Law and Society

"Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos opens the book with his latest contribution to his comprehensive project of re-theorising spatial justice with a piece titled ‘Spatial Justice in a World of Violence’. Through a close reading
of the photographic series Fortunes of War, Life Day by artist Eric Lesdema,
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos is interested in how these images reveal peripheral
spaces at the edge of violence which impose an ethic of spatial responsibility on the
viewer in the act of turning away and looking elsewhere. While no acts of explicit
violence are shown in the images, we are left with no doubt that violence is ubiquitous
along the spatio-temporal continuum. This continuum of violence between
bodies raises questions of complicity and responsibility. Do we submit to a state
of affairs in which space is saturated with the everyday and immobilised violence
of the ‘engineered atmosphere’ – or is it also possible for bodies to withdraw from
the atmosphere, through ruptures and folds within the continuum? Such a notion
raises the ethical possibility of the ‘emergence of spatial justice’." Chris Butler and Edward Mussawir (eds)

Storytelling pervades almost every aspect of the law. Many narrativistic legal elements, however, have in fact been little more than historically transitory. Given the precarious status of narrative at law, I argue we should focus instead on one of the most historically consistent acts of legal storytelling: the judicial opinion. Here I examine in particular the invocation of precedent in legal opinions, what I call “judicial emplotment,” as an almost archetypal act of formalized storytelling. As I go on to argue, the courts justify legal outcomes by invoking precedent, thereby placing decisions within a specific and heavily formalized legal-narrative structure.

There are many histories of the police as a law-enforcement institution, but no genealogy of the police as a form of power. This book provides a genealogy of the modern police by tracing the evolution of ‘police science’ and of police institutions in Europe, from the ancien régime to the early 19th century. Drawing on the theoretical path outlined by Michel Foucault at the crossroads between historical sociology, critical legal theory and critical criminology, it shows how the development of police power was an integral part of the birth of the modern state’s governmental rationalities and how police institutions were conceived as political technologies for the government and social disciplining of populations. Understanding modern police not as an institution at the service of the judiciary and the law, but as a complex political technology for governing the economic and social processes typical of modern capitalist societies, this book shows how the police have played an active role in actually shaping order, rather than merely preserving it.

Enacted February 24, 2014 and effective until August 1, 2014, Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act targeted Ugandans of minority sexual orientations and gender identities—many of whom self-identify as 'kuchu'—by imposing life sentences for homosexual sex and same-sex marriage. The original Anti-Homosexuality Bill introduced in 2009 promised even worse for kuchus: it would have mandated that all Ugandans report known homosexuals and threatened execution for serial offenders and other perpetrators of “aggravated homosexuality.” In the context of Ugandan political conflict, emerging international human rights norms, and global asymmetries of power, Uganda has become an ideological battlefront where competing actors—both US-based and Ugandan—advance their respective visions of a just and righteous global society. These factors mandate that US-based activists and organizations painstakingly consider how (or whether) they can advocate responsibly and effectively for international human rights related to gender identity and sexual orientation. Through interdisciplinary lenses and critical analysis, this paper explores three questions:

• How is Uganda distinct from other sites of antigay legislation?
• How have US-based organizations impacted Ugandan discourse and policy toward kuchus?
• How can US-based rights advocates and activists campaign for kuchus without doing them further harm?

While still fragmented, we are witnessing the emergence of a global commercial legal order independent of any one national legal system. This process is unfolding both on the macro-level of state actors as well as that of private individuals and organizations. On the macro-level, the sources of this legal order are complex international agreements; on the micro-level, private contracts employing commercial customary practices and arbitration are driving this process forward. Yet there is no comparable evolution occurring (in any substantial sense) in non-commercial areas of law such as criminal, tort, or family law. There is an overall asymmetry in the development of transnational legal order. But why is this happening? This paper argues that the emergence of a global commercial legal order may be partially attributed to the unique structural nature of trade. The paper gives a structuralist account, positing that unlike legal order of a non-commercial nature, commercial legal order has built-in mechanisms that make it particularly suited to evolve in a transnational context—i.e. to evolve and sustain itself in the absence of a central legislative or coercive authority. The paper identifies and explores these built-in mechanisms. The paper concludes that because commercial legal order is uniquely predisposed to emerge without the State, we should expect this asymmetry to not only continue, but likely grow even more extreme.

