end of the day, a boon to the human race. In fact, it’s kinda nasty. I’m glad that such behavior is generally condemned in the venues I’m involved in today; I wonder if the Comp-Law field might also have some things to observe about this piece, and suspect that it does.
And one of the reasons I don’t mind poking fun is that there’s hierarchy at play here as well; senior professor at the Sorbonne reviews book by scholars he characterizes as “unencumbered by reputation” (p.242). Well, refer to the meme above; you’ve already won that competition. Have some compassion.
But while compassion is in short supply, the game of quotability is over-amply supplied. In even a brief selection, Legrand demonstrates a series of writing quirks. I know that Comparative Law (and law in general for that matter) likes its literary flourishes. But these are, um, is “recklessly ornate” a fair assessment? You be the judge.
Start with over-the top image:
“even the kudzu-like proliferating orthodoxy that does not yet see retains the power of sight potentially allowing it to outsoar the darkness of not-seeing” (p.437)
Be proud of me, I did NOT ask Gemini to make me an image of Kudzu with eyes. Yikes.
We move on to over-the-top vocabulary:
“As rationality finds itself being relativized — the estimation of plurality must be a key factor in the comparatist’s allegiance to foreignness — comparison structurally invites conflict, no appeal to contrived and evanescent overarching commonalities being in a position to overcome the constitutive comparative dissensus” (p.428)
Relativized >>> evanescent >>> dissensus: the heat-o-meter just keeps rising as the sentence grows.
And, of course, there’s over-the-top sentence-building. Stop me when I get to a period?
“This review is not the proper locus to assess the merits or demerits of ‘tradition’ at any length although I am minded to specify that I consider Glenn’s move from ‘system’ to ‘tradition’ as largely cosmetic, a variation on the theme of David’s historically overarching model that remains deeply ingrained within orthodox comparative law’s ways generally and within the civil law’s manner in particular — which is why my preference easily goes to culture, a decisively more rewarding heuristic (tradition and possibly system, in the broadest sense of the term, being better apprehended as cultural subsets).” (p. 297)
Whew.
So, there’s a lot not to like. This review certainly wins some kind of academic Bulwer-Lytton prize, but for academia.
Why, oh why, do you think the editors of the journal chose to publish this? I suspect them of actually being kind of clever. Rarely do issues of comparative law make it into my headspace. After all, I’m a musicologist and a monastic historian, and I tend to dabble more in genre fiction than, er, comparative law. Yet as a non-expert outsider, I delighted in the inanities here, and was equally delighted by the community of scholars which came out to play with the materials.
There’s a sense of fun in being able to poke at such clearly contrived sentiments as those expressed here – and yes, to play a little bit of “I’ve read that, I have heard of this other thing, and oh, that could actually be interesting” with its footnotes. And, it’s low stakes – a chance to deal out an easy “my writing might be bad, but it’s certainly not THAT bad” card at the end of a long semester. Plus, we academics enjoy performative overwriting and disciplinary in-jokes, and this review provides a rare playground for exploring a bit of both elements.
So, you can chalk it up to "people being weird on the internet" or to modern-day publishing being a fool’s game. But now you know what at least some academics do for fun on their "time off."
Legrand, Pierre. "Comparative Law’s Shallows and Hollows: A Negative Critique on Ablepsy" [Review of Sabrina Ragone and Guido Smorto. Comparative Law: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2023. 145 pp. ISBN 978 0 19 289339 0]. The Journal of Comparative Law 22 (2025): 239-439. https://www.pierre-legrand.com/ewExternalFiles/JCL_20-2_01_Legrand_ComparativeLawsShallowsAndHallows.pdf
