The expression 'the criminal question' does not at present have much currency in English-language criminology. The term was carried across from Italian debates about the orientation of criminology, and in particular debates about what came to be called critical criminology. One definition offered early in the debate described it as 'an area constituted by actions, institutions, policies and discourses whose boundaries shift'. According to this writer, crime, and the cultural and symbolic significance carried by law and criminal justice, is an integral aspect of the criminal question. 'The criminal question' draws attention to the specific location and constitution of a given field of forces, and the themes, issues, dilemmas and debates that compose it. At the same time it enables connections to be made between these embedded realities and the wider, conceivably global, contours of influence and flows of power with which it connects. This in turn raises many questions. How far do the responses to crime and punishment internationally flow from and owe their contemporary shape to the cultural and economic transformations now widely known as 'globalisation'? How can something that is in significant ways embedded, situated, and locally produced also travel? What is not in doubt is that it does travel - and travel with serious consequences. The international circulation of discourses and practices has become a pressing issue for scholars who try to understand their operation in their own particular cultural contexts. This collection of essays seeks a constructive comparative view of these tendencies to convergence and divergence.

Winner of the 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award In Marxism and Criminology: A History of Criminal Selectivity, Valeria Vegh Weis rehabilitates the contributions and the methodology of Marx and Engels to analyze crime and punishment through the historical development of capitalism (15th Century to the present) in Europe and in the United States. The author puts forward the concepts of over-criminalization and under-criminalization to show that the criminal justice system has always been selective. Criminal injustice, the book argues, has been an inherent element of the founding and reproduction of a capitalist society. At a time when racial profiling, prosecutorial discretion, and mass incarceration continue to defy easy answers, Vegh Weis invites us to revisit Marx and Engels' contributions to identify socio-economic and historic patterns of crime and punishment in order to foster transformative changes to criminal justice. The book includes a Foreword by Professor Roger Matthews of Kent University, and an Afterword written by Professor Jonathan Simon of the University of California, Berkeley.

There is often more than meets the eye where politics, religion and money are concerned. This is certainly the case with the Faith-Based Initiative. Section 104, a small provision of the 1996 Welfare Reform bill called "Charitable Choice," was the beginning of what we now know as the Faith-Based Initiative. In its original form, the Initiative was intended to ensure that small religious groups were not discriminated against in the awarding of government funding to provide social services. While this was the beginning of the story for the initiative, it is not the end. Instead Charitable Choice served as the launching pad for growing implementation of Faith-Based Initiatives. These new policies and practices exist despite the fact that all levels of government already contract with religious organizations to provide social services. Nevertheless, government actors have been implementing the Initiative in myriad ways, creating new policies where none appear necessary.
Using data from multiple sources this book examines how and why states have been creating these policies and practices. The data reveal three key aspects of faith-based policy implementation by states: appointment of state actors known as Faith-Based Liaisons, passage of legislation, and development of state Faith-Based Policy conferences. These practices created a system in which neither the greatest hopes of its supporters, nor the greatest fears of its opponents have been realized. Supporters had hoped the Faith-Based Initiative would be about solving problems of poverty and an over-burdened welfare system, while opponents feared rampant proselytizing with government funds. Instead, these initiatives by and large did not offer substantial new fiscal support to those in need. In the place of this hope and fear, and despite the good intentions of many, these initiatives became powerful political symbols in the fight to reshape church/state relationships and distribution of political power.

Reproductive choices are at once the most private and intimate decisions we make in our lives and undeniably also among the most public. Reproductive decision making takes place in a web of overlapping concerns - political and ideological, socio-economic, health and health care - all of which engage the public and involve strongly held opinions and attitudes about appropriate conduct on the part of individuals and the state. Law, Policy and Reproductive Autonomy examines the idea of reproductive autonomy, noting that in attempting to look closely at the contours of the concept, we begin to see some uncertainty about its meaning and legal implications - about how to understand reproductive autonomy and how to value it. Both mainstream and feminist literature about autonomy contribute valuable insights into the meaning and implications of reproductive autonomy. The developing feminist literature on relational autonomy provides a useful starting point for a contextualised conception of reproductive autonomy that creates the opportunity for meaningful exercise of reproductive choice. With a contextualised approach to reproductive autonomy as a backdrop, the book traces aspects of the regulation of reproduction in Canadian, English, US and Australian law and policy, arguing that not all reproductive decisions necessarily demand the same level of deference in law and policy, and making recommendations for reform.

