Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmar's Courts Make Law and Order. By Nick Cheesman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 338 pp. $99.00 hardback.

• Date: 01 December 2016
• Published date: 01 December 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12242

2010. Perhaps the similarities and differences between these two

books are a testament to the remarkably esteemed status that Gins-

burg has attained in both the rarefied world of elite law, as well as

among the populus that is subject to it.

Reference

Carmon, Irin, & Shana Knizhnik (2015) Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader

Ginsburg. New York:Harper Collins.

***

Opposing the Rule of Law: How Myanmar’s Courts Make Law and

Order. By Nick Cheesman. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2015. 338 pp. $99.00 hardback.

Reviewed by Jothie Rajah, American Bar Foundation

Opposing the Rule of Law enters the complexities of law, politics, and

the social in Myanmar through a study of criminal courts. Drawing

on Nonet and Selznick (1978), Cheesman explains this point of

entry, “In a politically repressive setting, criminal cases are the rep-

resentative mode of legal authority. In the exercise of control over

the body of the accused we find the basic elements for the exercise

of control over the body politic” (p. 11).

Cheesman explores Myanmar’s criminal courts, not as con-

tained and simplistic arenas of adjudication, but as sites of

“interaction ... tell[ing] a story of policemen, prosecutors, lawyers,

complainants, and defendants ... a study of courts’ personae, of

courts’ representations of a larger political order, and of courts as

spaces for political language and practice” (p. 10). The meanings,

actors, and institutions relating to two opposing concepts – law and

order, and rule of law – are carefully traced. From British colonial

rule (Chapter 2), through the subsequent postcolonial regimes

(Chapters 3–8), the book details both repressive modes of legal

authority, and the remarkable human resistance and resilience that

inform the story of how Myanmar’s courts make law and order.

Opposing the Rule of Law makes a significant twofold contribution

to scholarship. This book “constitutes the first serious attempt for

half a century to situate Myanmar’s courts in its politics” (p. 12). In

the process, Cheesman documents much that has previously not

been documented, and often, much that has not even been known

beyond small circles, even within Myanmar. The value of rendering

1046 Book Reviews