This open access book provides a comprehensive analysis of the socioeconomic determinants of Covid-19. From the end of 2019 until presently, the world has been ravaged by the Covid-19 pandemic. Although the cause of this is (obviously) a virus, the extent to which this virus spread, and therefore the number of infections and deaths, was largely determined by socio-economic factors. From this, it follows that the course of the pandemic varies greatly from one country to another. This observation applies both to countries' resilience to such a pandemic (which is mainly rooted in the period preceding the outbreak of the virus) and to the way in which countries have reacted to the virus (including the political choices on how to respond). Meanwhile, research has made it clear that the nature of this response (e.g., elimination policy, mitigation policy, and proceeding herd immunity) was, on the one hand, strongly determined by political and ideological factors and, on the other hand, was highly influential in the factors of success or failure in combating the pandemic.The book focuses on the situation in a number of Western regions (notably the USA, the UK, and the EU and its Member States). The author addresses the reasons why in many Western countries both pandemic prevention and response policies to Covid-19 have failed. The book concludes with recommendations concerning the rearrangement of the socio-economic order that could increase the resilience of (Western) societies against such pandemics.

This collection brings together some of the most influential sociologists of law to confront the challenges of current transnational constitutionalism. It shows the constitution appearing in a new light: no longer as an essential factor of unity and stabilisation but as a potential defence of pluralism and innovation. The first part of the book is devoted to the analysis of the concept of constitution, highlighting the elements that can contribute from a socio-legal perspective, to clarifying the principle meanings attributed to the constitution. The study goes on to analyse some concrete aspects of the functioning of constitutions in contemporary society. In applying Luhmann's General Systems Theory to a comparative analysis of the concept of constitution, the work contributes to a better understanding of this traditional concept in both its institutionalised and functional aspects. Defining the constitution's contents and functions both at the conceptual level and by taking empirical issues of particular comparative interest into account, this study will be of importance to scholars and students of sociology of law, sociology of politics and comparative public law.

Topics covered include: spousal withholding of conjugal relations; halakhic understandings of the parent-child relationship; corporal punishment of children; the prohibition against seeking a second ruling after something has been declared forbidden; the agent who carries out his mandate for his own benefit, not the principal's; mid-twentieth century London organizations for the advancement of Jewish law.

With the developing landscape of a European criminal justice sphere comes an increasing imperative for scholars and practitioners to gain some insight into the diversity that exists in the criminal justice systems of European Union Member States. This book explores the mutual admissibility of evidence; a facet of EU criminal justice that is proving difficult to realise. While the Lisbon Treaty places the issue of mutual admissibility of evidence squarely on the agenda, the EU instruments to date have not succeeded in achieving this goal. Andrea Ryan argues that part of the reason for this failure is that while the mutual recognition instruments have focussed on the issue of gathering evidence and safeguarding suspects' rights, they have not addressed how evidence is to be presented and contested at trial. Drawing upon case studies from Ireland, France and Italy, and adopting a legal cultural perspective, and enriched by the author's observations of criminal trials, the book presents a detailed analysis of the developments to date in EU criminal justice and evidence law. By examining evidence practices the book asks whether the inquisitorial and accusatorial traditions within the EU systems are too irreconcilable to achieve a system of mutual admissibility of evidence. The book will be of great interest and use to academics and practitioners with an interest in European and comparative criminal justice, criminal procedure, human rights and socio-legal studies.

This book explores the main challenges against multiculturalism. It aims to examine whether liberalism and multiculturalism are reconcilable, and what are the limits of liberal democratic interventions in illiberal affairs of minority cultures within democracy. In the process, this book addresses three questions: whether multiculturalism is bad for democracy, whether multiculturalism is bad for women, and whether multiculturalism contributes to terrorism. Just, Reasonable Multiculturalism argues that liberalism and multiculturalism are reconcilable if a fair balance is struck between individual rights and group rights. Raphael Cohen-Almagor contends that reasonable multiculturalism can be achieved via mechanisms of deliberate democracy, compromise and, when necessary, coercion. Placing necessary checks on groups that discriminate against vulnerable third parties, the approach insists on the protection of basic human rights as well as on exit rights for individuals if and when they wish to leave their cultural groups.