It is sometimes argued that the non-therapeutic, non-consensual alteration of children’s genitals should be discussed in two separate ethical discourses: one for girls (in which such alterations should be termed ‘female genital mutilation’ or FGM), and one for boys (in which such alterations should be termed ‘male circumcision’). In this article, I call into question the moral and empirical basis for such a distinction, and argue that all children—whether female, male, or intersex—should be free from having parts of their genitals removed unless there is a pressing medical indication.

Some of Law and Economics’ basic claims have come to be criticized as a result of empirical findings that question their viability. Particularly, the premise that agents consistently act rationally and with their self-interest in mind seems problematic. What the consequences of the criticism mean for Law and Economics’ tenability depends largely on the questions whether (1) some elements are unassailable to the alternative’s objections and (2) the alternative is a systematic whole. It is argued that Law and Economics may be salvaged, if it is minimized and its ambitions are tempered. This means focusing on the stable, a priori, elements inherent to it.

The Relationship of Law to Society in Deuteronomy:
“The Draft Constitution” (Deut 16:18–18:22) as an “Ideal Type”

This article demonstrates the overlooked contribution of the ancient Near East to the development of constitutional law.  The legal corpus of Deuteronomy provides a utopian model for the organization of the state, one that enshrines separation of powers and their systematic subordination to a public legal text—the “Torah”—that delineates their jurisdiction while also ensuring their autonomy.  This legislation establishes an independent judiciary while bringing even the monarch under the full authority of the law.  This legislation departs from all previous models, whether those extant in the legislation of the ancient Near East or ancient Israel itself.  Two of its cornerstones are fundamental to the modern idea of a constitution: (1) clear division of state powers into separate spheres of authority; and (2) the subordination of each branch to the authority of the law.  This legislation was so utopian that it seems never to have been implemented; instead, idealism rapidly yielded to political pragmatism.  Nonetheless, Deuteronomy’s draft constitution makes a powerful statement about the broader function of law within society, while also providing a corrective to the secular and Graeco-Roman bias of more standard models of constitutional legal history.

The major aim of this article is to examine how migrations affect private governance, taking as a case study the Prud'homie de pêche, a private order that has governed the fishery of Marseille for the past six centuries. Scholarship generally argues that social norms guarantee the efficiency of private orders and their ability to resist the arrival of newcomers. My data suggests that the Prud'homie has failed to accommodate social changes prompted by migratory flows, not despite but because of its social norms. This paper suggests that social norms are not only powerful tools of governance for private orders, but also forces of inertia that can prevent these orders from accommodating social changes.

This article addresses the implications of a new resistance to hate crime legislation that has yet to be addressed in the mainstream legal debate in Canada or the United States. It comes mainly from groups in the US that represent lgbtq communities who are poor and/or of color. These communities are particularly vulnerable to victimization by hate crime yet the groups have repeatedly opposed the inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity/expression in hate crime legislation. This article addresses the underlying rationale of the new resistance and its implications for the mainstream debate. It begins by undertaking a comparative analysis of hate crime legislation in Canada and the US. It then considers the mainstream legal debate in both countries as well as some statistical data on hate crime. The third section turns to the new resistance as well as emerging data on the connection between victimization and the criminal legal system itself. It then draws on the legal theory of Walter Benjamin to reveal limits in the way that the mainstream legal debate conceptualizes criminalization. The final section of the article considers the implications of Benjamin’s concept of law for both the mainstream debate and the new resistance.

ABSTRACT The study provides an overview of the worldwide best practices for rape prevention and for assisting women victims of rape. It reviews the international literature and offers selected examples of promising practices. It addresses the comprehensive range of policies in the fields of gender equality; law and justice; economy, development and social inclusion; culture, education and media; and health. It presents a wide-ranging set of examples of best practice. It concludes with a series of recommendations, based on the social scientific evidence presented in the study. The report is available online at http://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/en/femm/studies.html

Despite their centrality to the operation of contemporary accredited zoo and aquarium institutions, the work of zoo veterinarians has rarely been the focus of a critical analysis in the social science and humanities. Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations of zoo and aquarium veterinarians, mainly in Europe and North America, this book highlights the recent transformation that has occurred in the zoo veterinarian profession during a time of ecological crisis, and what these changes can teach us about our rapidly changing planet.

