4-minute read
Dermot Feenan
LLB MA LLM Barrister-at-Law (non-practising) FRSA
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I am saddened to learn that Alan Hunt, Professor Emeritus, Department of Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University, Canada, passed away on 8 December, aged 79. My condolences to all who mourn his passing.
Alan Hunt made a major contribution to the development of sociology of law, legal theory, and early law and society scholarship, and played a formative role in critical legal studies, particularly in Britain, including as founding chair of the Critical Legal Conference.
His contribution to scholarship, including through an extensive range of publication and editorial service was immense. The Wikipedia entry about him does not do justice to this contribution, omitting, for example, much of his output.
Hunt’s first monograph The Sociological Movement in Law (based on his PhD) was published in 1978. The British Journal of Law and Society (as it then was) had launched just several years before, in 1974.
In addition to the monographs, he edited and co-edited many collections, including Class & Class Structure (1977), Marx and Engels on Law (with Maureen Cain) (1977) and (with Peter Fitzpatrick) a special issue on Critical Legal Studies for the Journal of Law and Society in 1987.
His interest in Marxism, which started in his teens – he was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain – continued throughout his career, though he moved away from that earlier adherence to a more critical engagement. He remained a significant scholar on law and Marxism.
In addition to his collection with Cain, this work also included the edited Marxism and Democracy (1980), ‘The Ideology of Law’ (Law & Soc’y Rev., 1985, vol. 19, no. 1), and the chapter on Marxist theory of law for Patterson’s A Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory.
He also published away from the usual suspects in current legal scholarship, writing, for instance, in New Left Review (‘A Socialist Interest in Law’, 1992, Issue 192) and Marxism Today (e.g. ‘Law, State and Class Struggle’, 1976, June).
This politically engaged approach of communicating to an audience beyond academia stands in contrast to the approach of many academics today who slavishly pursue status and metrics with for-profit multinationals and oligarchic editors of inaccessible journals.
Hunt’s consistent commitment to collaborative work is also politically noteworthy, especially in the current era of neoliberal valorising of individual, atomistic achievement. He, by contrast, co-authored and co-edited with scores of established and new scholars.
In addition to those co-editors already cited here, others included Bob Fryer, Doreen McBarnet and Bert Moorhouse (Law, State and Society, 1981). His co-authoring was extensive. It included work with Stuart Hall, Piers Beirne, Amy Bartholomew, Heidi Rimke, and Bruce Curtis.
Those collaborations existed alongside a consistent and significant output as sole author, including Explorations in Law and Society: Towards a Constitutive Theory of Law (Routledge, 1993) in which he argued against the illusion of seeing law as a self-sufficient discipline.
From the early 1990s, Hunt engaged increasingly with the work of Michel Foucault; in ‘Foucault’s Expulsion of Law: Towards a Retrieval’ (Law & Social Inquiry, 1992, vol. 17, no. 1) and (with Gary Wickham) in Foucault and Law: Towards a New Sociology of Law as Governance (1994).
His Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (1996), analysing the discursive significance of law and its enforcement in respect of the regulation of clothes, food etc., provided an opportunity to engage further with Foucault’s concept of governmentality.
He developed this work in Governing Morals: A Social History of Moral Regulation (1999). Unsurprisingly, given Foucault’s work on sexuality, Hunt would go on to write on that, too; e.g. ‘Regulating Heterosocial Space: Sexual Politics in the Early Twentieth Century’ (J. His. Soc., 2002, vol. 15, no. 1).
His recent work shifted to analysing emotions; again, perhaps unsurprising given connections between sexuality and affect. He co-edited Emotions Matters: A Relational Approach to Emotions (2012) – an early collection on the sociology of emotions, now a growing field of study.
Shortly before his death, Hunt was working on the topic of anxiety – which he had initially explored in ‘Anxiety and Social Explanation: Some Anxieties about Anxiety’ (J. Soc. His., 1992, vol. 32, no. 3).
His account of the development in his work (up until 2004) is set out, alongside some revealing context of the early days of socio-legal studies in Britain, in ‘Getting Marx and Foucault into Bed Together!’, Journal of Law and Society (JLS) 2004, vol. 31, no. 4.
While I never had the opportunity to meet him personally, I first encountered his work while studying sociology of law—then, rightly, a compulsory topic, even if not well taught—on the LLB degree at Queen’s, Belfast, in the early 1980s.
By then, he was already publishing regularly, including in JLS – and soon became a member of its advisory board. Around that time, he became head of the law department at what was then Middlesex Polytechnic, having moved there from Manchester Polytechnic in 1975.
It was a measure of the calibre of his interdisciplinarity that he was offered a tenured professorship held jointly in the Law Department and the Sociology Anthropology Department at Carleton University in 1989 following a visiting professorship there.
His scholarship continued to inform my subsequent work as an academic, including in the introduction to the edited collection Exploring the Socio of Socio-legal Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
When I saw that he reviewed the book for JLS, I was apprehensive given the quality of his work and critique. He had referred to the ‘bankruptcy’ of Donald Black’s theory of the ‘behaviour of law’; ‘methodologically and theoretically deficient’ (JLS, 1983, vol. 10, no. 1).
His review of my collection was, however, fair and generous. It helped me in further research and prompted renewed interest in his own work, especially on ideology (see, e.g. ‘The Ideology of Law’, above).
Upon learning of his death, I rifled through some of my files, curious about what work of his I’d kept. Numerous articles were saved in folders across a range of projects including the ‘socio’ of socio-legal studies, epistemology, and law and emotions.
Paul Skidmore wrote in a review of Governance of the Consuming Passions that Hunt’s approach to analysing the discursive significance of law and its enforcement regarding the regulation of clothes, food etc. can be transferred to analysis of other projects of governance.
Hunt’s work was extensive and eclectic – with work on apparently disparate subjects often characterised by incisive critique. His criticism of Brenda Barrett’s conservatism and vocationalism in legal education is particularly sharp (The Law Teacher, 1987, vol. 21, no. 1).
This note is a brief and, necessarily given the format, a selective tribute to Alan Hunt’s work. Perhaps others might add reference to his other achievements. I’m far from the best person to comment on his work: many others knew him and his work much, much better.
Justin Paulson and Bruce Curtis, two of Alan Hunt’s colleagues at Carleton, have been researching and analysing Hunt’s intellectual legacy. I look forward, as I’m sure many others will do too, to reading their work in due course.
I hope, also, that Alan Hunt’s contribution might be honoured through, at least, a collection of papers that attends to, and reflects on, themes in historical sociology and legal theory that he addressed in his scholarship – still hugely important.
Perhaps consideration might also be given to the creation of a fund in his name to help support further research on the issues that he addressed. Such research remains important, not least because of resurgent right-wing attacks on the academy and elsewhere.
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© Dermot Feenan 2021