LAUSR

widely, highlighting experience (frequently painful) in jurisdictions as diverse as Poland, Armenia and Italy. The arguments are detailed, often technical and all well footnoted. The contradictions and complexities of life in secularist, pluralist and religious societies are not ignored. The realm of law often seems to be the last place to look for love and yet, as Robert Crotty says, law so often has a real role in ‘protecting the public order of a cultural group or of a multicultural society; its purpose, in other words, is to maintain the cultural umbrella’ (p 264). Love, with its utter commitment to the ‘other’, can surely only enrich that process. Who might have thought, then, that only one European country, the Russian Federation, even mentions ‘love’ in its laws, tucked into its Family Code in an aspiration to ‘build family relations on feelings of mutual love and respect’ (p 301)? Martin Luther King Jr was surely right when, in one of his landmark speeches, he said: ‘Power at its best is love, implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love, correcting everything that stands against love.’ Lawyers have much to learn about power and love and what it means to be genuinely other-regarding. These fine collections, as Jonathan Burnside neatly put it, ‘refract the light of agape through the prism of scholarship, enriching with colour an understanding of law that is often all too grey’ (Agape, Justice, and Law, p i).