The Agnostic Age: Law, Religion, and the Constitution is a book for lawyers, law professors, law students, lawmakers, and any citizen who cares about church-state conflict and about the relationship between religion and liberal democracy. It provides a way to understand and balance the conflicts that inevitably arise when neighbors struggle with neighbors, and when liberal democracy tries to reach common ground with religious beliefs and practices.
Paul Horwitz argues that the fundamental reason for the church-state conflict is our aversion to questions of religious truth. By trying to avoid the question of religious truth, law and religion has ultimately only reached a state of incoherence. He asserts that the answer to this dilemma is to take "the agnostic turn": to take an empathetic and imaginative approach to questions of religious truth, one that actually confronts rather than avoids these questions, but without reaching a final judgment about what that truth is.
This book offers a sensitive and sensible approach to questions of church-state conflict, justifying what the courts have done in some cases and demanding new results in others. It explains how the church-state conflict extends beyond law and religion itself, and goes to some of the central questions at the heart of the troubled relationship between religion and liberal democracy in a post-9/11 era.

A succinct, clear, and accessible introduction to the role and place of law in modern society, this addition to the 'Clarendon Law Series' explores the idea that the legal system is a highly developed social system, which has a distinct character and structure, and which shapes and influences behaviour.

This book describes the state of the art and future prospects of the most important bio-medicolegal subdisciplines in the post-genomic framework of personalized medicine. Focusing on the three main themes Innovation, Unitariness and Evidence, the book addresses a wide range of topics, including: Bio-Medicolegal and Criminological Sciences, Forensic Pathology and Anthropology, Clinical and Forensic Medicine in Living Persons (from Interpersonal Violence to Personal Injury and Damage, Malpractice, Personal Identification and Age Estimation), Forensic Genetics and Genomics, and Toxicology and Imaging. The unitariness of the "Bio-Medicolegal Sciences", historically founded on the accuracy and rigor of the methods of ascertainment and criteria of evaluation, should be re-established on the basis of molecular evidence, and used to promote Personalized Justice. Taken together, the book's conclusions and future perspectives outline a vision of transdisciplinary innovation and future evidence in the framework of personalized justice.

Europe has come a long way at least in the institutional response to racism. This book describes the responses of the Council of Europe and the European Union to the worrying trends of racism and xenophobia in the 1990s, and considers the prospects for combating discrimination in Europe using tools that have emerged as a result. Part one looks at the evolution of the Council of Europe apparatus to combat discrimination and the anti-discrimination standards prescribed by its institutions. Part two considers the legislative measures recently adopted by the European Union. The contributions in Part three take a comparative perspective of all measures adopted at European level to combat racial and ethnic discrimination.

This book collects twelve papers which make original contributions to the historical interpretation of inscribed Athenian laws and decrees, with a core focus on significant historical shapes and patterns implicit in the corpus of the age of Demosthenes. Following a synthetic Introduction, two chapters analyse locations and selectivity of inscribing, four explore the implications of the inscriptions for Athenian policy and for developing attitudes to the past, three for aspects of Athenian democracy. The volume concludes with two studies of specific inscriptions. Some of the papers have appeared elsewhere in conference proceedings and Festschriften, some are published here for the first time. The volume complements the author's previous collection, Inscribed Athenian Laws and Decrees 352/1-322/1 BC: Epigraphical Essays.