Zoo vets, Braverman instructs us with a wink, have "gone wild." Originally an individual welfare-centered profession, these experts are increasingly concerned with the sustainability of wild animal populations and with ecological health. The story of zoo vets going wild—in their subjects of care, their motivations, and their ethical standards, as well as in their professional practices and scientific techniques—is also a story about zoo animals gone wild, wild animals encroaching the zoo, and, more generally, a wild world that is becoming "zoo-ified." Such transformations have challenged existing veterinary standards and practices. Exploring the regulatory landscape that governs the work of zoo and aquarium veterinarians, Braverman traverses the gap between the hard and soft sciences and between humans and nonhumans.

At the intersection of animal studies, socio-legal studies, and science and technology studies, this book will appeal not only to those interested in zoos and in animal welfare, but also to scholars in the posthumanities.

There is increasing pressure in international development to demonstrate that aid spending has an impact. This includes spending on policy research. While there is much debate about appropriate methods and evidence for demonstrating impact, ‘a more recent development is the movement to include practice-based evidence alongside more traditional scientific evidence in the accumulation of knowledge about what works, when, and why?’ (Forss, Marra and Schwartz 2011: 5).

The concept of practice-based evidence accepts that the world is a complicated, messy place that cannot be easily controlled. Those promoting its use suggest that it can provide additional insight about impact. Impact evaluation is an assessment of both the intended and unintended outcomes of a given intervention, where ‘the proper analysis of impact requires a counterfactual of what those outcomes would have been in the absence of the intervention’ (OECD 2001).

This paper explores the challenge of using practice-based evidence gathered with civil society organisations – and agencies that support them – to learn more about the impact of policy-related work. Specifically, it uses the work undertaken in the Sexuality, Poverty and Law programme at the Institute of Development Studies, and focuses on one case study that looked at sex workers’ experiences of economic empowerment programmes in Ethiopia. The purpose is not to assess the case study or particular interventions, but to better understand what policy impact might look like.

I have been researching equity jurisprudence for several years now in order to prove my hypothesis that people were better served by governments in the middle ages than they are now -- at least with respect to access to justice and equity. Yesterday, I came across Volume I of Justice Story's well-known Commentaries of Equity Jurisprudence on the internet.

I considered this digital book to be a great find and set about studying it. Before I barely got started I was startled to observd the book had dedicated to an ancestor of mine on my mother's side - William Henry Prescott, who apparently was also a lawyer, i.e. LL. D..

When I was born my Mom and Dad argued over my name. Mom wanted to name me Prescott. But Dad argued everybody would call me "piss pot Prescott"

So Mom caved and I became Scott.

Transitional justice is concerned with the legal and social processes established to deal with the legacy of violence in post-authoritarian and post-conflict contexts. The interview — in different guises, contexts and settings — is at the heart of most transitional justice processes. Prosecutorial mechanisms, truth recovery commissions, assessments for reparations, applications for amnesty — all of these and more are fueled by the art of one human being interviewing another and then presenting or “re-presenting” the material recorded, to make it “fit” with the broader transitional goals of a particular institution. Most transitional justice institutions are, in the final analysis, “creatures of law.” They are typically established by statute, their work is molded and shaped by lawyers, and their outcomes are benchmarked against what is or is not acceptable under domestic and international law. In such a context, it is little wonder that some transitional scholars have expressed conc...

This is chapter 20 of M Crouch and T Lindsey (ed), Law, Society and Transition in Myanmar (Oxford, Hart Publishing, 2014). In this chapter I report on the views of participants at a remarkable workshop at NUS in 2013. On the basis of this report I argue for a changed approach to law and development. after 50 years and faced with a new situation in Myanmar we can adopt a more contextual and more informed approach to law and development.

This article contrasts two English solicitors' styles of file work and aims to spell out some of the styles' respective practical and ethical implications. What I call ‘elaborate style’ relates to the file as the primary means of casework, while the ‘minimalist style’ relates to the file in terms of a compulsory exercise. The contrasts in style are further explored by attempting a set of explanations for them. The paper seeks explanation by relating the styles to the respective cases filed, to gender differences in the legal profession, and to the professional habitus of either solicitor. In conclusion, the inquiry suggests an explanation involving the legal discourse served. There are good reasons for either style under certain pre-trial and trial procedures. To stick habitually to one style while moving towards another procedure may cause unwanted consequences.

