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Fitzpatrick-McKinley's book, based on her 1993 Trinity College (Dublin) Ph.D. dissertation under the supervision of A. D. H. Mayes, focuses on the question of whether law reflects the society in which it was created or is solely an autonomous construct of legal experts. This book is especially praiseworthy for incorporating general material on law and for the clarity of its argument.

Fitzpatrick-McKinley's book opens with an examination of the work of four scholars, Jorn Halbe, Eckart Otto, Ludger Schwienhorst-Schönberger, and Frank Crüsemann, who correlate law with social developments and who use redaction and source criticism to isolate distinct strata in biblical law. She accurately contends that all of these scholars believe that law reflects reality, whether it is Halbe and Otto following a Weberian model, Schwienhorst-Schönberger using redaction criticism, or Crüsemann reasoning about the absence of legislation on a particular social institution. Fitzpatrick-McKinley disagrees with all of these scholars for their diachronic analysis, but even when she offers Dale Patrick's work as an example of analyzing biblical law as a coherent system, Fitzpatrick-McKinley inveighs against Patrick's contention that law reflects the ethos of a society.

Fitzpatrick-McKinley uses the analysis of Alan Watson, a scholar of Roman law, who argues that law is an autonomous institution that develops under its own momentum. First, legal development, according to Watson, tends to lag behind social changes: certain legal rules and institutions survive even though they have become irrelevant. This is largely because law is textual--it is simply difficult to remove a law from the books. Secondly, legal systems often develop by means of borrowing from other legal systems. The two facts mean that the catalyst for legal development may not be the reality of a society: statutes and legal institutions may develop independently in an elite circle. Fitzpatrick-McKinley then presents the work of J. Goody, who contends that this is true for all legal systems, ancient and modem.

Finally, it is not always clear which biblical texts Fitzpatrick-McKinley is including under the rubric of biblical law. With the exception of the Decalogue, Fitzpatrick-McKinley never directly works through any particular corpus of biblical law. She appears to be dealing with the Covenant Code, but whether her conclusions apply to the priestly law or Deuteronomy or the Pentateuch as a whole is vague.

Fitzpatrick-McKinley argues for her thesis in a vigorous and lucid manner. This reader looks forward to Fitzpatrick-McKinley's future work in which a more expansive development of her points will be offered.

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