Law, Culture and Society: Legal Ideas Mirror of Social By Roger Cotterrell. Aldershot, United Kingdom: Ashgate, 2006. Pp. 206. $114.95 cloth; $39.95 paper. Collecting a series of previously published articles of a theorist of stature of Cotterrell has not only distinct virtue of convenience, but also offers an opportunity for reflection on importance of a corpus of individually influential articles now subject to a more holistic interpretation. Add to that mix slight reworking and updating of some of articles, and a new introduction and conclusion, and you perfect recipe for constructing and evaluating major themes and aims of a spectrum of work that dates back at least a decade. The collection of articles grouped into two parts: first part called Perspectives and focuses on and social theory, while second named Applications and subtitled Comparative Law and Culture. The insights are layered, beginning with development of conceptual tools within social theory, exploring their impact on theoretical issues, and then proceeding toward detailed work methodology of comparative law. It is, however, artificial to attempt to separate conceptual tools of social theory that Cotterrell invokes and develops, for it conceptual tools themselves that help construct that object-said by Cotterrell to be as institutionalised doctrine (p. 1). That construction manifests itself methodological parallels that Cotterrell keen for us to recognize between social theory and analysis. Both, he says, must define and conceptualise very elusive aspects of human behavior, and both have to make sense of strategies and accidents of history (p. 2). In that respect, this collection should speak as much to social theorist as to theorist. Cotterrell at pains to make law less intimidating and more accessible to social analysis, stressing that discourse not some unified, autonomous system of communication-i.e., that law does not its own truth-and thus opening up legal to sociological microscope. The focus on participant understandings of law of critical importance to Cotterrell. He argues that it should be the aim of a sociological perspective ... to broaden participant understandings of law, and of social interpreted law, so as to enable people to know better society they live in, and (amongst other things) to regulate it a better informed way (p. 5). Law is a field of social experience focused on problems of governmental organisation and (p. 4) and it is, therefore, profitably understood in Mirror of Social Theory. Of course, Cotterrell does not let similarities and capacity for scholarly alliances between analysis and social theory shroud differences. That law presents itself as self-sufficient and as preeminent normative discourse or knowledge field (p. 4) cannot be dismissed as a phenomenological nicety-appearances political effects and impose, necessarily, upon all those who engage with it, political responsibility. What that political responsibility for Cotterrell? It allegiance to an idea of peaceful, stable regulation of social life, and to aspirations for justice life of communities (p. 5). And that an allegiance, as I noted above, that cannot be fulfilled as effectively, and not nearly as ethically, without gift of sociological analysis-without that mirror of social theory. The particular characterization of social locus of law that Cotterrell first explored Law's Community (1995), but that substantially revised and developed this collection, that of a concept of community. …