This paper analyzes the laws and policies employed by the Puerto Rican government to address the economic and financial crisis that has been affecting Puerto Rico since 2005. This analysis is built upon the concept of the internal state of exception; a concept that aims to provide a better understanding of the correlation between neoliberalism, colonialism, economy, and law. This paper proposes: 1) a depiction of the state of exception and its uses as an economic and financial crisis management dispositive; 2) an exposition of the Puerto Rican government's uses of the internal state of exception as a dispositive to tackle the eco nomic and financial crisis between 2005 and 2016; and 3) an analysis of the uses of the inter nal state of exception by the Puerto Rican government in 2017. Thus, this paper reinterprets the uses of the state of exception as a strategy to manage economic and fiscal crises from a colonial and global south experience and proposes a new understanding of this legal and political paradigm.

It is a legal sample of case file as a syllabus content of L.L.B. Second year from Tribhuvan University Nepal. It comprises all the case files from F.I.R. to the police station along with all the legal papers prepared by police and documents submitted to court for jurisdiction. All the procedure done by court in presence of justice, lawyer, witness, suspectee all are taken under consideration and final judgement is then ordered by Judge. These all things are included in this sample case file called MOOT COURT.

Эта книга – очередное издание известного труда историка советской и пост-советской правовой системы, профессора университета Торонто Питера Соломона. Впервые на русском языке эта работа была опубликована в 1998 году, на английском книга вышла в 1996. В середине 1990-х годов исследование Соломона внесло вклад в дискуссию о советском правосудии сталинского периода, участниками которой были Габор Риттершпорн, Йорам Горлицкий, Олег Хлевнюк, Харольд Берман, Юджин Каменка и другие. С тех пор дискуссия на Западе значительно продвинулась, однако далеко не все исследования, посвященные этой проблеме, известны в России. Между тем, в последние годы активно развиваются эмпирические социо-правовые исследования, которые нуждаются в теоретико-
методологической базе. При общем дефиците русскоязычной научной литературы по практике правоприменения, истории и социологии права хотелось бы, чтобы труд Питера Соломона не остался незамеченным.

This thesis examines child custody contestations in order to understand how parental rights and responsibilities are constructed and contested in the legal sphere. Based on the analysis of thirty four court files concluded in Istanbul, Turkey between 1996 and 2002, I discuss the ways in which women and men are entitled with rights and responsibilities with regards to their children in custody trials. My main finding is that gendered inequalities are sustained and reproduced within the legal institution. Women are given the right and duty of their young children’s care through the motherly care and affection trope and their sexual morality is supervised in custody contestations. Fathers, by contrast, are entitled to the childcare services of their kin and represented as providers of class habitus and education for their children. 
While the legal status of Turkish women has received substantial interest both within and outside academia, the hegemonic view of the Turkish modernist nationalization project has long dominated the discourse around the subject, limiting speakers to the celebration of the “emancipation” of Turkish women. Moreover, most of the reflections are limited to the articles of the Civil Code and social-scientific studies of practiced law remain rare. This thesis demonstrates that the word of the law is neither a sufficient nor a central variable in understanding how inequalities are reproduced in the legal universe of child custody. This finding is even more significant after the 2001 Civil Code Reform that recently rewritten the Turkish family law in a gender-neutral language with the premise that such move will result in furthering gender equality in the legal sphere.

Pakistan state law and Taliban rule of Sharia law are at different ends of a politico-legal spectrum. They share advocacy of one system of law and attraction to eradication of alternatives. Muslahathi Committees in Pakistan are used to explore legal pluralism, hybrid institutions that allow deliberative democracy to seek workable responses to injustice. Formal and traditional systems can show mutual respect and check each other. On the basis of purely qualitative evidence, it is argued that Muslahathi Committees are restorative justice programs that sustainably reduce revenge violence, make a contribution to preventing Pakistan from spiraling into civil war, and assist a police force with low legitimacy to become somewhat more accountable to local civil society. These contributions are limited, but could be more significant with modest investment in human rights and gender awareness training to control abuses and increase accountability. The ruthless, murderous, divisive politics of policing and restorative justice in Pakistan seems a least likely case for deliberative democracy to work. In limited ways it does. Legal Pluralism and the Pakistan Policing Context Thi s research is about contests and synergies between state and non-state justice. Legal pluralism is about the idea that different legal systems can coexist in the same social field (Merry 1988: 870). Legal pluralism often bogs down in debates about whether forms of custom should be described as legal systems. Our interest is not in that question, but in exploring inductively effects of new forms of legal hybridity. The hybridity in focus is distinctive because it is as much about the police role as the lawyerly role in legal pluralism. While the research embraces conventional concerns of the legal pluralism literature such as legitimacy, its particular focus is on the effects of legal hybrids on the vitality of democracy and on dampening cycles of violence in spaces of extreme violence. What is Our thanks to the Australian Research Council for funding of this research.

