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23 Soc. & Legal Stud. 278 (2014)
Jonathan Herring, Caring and the Law

handle is hein.journals/solestu23 and id is 276 raw text is: Social & Legal Studies 23(2) JONATHAN HERRING, Caring and the Law. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2013, pp. 352, ISBN 9781849461061, £30.00 (pbk). It has become a standingjoke between Jonathan Herring and me that we never agree on any- thing. So it came as no surprise to me, and will come as no surprise to him, that I entirely disagree with the fundamental point ofhis book Caring and the Law, namely that law should be centrally concerned with caring. From the safe premise that caring is crucial, Herring derives the shocking conclusion that caring should be the central principle ofthe law (p. 10). His theme is that to date law has been overly concerned with individual rights and interests - protecting the autonomy and independence of the ruggedly isolated abstract individual, and insufficiently concerned with recognising the importance of caring - pro- tecting the vulnerability and dependence of the connected relational subject. The law is preoccupied with business and money, he writes, and pays inadequate attention to the ,exhausted mother of the disabled child' (p. 1). At his most eloquent, Herring claims, 'Money and individual rights, while important, are a sandy foundation, but caring is the rock on which society stands' (p. 10). But granted that caring is of central importance, it does not follow that caring should be of central importance to the law. Such an approach makes sense only on one of two assumptions. The first is that we see law as an unalloyed good, to be ushered into every aspect and arena of social life. But the costs of extending law are legion: law may fuel conflict, weaken spontaneous bonds and limit freedom, to mention a few. And of course, as a first-rate scholar, Herring raises and rejects these objections. Herring laments that study of the nappy changing table does not figure in most law degrees (p. 1), to which I would add thank goodness. I wondered at times whether Herring was confusing the law with a knight in shining armour. The second assumption is that we define law so broadly that it is synonymous with society. The blurb on the back tells us, 'At the heart of the book is the claim that the law has failed to recognise the importance of caring in many areas and in doing so has led to the costs and burdens of care falling on those who provide it, primarily women'. I would entirely agree, if we substitute the word 'society' for 'law'. This comes across particu- larly clearly in Chapter 4 on State Support of Care, in which much of what Herring calls for is more money and assistance for carers. By conflating law with regulation, the state and even society, Herring risks losing the distinctiveness and specificity of the legal form, namely its foundation on conflicts of interests. Complaining that law is overly con- cerned with an 'individualised conception of rights and interests' (preface) is like lamenting that mathematics is overly preoccupied with numbers. Again of course Herring recognises this objection, regarding it as too narrow a con- ceptualisation of law (p. 2). It is trite that law can and does change its form. Indeed, this changing legal form has been a preoccupation in much of my own writing, principally in Divorcing Responsibly (Reece, 2003). But the point that I make there and elsewhere (e.g. Reece, 2009a) is the high price that is paid for changing the legal form. I argue, and show, that when law moves away from the construction of the autonomous rights bearer, law becomes more insidious and intrusive. This has been a theme in other recent scholar- ship, notably Ramsay (2012).

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