This textbook covers the Contract Law option of the new A-level law syllabus, and provides at the same time an ideal introduction for anybody coming to the subject for the first time. The book covers all A-level syllabuses/specification requirements, and is written by the principal examiner in Contract Law for one of the major examination boards. It contains extensive case illustration, and a range of examination related questions and activities. There is a special focus on key skills, and on the new synoptic assessment syllabus requirements. This fully updated fourth edition builds upon the success of the first three editions, with new case law (especially on offer and acceptance, legal intent, terms, exemption clauses and misrepresentation remedies) and coverage of new statute law (especially Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations).

This latest edition of AS Law has been fully updated to meet the requirements of the most recent changes to the specifications of both AQA and OCR examination boards. This title is tailored to the NEW four-module specifications for both AQA and OCR (although also suitable for the existing six-module specifications) includes a new chapter on Contract as part of the section on The Concept of Liability contains coverage of recent legal changes includes the effects of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, especially concerning appointment of judges and the role of senior officers, such as the Lord Chancellor; reform of the powers of the police; recent statutes and cases particularly useful in preparing for questions involving judicial precedent and statutory interpretation. is written by authors who are experienced teachers, writers and examiners for AS/A-level law.

In this book, James Gallen provides an in-depth evaluation of the responses of Western States and churches to their historical abuses from a transitional justice perspective. Using a comparative lens, this book examines the application of transitional justice to address and redress the past in Ireland, Australia, Canada, the United States and United Kingdom. It evaluates the use of public inquiries and truth commissions, litigation, reparations, apologies, and reconciliation in each context to address these abuses. Significantly, this novel analysis considers how power and public emotions influence, and often impede, transitional justice's ability to address historical-structural injustices. In addressing historical abuses, power fails to be redistributed and national and religious myths are not reconsidered, leading Gallen to conclude that the existing transitional justice efforts of states and churches remain an unrepentant form of justice. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

In the field of socio-legal studies or law and society scholarship, it is rare to find empirically rich and conceptually sophisticated understandings of actual legal practice. This book, in contrast, connects the conceptual and the empirical, the abstract and the concrete, and in doing so shows the law to be an irreducibly social, material and temporal practice. Drawing on cutting-edge work in the social study of knowledge, it grapples with conceptual and methodological questions central to the field: how and where judgment empirically takes place; how and where facts are made; and how researchers might study these local and concrete ways of judging and knowing. Drawing on an ethnographic study of how narratives and documents, particularly case files, operate within legal practices, this book's unique and innovative approach consists of rearticulating the traditional boundaries separating judgment from knowledge, urging us to rethink the way truths are made within law.

This fourteenth edition of Law Made Simple marks the fiftieth year of the publication for one of the best-selling UK Law books. It is the perfect introduction to the English Legal System, and combines an overview of both the legislation and case law relating to all the foundation subjects, including Contract, Torts, Land, Trusts, Criminal, Public and EU. Fully updated, this book acts as a clear and concise guide for students studying law at any level, and takes into account developments across the curriculum. It is suitable for students studying law at A-Level, or as an excellent background for students thinking of embarking on the study of law or related course at degree level.

Written by a lawyer who works at the intersection between legal education and practice in access to justice and human rights, this book locates, describes and defines a collective identity for social justice lawyering in the UK. Underpinned by theories of cause lawyering and legal mobilisation, the book argues that it is vital to understand the positions that progressive lawyers collectively take in order to frame the connections they make between their personal and professional lives, the tools they use to achieve social change, as well as ethical tensions presented by their work. The book takes a reflexive ethnographic approach to capture the stories of 35 lawyers working to positively transform law and policy in the UK over the last 50 years. It also draws on a wealth of primary sources including case reports, historic campaign materials and media analysis alongside wider ethnographic interviews with academics, students and lawyers and participant observation at social justice conferences, workshops and events. The book explains the way in which lawyers' networks facilitate their collective positioning and influence their strategic decision making, which in turn shapes their interactions with social activists, with other lawyers and with the state itself.

