A General Right to Conscientious Exemption: Beyond Religious Privilege. By John Adenitire. [Cambridge University Press, 2020. xiv + 320 pp. Hardback £85.00. ISBN 978-1-10-847845-8.]

Abstract

excellently presented by Beever in Part II, can free us from the old debates in the grand jurisprudential battle discussed in Part III. This is so particularly because throughout Part III – consisting more than half of the book’s content – Beever is trying to defend one camp in the battle against the other, despite his avowal that this battle is a great waste of time. To borrow Beever’s Freudian terminology (p. 264), it almost seems that he is consciously trying to move on from the battle while unconsciously joining the battle himself. Beever’s sustained attacks on legal positivism are often vigorous and skilful. However, in deploying those attacks he draws only sparingly on Searle and adopts a methodology that is virtually indistinguishable from how jurisprudence has traditionally been practised, making good use of doctrinal legal materials (showcasing Beever’s expertise in tort law), but ultimately letting the philosopher’s own intuition do the decisive work. Beever hence demonstrates by his own practice that one can still make new contributions to the persistent jurisprudential debates, which Searle’s social philosophy has not enabled us to either resolve or dissolve.