What is the relationship between politics and international law? Rather than exploring this question through the lens of the dominant paradigms of international relations theory - realism, liberalism, and constructivism - this book proposes a different approach. Based on the premise that the relationship varies depending on the sites where it unfolds, and inspired by comparative politics and socio-legal studies, the book develops a novel framework for comparative analysis of politics and international law at different stages of governance and in different governance systems. Expert contributors apply this analytical framework to diverse fields of law and politics. Part I examines the problems of compliance, effectiveness and the domestic enforcement of international law, and legal institutions including domestic and international courts, national legislatures and regime complexes. Part II covers substantive fields of governance such as global financial regulation, environmental standards, trade, intellectual property and human rights. The final chapters in this Part tackle emerging yet critical issues in international law, including terrorism, cyber conflict and Internet regulation. Together, the chapters represent a significant step forward in the comparative analysis of politics and international law. This Research Handbook will be essential reading for students and academics in political science and law alike. Contributors include: W.C. Banks, R. Brewster, A. Chander, K.L. Cope, M. Elsig, B. Faude, T. Gehring, C. Hillebrecht, S. Katzenstein, M.R. Madsen, W. Mattli, J.J. Paust, M.J. Peterson, S. Puig, W. Sandholtz, J. Seddon, S.K. Sell, G. Shaffer, D. Sloss, M. Van Alstine, P.-H. Verdier, M. Versteeg, C.A. Whytock

This book is the first comparative and interdisciplinary study of constitutional politics and constitution-making in the Middle East. The historical background and setting are fully explored in two substantial essays by Linda Darling and Said Amir Arjomand, placing the contemporary experience in the contexts, respectively, of the ancient Middle Eastern legal and political tradition and of the nineteenth and twentieth century legal codification and political modernization. These are followed by Ann Mayer's general analysis of the treatment of human rights in relation to Islam in Middle Eastern constitutions, and Nathan Brown's comparative scrutiny of the process of constitution-making in Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq with reference to the available constitutional theories which are shown to throw little or no light on it. The remaining essays are country by country case studies of Turkey, Afghanistan and Iraq, the case of Iran having been covered by Arjomand as the special point of reference. Mehmet Fevzi Bilgin examines the making and subsequent transformation of the Turkish Constitution of 1982 against current theories of constitutional and deliberative democracy, while Hootan Shambayati examines the institutional mechanism for protecting the ideological foundations of the Turkish Republic, most notably the Turkish Constitutional Court which offers a surprising parallel to the Iranian Council of Guardians. Arjomand's introduction brings together the bumpy experience of the Middle East along the long road to political reconstruction through constitution-making and constitutional reform, drawing some general analytical lessons from it and showing the consequences of the origins of the constitutions of Turkey and Iran in revolutions, and of Afghanistan and Iraq in war and foreign invasion.

The rule of law paradigm has long operated on the premise that independent judges disregard extralegal influences and impartially uphold the law. A political transformation several generations in the making, however, has imperiled this premise. Social science learning, the lessons of which have been widely internalized by court critics and the general public, has shown that judicial decision-making is subject to ideological and other extralegal influences. In recent decades, challenges to the assumptions underlying the rule of law paradigm have proliferated across a growing array of venues, as critics agitate for greater political control of judges and courts. With the future of the rule of law paradigm in jeopardy, this book proposes a new way of looking at how the role of the American judiciary should be conceptualized and regulated. This new, "legal culture paradigm" defends the need for an independent judiciary that is acculturated to take law seriously but is subject to political and other extralegal influences. The book argues that these extralegal influences cannot be eliminated but can be managed, by balancing the needs for judicial independence and accountability across competing perspectives, to the end of enabling judges to follow the "law" (less rigidly conceived), respect established legal process, and administer justice.

From postcolonial, interdisciplinary, and transnational perspectives, this collection of original essays looks at the experience of Spain's empire in the Atlantic and the Pacific and its cultural production.