In this two-volume set, Larry D. Barnett delves into the macrosociological sources of law concerned with society-important social activities in a structurally complex, democratically governed nation. Barnett explores why, when, and where particular proscriptions and prescriptions of law on key social activities arise, persist, and change. The first volume, Societal Agents in Law: A Macrosociological Approach, puts relevant doctrines of law into a macrosociological framework, uses the findings of quantitative research to formulate theorems that identify the impact of several society-level agents on doctrines of law, and takes the reader through a number of case analyses. The second volume, Societal Agents in Law: Quantitative Research, reports original multivariate statistical studies of sociological determinants of law on specific types of key social activities. Taken together, the two volumes offer an alternative to the almost-total monopoly of theory and descriptive scholarship in the macrosociology of law, comparative law, and history of law, and underscore the value of a mixed empirical/theoretical approach.

In considering diffusion from a global perspective, this book provides timely new insights into its application in a variety of fields and at many levels of both legal and non-legal orderings. This collection contributes to the wider theoretical debate concerning the movement of law and legal norms by engaging with concrete examples of legal diffusion, in jurisdictions as diverse as Albania, the Czech Republic, Poland and Kuwait. These examples, taken together, provide a comprehensive illustration of the theoretical debates concerning the diffusion of laws and norms in terms of both process and form. This international, multi-disciplinary and multi-methodological volume brings together scholars from law and social science with experience in mixed and hybrid jurisdictions, and advances the conversation about legal and normative diffusion across the academy. It represents a robust challenge to many preconceived ideas about legal movement and, as such, will be of interest to academics and students working in the fields of Law, Sociology, Anthropology, Political Science, Legal Education and comparative method.

Outside the United States, Norway's 1814 constitution is the oldest still in force. Constitutional judicial review has been a part of Norwegian court decision-making for most of these 200 years. Since the 1990s, Norway has also exercised review under the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR). Judicial review of legislation can be controversial: having unelected judges overruling popularly elected majorities seems undemocratic. Yet Norway remains one of the most democratic countries in the world. How does Norway manage the balance between democracy and judicial oversight? Author Anine Kierulf tells the story of Norwegian constitutionalism from 1814 until today through the lens of judicial review debates and cases. This study adds important insights into the social and political justifications for an active judicial review component in a constitutional democracy. Anine Kierulf argues that the Norwegian model of judicial review provides a useful perspective on the dichotomy of American and European constitutionalism.

A big cat overthrows the Indian state and establishes a reign of terror over the residents of a Himalayan town. A welfare legislation aimed at providing employment and commanding a huge budget becomes 'unimplementable' in a region bedeviled by high levels of poverty and unemployment. Paper Tiger provides a lively ethnographic account of how such seemingly bizarre scenarios come to be in contemporary India. Based on eighteen months of intensive fieldwork, this book presents a unique explanation for why and how progressive laws can do what they do and not, ever-so-often, what they are supposed to do. It reveals the double-edged effects of the reforms that have been ushered in by the post-liberalization Indian state, particularly the effort to render itself more transparent and accountable. Through a meticulous detailing of everyday bureaucratic life on the Himalayan borderland, Paper Tiger makes an argument for shifting the very frames of thought through which we apprehend the workings of the developmental Indian state.

