SOURCE: Williams, Bernard. “Drawing Lines.” London Review of Books 16, no. 9 (12 May 1994): 9-10.

In the following review, Williams comments that the legal arguments in Only Words will be difficult for British readers to fully comprehend.

Best known as an eloquent campaigner against pornography, Catharine MacKinnon is a lawyer—a Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. Not all of this book (based on talks given at Princeton) sounds much like legal argument, and particularly when she is talking about pornography she gives a rhetorical display which may well have been breathtaking in the lecture hall. But the book [Only Words] does in fact offer a legal argument, one which is interesting, and also deeply American, in the sense that MacKinnon discusses the problems raised by pornography and also by speech that constitutes sexual or racial harassment in terms of American law and the American Constitution. MacKinnon...