"Hispanic Issues Series"
Nicholas Spadaccini, Editor-in-Chief

"Hispanic Issues Online"
hispanicissues.umn.edu/online_main.html

How our national identity has changed in significant and unexpected ways since the attacks of 9/11 Beautifully written and carefully reasoned, this bold and provocative work upends the conventional wisdom about the American reaction to crisis. Margulies demonstrates that for key elements of the post-9/11 landscape-especially support for counterterror policies like torture and hostility to Islam-American identity is not only darker than it was before September 11, 2001, but substantially more repressive than it was immediately after the attacks. These repressive attitudes, Margulies shows us, have taken hold even as the terrorist threat has diminished significantly. Contrary to what is widely imagined, at the moment of greatest perceived threat, when the fear of another attack "hung over the country like a shroud," favorable attitudes toward Muslims and Islam were at record highs, and the suggestion that America should torture was denounced in the public square. Only much later did it become socially acceptable to favor "enhanced interrogation" and exhibit clear anti-Muslim prejudice. Margulies accounts for this unexpected turn and explains what it means to the nation's identity as it moves beyond 9/11. We express our values in the same language, but that language can hide profound differences and radical changes in what we actually believe. "National identity," he writes, "is not fixed, it is made."

View the Table of Contents.
Read the Introduction.

"This is a spectacular collection of essays on the present and future of virtual worlds. It's a perfect introduction for those who have yet to experience them, and more important, a thoughtful companion for those who do."
--Jonathan Zittrain, Oxford University

"The State of Play is an extremely comprehensive look into digital worlds and how those worlds are evolving cultures, changing lives, reshaping the way we think and communicate. If you want to understand where modern culture is headed and learn more about incredibly fascinating experiences taking place in virtual worlds, pick up and read this book now."
--Richard Garriott, a.k.a. Lord British, Creator of Ultima Online and Executive Producer, NCsoft

"These essays, by the best thinkers in their fields, will be read, debated, taught, and cited in court cases as we struggle to figure out how to live in a world which is part digital and part social, part real and part imaginary."
--Henry Jenkins, author of "Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide"

aIs useful and interesting for students of surveillance.a--"Surveillance & Society"

aWith diverse essays from game designers, social scientists and legal scholars, The State of Play is a provocative consideration of virtual jurisprudence.a
--"Paste Magazine"

aFor those who want to skip over the hype and dive into the issue, it is hard to imagine a better resource.a
--Cecily Deane Mak, Senior Counsel, Music at RealNetworks.

aReading The State of Play is an adventure. It is the first real step of a journey into the outer limits of the physical world and the inner realms of the virtualwithin the boundaries of societyas comfort zone. It is an exploratory glimpse into how digital worlds may change the future, reshape our own reflection, and challenge real-world laws.a
--"New York Law Journal"

a...traces the fate of playtime over the centuries.a
--"Slate.com"

The State of Play presents an essential first step in understanding how new digital worlds will change the future of our universe. Millions of people around the world inhabit virtual words: multiplayer online games where characters live, love, buy, trade, cheat, steal, and have every possible kind of adventure. Far more complicated and sophisticated than early video games, people now spend countless hours in virtual universes like Second Life and Star Wars Galaxies not to shoot space invaders but to create new identities, fall in love, build cities, make rules, and break them.

As digital worlds become increasingly powerful and lifelike, people will employ them for countless real-world purposes, including commerce, education, medicine, law enforcement, and military training. Inevitably, real-world law will regulate them. But should virtual worlds be fully integrated into our real-world legal system or should they be treated as separate jurisdictions with their own forms of dispute resolution? What rules should govern virtual communities? Should the law step in to protect property rights when virtual items are destroyed or stolen?

These questions, and many more, are considered in The State of Play, where legal experts, game designers, and policymakers explore the boundaries of free speech, intellectual property, and creativity in virtual worlds. The essays explore both the emergence of law inmultiplayer online games and how we can use virtual worlds to study real-world social interactions and test real-world laws.

Contributors include: Jack M. Balkin, Richard A. Bartle, Yochai Benkler, Caroline Bradley, Edward Castronova, Susan P. Crawford, Julian Dibbell, A. Michael Froomkin, James Grimmelmann, David R. Johnson, Dan Hunter, Raph Koster, F. Gregory Lastowka, Beth Simone Noveck, Cory Ondrejka, Tracy Spaight, and Tal Zarsky.