Winner, 2021-2022 AES Senior Book Prize, awarded by the American Ethnological Society Honorable Mention, Senior Book Prize of the Association for Feminist Anthropology Uncovers how the process of sexual assault adjudication reinforces inequality and becomes a public spectacle of violence For victims in sexual assault cases, trials rarely result in justice. Instead, the courts drag defendants, victims, and their friends and family through a confusing and protracted public spectacle. Along the way, forensic scientists, sexual assault nurse examiners, and police officers provide their insight and expertise, shaping the story that emerges for the judge and jury. These expert narratives intersect with the stories of victims, witnesses, and their communities to reproduce our cultural understandings of sexual violence, but too often this process results in reinscribing racial, gendered, and class inequalities. Bodies in Evidence draws on observations of over 680 court appearances in Milwaukee County’s felony sexual assault courts, as well as interviews with judges, attorneys, forensic scientists, jurors, sexual assault nurse examiners, and victim advocates. It shows how forensic science helps to propagate public misunderstandings of sexual violence by bestowing an aura of authority to race and gender stereotypes and inequalities. Expert testimony reinforces the idea that sexual assault is physically and emotionally recognizable and always leaves material evidence. The court’s reliance on the presence of forensic evidence infuses these very familiar stereotypes and myths about sexual assault with new scientific authority. Powerful, unflinching, and at times heartbreaking, Bodies in Evidence reveals the human cost of sexual assault adjudication, and the social cost we all bear when investing in forms of justice that reproduce inequality and racial injustice.

This book presents an invaluable collection of essays by eminent scholars from a wide variety of disciplines on the main issues currently confronting legal professions across the world. It does this through a comparative analysis of the data provided by the reports on 46 countries in its companion volume: Lawyers in 21st-Century Societies: Vol. 1: National Reports (Hart 2020). Together these volumes build on the seminal collection Lawyers in Society (Abel and Lewis 1988a; 1988b; 1989). The period since 1988 has seen an acceleration and intensification of the global socio-economic, cultural and political developments that in the 1980s were challenging traditional professional forms. Together with the striking transformation of the world order as a result of the fall of the Soviet bloc, neo-liberalism, globalisation, the financialisation of capitalism, technological innovations, and the changing demography of lawyers, these developments underscored the need for a new, comparative exploration of the legal professional field. This volume deepens the insights in volume 1, with chapters on legal professions in Africa, Latin America, the Islamic world, emerging economies, and former communist regimes. It also addresses theoretical questions, including the sociology of lawyers and other professions (medicine, accountancy), state production, the rule of law, regional bodies, large law firms, access to justice, technology, casualisation, cause lawyering, diversity (gender, race, and masculinity), corruption, ethics regulation, and legal education. Together with volume 1, it will inform and challenge conceptions of the contemporary profession, and stimulate and support further research.

The first reader on Asian law and society scholarship, this book features reading selections from a wide range of Asian countries - East, South, Southeast and Central Asia - along with original commentaries by the three editors on the theoretical debates and research methods pertinent to the discipline. Organized by themes and topical areas, the reader enables scholars and students to break out of country-specific silos to make theoretical connections across national borders. It meets a growing demand for law and society materials in institutions and universities in Asia and around the world. It is written at a level accessible to advanced undergraduate students and graduate students as well as experienced researchers, and serves as a valuable teaching tool for courses focused on Asian law and society in law schools, area studies, history, religion, and social science fields such as sociology, anthropology, politics, government, and criminal justice.

The first reader on Asian law and society scholarship, this book features reading selections from a wide range of Asian countries - East, South, Southeast and Central Asia - along with original commentaries by the three editors on the theoretical debates and research methods pertinent to the discipline. Organized by themes and topical areas, the reader enables scholars and students to break out of country-specific silos to make theoretical connections across national borders. It meets a growing demand for law and society materials in institutions and universities in Asia and around the world. It is written at a level accessible to advanced undergraduate students and graduate students as well as experienced researchers, and serves as a valuable teaching tool for courses focused on Asian law and society in law schools, area studies, history, religion, and social science fields such as sociology, anthropology, politics, government, and criminal justice.

Contrary to the general perception of legal regression under Xi Jinping, this volume presents a more nuanced picture: It combines a wide range of analytical perspectives and themes in order to investigate questions that link institutional changes within the court system and legal environment with developments in criminal procedure law. The first part of the book investigates topics that contextualise institutional and procedural aspects of the law with a focus on various actors in the judiciary and other state and party organs. The second part of the book shifts the perspective to three controversial themes of criminal procedure reform: pre-trial custody review, live witness testimony in court and criminal reconciliation. By shedding light on performance evaluation of judges and interactions of courts and media the final part of the book introduces two sets of contextual factors relevant to the adjudication of criminal cases.

