136 Book Review Marianne Constable: Our Word is Our Bond. How Legal Speech Acts. Stanford University Press, Stanford 2014. Julen Etxabe* Marianne Constable’s Our Word is Our Bond is a rhetorical and jurisprudential investigation into modern law’s embeddedness in language and its relation to justice, an alternative to those who would deine law as a system of rules, as a regulatory science, a problem-solving technique, or as an instrument of power. At the most basic level, Our Word is Our Bond argues that modern law (mostly of the Anglo-American variety, but not only 1 ) exists rhetorically, in the sense that legal institutions and claims such as promises, oaths, pleas, contracts, marriages, torts, criminal indictments, and judgments come to fruition through acts of language—which include symbols, gestures, and silences. To say that language is central to law, to be sure, is not to say that language is all there is to law, or that all law is reducible to language; in fact, ‘law cannot be reduced to anything’ (Constable 2014, 132), which could be taken as the central programmatic statement of the book. In contrast to the eternal and immutable truths of Philosophy, rhetoric seeks the contextual and contingent ‘appropriate saying’, relative to particular speakers, situations, and contexts. Consistently, the book ofers neither a theory of justice nor a concept of law as such. It shows, rather, how modern law is a matter of language and that justice, however impossible to deine and diicult to determine, depends on the relationships we have with one another (Constable 2014, 4). hus, to those who ask ‘What is law?’, the book suggests that the answer lies in further investigating law’s relations to the rhetorical activities of claiming and hearing (Ibid., 1). In so 1 Constable’s examples are drawn from the Anglo-American legal tradition, but claiming and hearing are common to a plurality of legal contexts and geographies. * University Researcher, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.