Comparative Law and Society, part of the Research Handbooks in Comparative Law series, is a pioneering volume that comprises 19 original essays written by expert authors from across the world. This innovative handbook offers both a history of the field of comparative law and society and a thorough exploration of its methods, disciplines, and major issues, presenting the most comprehensive look into this contemporary field to date. In Part I, Methods and Disciplines, contributors approach critical issues in comparative law and society from a variety of academic fields, including sociology, criminology, anthropology, economics, political science, and psychology. This multidisciplinary approach highlights the importance of addressing the variance of perspectives inherent to the field. In Part II, Core Issues, chapters offer an exploration of major legal institutions, processes, professionals, and cultures associated with particular legal subjects. Since authors utilize the perspective of at least two different legal systems, this book offers a truly thorough and wide-ranging focus. The general reader, as well as students and scholars, will find this handbook useful in their continuing explorations into the interaction between law and society. Practitioners such as lawyers and judges with an interest in global perspectives of law will also find much to admire in this innovative volume. Contributors: M. Adler, N. Brewer, D.S. Clark, R. Cotterrell, B.L. Cutler, T. Ginsburg, M. Goodale, C. Guarnieri, R. Horry, B. Luppi, S.C. McCaffrey, E. Mertz, D. Nelken, F. Pakes, M.A. Palmer, F. Parisi, J.T. Polk, J.C. Reitz, R.E. Salcido, S. Stendahl, J.C. Suk, G.A. Tarr, S.C. Thaman, K. van Aeken, H.J. Wiarda

Although international arbitration has emerged as a credible means of resolution of transnational disputes involving parties from diverse cultures, the effects of culture on the accuracy, efficiency, fairness, and legitimacy of international arbitration is a surprisingly neglected topic within the existing literature. The Culture of International Arbitration fills that gap by providing an in-depth study of the role of culture in modern day arbitral proceedings. It contains a detailed analysis of how cultural miscommunication affects the accuracy, efficiency, fairness, and legitimacy in both commercial and investment arbitration when the arbitrators and the parties, their counsel and witnesses come from diverse legal traditions and cultures. The book provides a comprehensive definition of culture, and methodically documents and examines the epistemology of determining facts in various legal traditions and how the mixing of traditions influences the outcome. By so doing, the book demonstrates the acute need for increasing cultural diversity among arbitrators and counsel while securing appropriate levels of cultural competence. To provide an accurate picture, Kidane conducted interviews with leading international jurists from diverse legal traditions with first-hand experience of the complicating effects of culture in legal proceedings. Given the insights and information on the rules and expectations of the various legal traditions and their convergence in modern day international arbitration practice, this book challenges assumptions and can offer a unique and useful perspective to all practitioners, academics, policy makers, students of international arbitration.

Men on trial explores how the Irish perform 'the self' within the early nineteenth-century courtroom and its implications for law, society and nation. Drawing on new methodologies from the history of emotion, as well as theories of performativity and performative space, it emphasises that manliness was not simply a cultural ideal, but something practised, felt and embodied. Men on trial explores how gender could be a creative dynamic in productions of power. Targeted at scholars in Irish history, law and gender studies, this book argues that justice was not simply determined through weighing evidence, but through weighing men, their bodies, behaviours, and emotions. Moreover, in a context where the processes of justice were publicised in the press for the nation and the world, manliness and its role in the creation of justice became implicated in the making of national identity. -- .