Why do some people invoke the law (or resist it) as a way to solve their problems and achieve more stability in life, only to end up in another challenging and uncertain situation? This book offers an original understanding of the important, but understudied, paradoxical effects of law on the survival strategies of Vietnamese people who are caught to live and work in precarious circumstances. It demonstrates how precarity influences the way people perceive, engage with, or resist the law; yet law, at the same time, creates and reinforces such a condition. Understanding the mutually reinforcing relationship between law and precarity sheds a new light on the way law enables individuals to better their condition but ultimately makes matters worse rather than better. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of law and society, political economy, anthropology, and Asian studies.

Information society projects promise wealth and better services to those countries which digitise and encourage the consumer and citizen to participate. As paper recedes into the background and digital data becomes the primary resource in the information society, what does this mean for privacy? Can there be privacy when every communication made through ever-developing ubiquitous devices is recorded? Data protection legislation developed as a reply to large scale centralised databases which contained incorrect data and where data controllers denied access and refused to remedy information flaws. Some decades later the technical world is very different one, and whilst data protection remains important, the cries for more privacy-oriented regulation in commerce and eGov continue to rise. What factors should underpin the creation of new means of regulation? The papers in this collection have been drawn together to develop the positive and negative effects upon the information society which privacy regulation implies.

The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Development provides a comprehensive statement and reference point for gender and development policy making and practice in an international and multi-disciplinary context. Specifically, it provides critical reviews and appraisals of the current state of gender and development and considers future trends. It includes theoretical and practical approaches as well as empirical studies. The international reach and scope of the Handbook and the contributors' experiences allow engagement with and reflection upon these bridging and linking themes, as well as the examining the politics and policy of how we think about and practice gender and development. Organized into eight inter-related sections, the Handbook contains over 50 contributions from leading scholars, looking at conceptual and theoretical approaches, environmental resources, poverty and families, women and health related services, migration and mobility, the effect of civil and international conflict, and international economies and development. This Handbook provides a wealth of interdisciplinary information and will appeal to students and practitioners in Geography, Development Studies, Gender Studies and related disciplines.

Family Law provides a comprehensive foundation in the key topics covered by courses. It explains the basic principles of the law and practice in their social, economic and historic context, enabling the reader to understand the doctrinal and practical impact of current radical changes in family law in response to cultural and other influences. This second edition has been fully updated in the light of on-going changes to the family justice system including: the modernisation of family justice including the new Family Court Atypical formation of the contemporary family: genetic, adoptive, social or through HAR the proposed administrative extra-judicial divorce process financial orders on married and unmarried family relationship breakdown enhanced parental responsibility, 'Parental Agreements' and 'Child Arrangement Orders' the treatment of post separation parenting (and the new DWP child support system) reforms to public child law, including changes to adoption same-sex marriage and the impact on traditional marriage and cohabitation Visit the companion website for practice questions, updates to the law and podcasts by the author at http://www.routledge.com/cw/burton-9780415583640

New religious movements (NRMs) and other minority faiths have regularly been the focus of legal cases around the world in recent decades. This is the first book to focus on important aspects of the relationship of smaller faiths to the societies in which they function by using specific legal cases to examine social control efforts. The legal cases involve group leaders, a groups' practices or alleged abuses against members and children in the group, legal actions brought by former members or third parties, attacks against such groups by outsiders including even governments, and libel and slander actions brought by religious groups as they seek to defend themselves. These cases are sometimes milestones in the relation between state authorities and religious groups. Exploring cases in different parts of the world, and assessing the events causing such cases and their consequences, this book offers a practical insight for understanding the relations of NRMs and other minority religions and the law from the perspective of legal cases. Chapters focus on legal, political, and social implications. Including contributions from scholars, legal practitioners, actual or former members, and authorities involved in such cases from various jurisdictions, this book presents an objective approach to understanding why so many legal actions have involved NRMs and other minority faiths in recent years in western societies, and the consequences of those actions for the society and the religious group as well.