Dalam dekade terakhir ini, begitu banyak perubahan sekaligus perkembangan di Indonesia dalam berbagai bidang, salah satunya, topik khusus di bidang hukum yang terkait dengan hak asasi manusia. Perkembangan ini ditandai dengan sejumlah perubahan kebijakan hukum, antara lain: meluasnya pengaturan hak asasi manusia dalam Undang-Undang Dasar Negara Republik Indonesia Tahun 1945 pasca-amandemen; (2) dibentuknya peraturan perundang-undangan baru yang khusus mengatur hak asasi manusia, seperti Undang-Undang No. 39 Tahun 1999 tentang Hak Asasi Manusia (HAM) dan Undang-Undang No. 26 Tahun 2000 tentang Pengadilan HAM; (3) diakui dan diratifikasinya sejumlah perjanjian internasional mengenai hak asasi manusia ke dalam sistem hukum nasional; serta (4) adanya komitmen politik baik di dalam negeri melalui Rencana Aksi Nasional Hak Asasi Manusia (RANHAM) maupun keterlibatan pemerintah Indonesia di ASEAN dan di tingkat internasional.

The aim of this article is to explore the peculiarity of Italian policies on immigration detention and their evolution over time. This will be done by highlighting the main factors that might explain the apparent political disinvestment in immigration detention in Italy, in particular in the years between 2013 and 2015, and account for the turnaround in approach announced and then implemented by the two Interior Ministers in charge between 2017 and 2019. The article uses the Italian case as an opportunity to explore the functions that are assigned to immigration detention in destination countries. In particular, it considers whether or not it can be argued that immigration detention in Italy has been "reinvented" (meaning that its functions have somewhat changed) as a consequence of the so-called "refugee crisis" and in light of Italy's specific position in the contemporary geopolitics of the EU's border control regime.

Drawing on textual and ethnographic research conducted over the last five years, this article analyses an important genre of judicial practice in South and Southeast Asia that has been almost entirely ignored by socio-legal scholars: Buddhist systems of judging. Using the judicial system of one monastic group in contemporary Sri Lanka as a case study, it argues that Buddhist judging requires more than just the internalisation of moral principles, as is often assumed. According to Buddhist (monastic) principles of judging, legal procedures—similar to those used in state-legal settings—are equally essential. These procedures govern everything from making legal complaints, to the structuring of trials, to determining jurisdiction and many other topics. By examining Buddhist judicial systems, this article not only casts new light on the pluri-legal landscape of Asia, it also offers new reflections on the intersection of religion-based and state-based systems of law in the contemporary world.

This chapter analyses constitutional amendments in the Russian Federation (1993–2014). We show that in the phase of constitution-making a problematic path was adopted when the El'cin administration promoted a basic law advantaging the executive. The praxis of constitutional amendment in the Russian Federation is discussed in three dimensions: First, concerning amendments to Art. 65, which regulates the structure of the federal republic; second, concerning changes to the structure or principles of the constitutional system; third, concerning de facto constitutional amendments through ordinary laws. In particular, a combination of amendments of the second and third dimensions substantially centralized the constitutional regime over the past 20 years, moving it toward an authoritarian state order. The Russian praxis of constitutional amendment is here classified as authoritarian constitutionalism.

The United States has long grappled with the question of how to maintain an appropriate combination of religion and politics in the public sphere. The current electoral cycle is no different, as Presidential candidates attempt to negotiate both the political and religious landscapes. This essay introduces a special forum on rhetoric and religion in contemporary politics and touches on some recent instances of how religious differences have played out in the current political environment. Some of the issues discussed include the separation of church and state, Mitt Romney’s membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), Rick Santorum’s conception of the “war on religion,” and the controversy over contraceptives at religious institutions and Rush Limbaugh’s attacks on a Georgetown law student.