ABSTRACT
How is doctrine currently represented? In many respects, our modern understanding of doctrine is perceived as being in trouble; its status and aspirations, its topics and its promises, are seemingly besieged on all sides by legal practitioners, sociologists, economists, philosophers, not to mention all those others who are uncomfortable with the disciplinary boundaries of the legal academy.1 The prospect of a legal science no longer seems capable of admiration, let alone affords consolation. Reason and its substitutes seem incapable (if they ever were) of supplying foundational principles. The possibility that legal doctrine could be understood as a social science seems attractive only to the extent that social science shares in the same problem of order and location. The quest for a language that both encompasses its subject matter, directs its action and performs as an organiser of facts, is precisely a staging of a juridical order of social science (van de Kerchove and Ost, 1994).2 Even the common law tradition of experience has declined in the presence of a technological reason which has excluded experience itself from thought, splitting knowledge from understanding (Murphy, 1991). Such a story of broken promises, failed foundations, lost experiences, shattered dreams, has a certain symbolic burden on our imaginations. Yet to characterise this situation in solely negative terms somewhat begs the question of the nature of the dreams, promises, foundations — in short, the nature of doctrine as the subject
of law. It is thus necessary to begin by reconstructing the promise or dream of criminal legal doctrine.
