This book discusses how Plato one the fiercest legal critics in ancient Greece became - in
the longue durée - its most influential legislator. Making use of a vast scholarly literature
and offering original readings of a number of dialogues it argues that the need for legal
critique and the desire for legal permanence set the long arc of Plato's corpus-from the
Apology to the Laws. Modern philosophers and legal historians have tended to overlook the fact
that Plato was the most prolific legislator in ancient Greece. In the pages of his Republic and
Laws he drafted more than 700 statutes. This is more legal material than can be credited to
the archetypal Greek legislators-Lycurgus Draco and Solon. The status of Plato's laws is
unique since he composed them for purely hypothetical cities. And remarkably he introduced
this new genre by writing hard-hitting critiques of the Greek ideal of the sovereignty of law.
Writing in the milieu in which immutable divine law vied for the first time with volatile
democratic law Plato rejected both sources of law and sought to derive his laws from what he
called 'political technique' (politikê technê). At the core of this technique is the question
of how the idea of justice relates to legal and institutional change. Filled with sharp
observations and bold claims Platonic Legislations shows that it is possible to see Plato-and
our own legal culture-in a new light In this provocative intelligent and elegant work D. L.
Dusenbury has posed crucial questions not only as regards Plato's thought in the making but
also as regards our contemporaneity.-Giorgio Camassa University of Udine There is a tension in
Greek law and in Greek legal thinking between an understanding of law as unchangeable and
authoritative and a recognition that formal rules are often insufficient for the
interpretation of reality and need to be constantly revised to match it. Dusenbury's book
illuminates the sophistication of Plato's legal thought in its engagement with this tension
and explores the potential of Plato's reflection for modern legal theory.-Mirko Canevaro The
University of Edinburgh