Prior to the 1950s, it was remarkably easy for police to arrest people for a wide variety of activities performed in the streets. Throughout the country, vagrancy laws were far-reaching and pervasive. Yet by the end of the 1960s, streets across America hosted both massive political protests and a cultural revolution that reshaped not only the nation's public spaces, but more broadly its public life. For the era or against it, virtually all agreed that America after the 1960s was starkly different than before it. What happened? In Vagrant Nation, Risa Goluboff provides a truly groundbreaking explanation of the transformation. Focusing on Court decisions that loosened vagrancy laws and opened up the streets to Americans in all their variety, she shows how legal change helped fuel highly public social movements advocating everything from civil rights to peace to gay rights to cultural revolution. Indeed, increased access to the streets increased their public presence and thereby social power. The book is a brilliant example of how a seemingly small event -alteratations to the relatively minor crime of vagrancy-can contribute to a social revolution. Not only that, Goluboff powerfully demonstrates how the courts can advance social change-make history, so to speak. The vagrancy laws were that were on the books virtually everywhere in the 1950s served as a catchall device for police forces intent on establishing public order; you could be arrested for everything from causing a disturbance to behaving in a way contrary to the norm-fraternizing with a member of another race, for example, or publically preaching non-mainstream beliefs like communism. Given the very fluid interpretation of vagrancy, police inevitably abused it to the point where they could arrest almost any "nonconforming" person. Once the Supreme Court began invalidating these laws, it opened up public space to any manner of dissenter or nonconformist: hippies, war protestors, civil rights activists, interracial couples, gays, and, of course, vagrants-all the people occupying spaces previously off-limits to them. Goluboff's account is not just a investigation of the relationship between law and social change, however. It is also a ground-up history-from Skid Row to the Supreme Court-of the culture wars between the New Left and New Right. The results of these battles are abundantly evident today in both positive ways-like the increased openness to all in America's public spaces-and negative ways-especially the explosion of homelessness afterward. In sum, she shows that major societal changes can result not only from big waves, but from seeming ripples too.

This special issue of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society examines the relationship between law and disasters. The papers come from members of the Collaborative Research Network on the Jurisprudence of Disasters within the Law and Society Association. This network was formed in 2012 at a conference held by the International Institute for the Sociology of Law, titled "Workshop on Disasters and Sociolegal Studies." The volume addresses the 'myths' of contemporary disaster law and policy, such as that of society's "invincibility". The papers examine specific cases such as the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, bushfire management in Australia and wildfire prevention in the Mediterranean, as well as providing broader analysis and comment on global disaster law and policy.

In Islamic Legal Thought: A Compendium of Muslim Jurists, twenty-three scholars each contribute a chapter on a distinguished Muslim jurist. The volume is organized chronologically and it includes jurists who represent the formative, classical and modern periods of Islamic legal thought. Each chapter contains both a biography of an individual jurist and a translated sample of his work. The biographies emphasize the scholarly milieu in which the jurist worked-his teachers, colleagues and pupils, as well as the type of juridical thinking for which he is best known. The translated sample highlights the contribution of each jurist to the evolution of both the method and the methodology of Islamic jurisprudence. The introduction by the volume's three editors, Oussama Arabi, David S. Powers and Susan A. Spectorsky, provides a concise overview of the contents. Contributors include: Oussama Arabi, Murteza Bedir, Jonathan E. Brockopp, Robert Gleave, Camilo Gomez-Rivas, Mahmoud O. Haddad, Peter C. Hennigan, Colin Imber, Samir Kaddouri, Aharon Layish, Joseph E. Lowry, Muhammad Khalid Masud, Ebrahim Moosa, David S. Powers, Yossef Rapoport, Delfina Serrano Ruano, Susan A. Spectorsky, Devin J. Stewart, Osman Tastan, Etty Terem, Nurit Tsafrir, Bernard G. Weiss, Hiroyuki Yanagihashi.

This volume addresses the study of family law and society in Europe, from medieval to contemporary ages. It examines the topic from a legal and social point of view. Furthermore, it investigates those aspects of the new family legal history that have not commonly been examined in depth by legal historians. The volume provides a new 'global' interpretative key of the development of family law in Europe. It presents essays about family and the Christian influence, family and criminal law, family and civil liability, filiation (legitimate, natural and adopted children), and family and children labour law. In addition, it explores specific topics related to marriage, such as the matrimonial property regime from a European comparative perspective, and impediments to marriage, such as bigamy. The book also addresses topics including family, society and European juridical science.

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society provides a vehicle for the publication of scholarly articles within the broad parameters of interdisciplinary legal scholarship. In this latest edition of this highly successful research series, chapters examine a diverse range of legal issues and their impact on and intersections with society. This volume features a special section with papers dedicated to life after imprisonment. The chapters examine issues around offender rehabilitation, mass incarceration, and overcriminalization. Other papers included in this important volume address the shift in attitudes to solitary confinement (and the prospect of moving beyond solitary confinement measures) and private prison services. This volume brings together leading scholars and will be vital reading for all those researching in this subject area.