This volume addresses a variety of issues related to economic crisis in the broadest sense of the term, involving diverse national and international contexts, historical epochs, and a range of problems related to economic life. The chapters in this volume tackle criminologically relevant questions in connection with crime/deviance and/or the control thereof, on the basis of an analysis of any aspect of economic life, in general, and economic crisis, in particular. Thematically diverse within the province of criminology and the sociology of crime, deviance, and social control, the chapters are not restricted in terms of theoretical approach and methodological orientation. In these and all other relevant respects, this book is usefully varied in examining selected dimensions of economic crisis in relation to important questions of crime and crime control. Specific themes discussed include: corporate crime, money laundering, foreclosures, and mortgage fraud. This volume provides timely analyses of the impact of the current economic crisis, innovative perspectives on problems of economy and finance, and criminological insights on often neglected aspects of social life.

Speaking to today's flourishing conversations on both law, morality, and religion, and the religious foundations of law, politics, and society, Common Law and Natural Law in America is an ambitious four-hundred-year narrative and fresh re-assessment of the varied American interactions of 'common law', the stuff of courtrooms, and 'natural law', a law built on human reason, nature, and the mind or will of God. It offers a counter-narrative to the dominant story of common law and natural law by drawing widely from theological and philosophical accounts of natural law, as well as primary and secondary work in legal and intellectual history. With consequences for today's natural-law proponents and critics alike, it explores the thought of the Puritans, Revolutionary Americans, and seminal legal figures including William Blackstone, Joseph Story, Christopher Columbus Langdell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the legal realists.

Recent controversies surrounding the war on terror and American intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan have brought rule of law rhetoric to a fevered pitch. While President Obama has repeatedly emphasized his Administration's commitment to transparency and the rule of law, nowhere has this resolve been so quickly and severely tested than with the issue of the possible prosecution of Bush Administration officials. While some worry that without legal consequences there will be no effective deterrence for the repetition of future transgressions of justice committed at the highest levels of government, others echo Obama's seemingly reluctant stance on launching an investigation into allegations of criminal wrongdoing by former President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, and members of the Office of Legal Counsel. Indeed, even some of the Bush Administration's harshest critics suggest that we should avoid such confrontations, that the price of political division is too high. Measured or partisan, scholarly or journalistic, clearly the debate about accountability for the alleged crimes of the Bush Administration will continue for some time. Using this debate as its jumping off point, When Governments Break the Law takes an interdisciplinary approach to the legal challenges posed by the criminal wrongdoing of governments. But this book is not an indictment of the Bush Administration; rather, the contributors take distinct positions for and against the proposition, offering revealing reasons and illuminating alternatives. The contributors do not ask the substantive question of whether any Bush Administration officials, in fact, violated the law, but rather the procedural, legal, political, and cultural questions of what it would mean either to pursue criminal prosecutions or to refuse to do so. By presuming that officials could be prosecuted, these essays address whether they should. When Governments Break the Law provides a valuable and timely commentary on what is likely to be an ongoing process of understanding the relationship between politics and the rule of law in times of crisis. Contributors: Claire Finkelstein, Lisa Hajjar, Daniel Herwitz, Stephen Holmes, Paul Horwitz, Nasser Hussain, Austin Sarat, and Stephen I. Vladeck.

Social movements provide the engine of legal change and law itself spurs social movement activity. This issue of "Studies in Law, Politics and Society" examines the legal life of social movements and their impact on law. The articles collected here take up social movements in several different nations, including France, South Africa and Canada, asking us to consider the way context is reflected in movement activities.

How evangelical activism in England contributes to the secularizing forces it seeks to challenge Over the past two decades, a growing number of Christians in England have gone to court to enforce their right to religious liberty. Funded by conservative lobby groups and influenced by the legal strategies of their American peers, these claimants—registrars who conscientiously object to performing the marriages of same-sex couples, say, or employees asking for exceptions to uniform policies that forbid visible crucifixes—highlight the uneasy truce between law and religion in a country that maintains an established Church but is wary of public displays of religious conviction. Representing God charts the changing place of public Christianity in England through the rise of Christian political activism and litigation. Based on two years of fieldwork split between a conservative Christian lobby group and a conservative evangelical church, Méadhbh McIvor explores the ideas and contested reception of this ostensibly American-inspired legal rhetoric. She argues that legal challenges aimed at protecting “Christian values� ultimately jeopardize those values, as moralities woven into the fabric of English national life are filtered from their quotidian context and rebranded as the niche interests of a cultural minority. By framing certain moral practices as specifically Christian, these activists present their religious convictions as something increasingly set apart from broader English culture, thereby hastening the secularization they seek to counter. Representing God offers a unique look at how Christian politico-legal activism in England simultaneously responds to and constitutes the religious life of a nation.

A timely and immensely scholarly work to explain how present doctrines of secularism could be infused, enriched by the notion of objective constitutionalism. The author's wide-ranging comparative research and his understanding of religious systems, as well as constitutions, judicial precedent and international law instruments, are most impressive. This is a work that deserves serious worldwide study and attention by academics, students, religious leaders and governments.' - Marinus Wiechers, Former Principal, University of South Africa'Constitutional arrangements relating to the relationship between religion and the law have over the years reflected a rich variety, ranging from the separation of religion and the law to the identity of religion and the law. Constitutionalism and Religion records the rich varieties of constitutional arrangements of religion in many countries of the world and in respect of a great variety of pragmatic features of our day-to-day lives, such as education, labour relations and the display of religious symbols.' - Johan D. van der Vyver, Emory University School of Law, US 'Francois Venter's study of Constitutionalism and Religion is a major contribution to the understanding of church-state relations in the modern age. This global comparative exploration of how governments need to engage with twenty-first century religious pluralism is refracted through the prism of the author's informed critique of the challenges faced in post-apartheid South Africa. This book is a handy road map when travelling through potentially hostile territory.' - Mark Hill QC, University of Pretoria, South Africa This topical book examines how the goals of constitutionalism - good and fair government - are addressed at a time when the multi-religious composition of countries' populations has never before been so pronounced. How should governments, courts and officials deal with this diversity? The widely accepted principle of treating others as you wish them to treat you and the universal recognition of human dignity speak against preferential treatment of any religion. Faced with severe challenges, this leads many authorities to seek refuge in secular neutrality. Set against the backdrop of globalized constitutionalism in a post-secular era, Francois Venter proposes engaged objectivity as an alternative to unachievable neutrality. Bringing together the history of church and state, the emergence of contemporary constitutionalism, constitutional comparison and the realities of globalization, this book offers a fresh perspective on the direction in which solutions to difficulties brought about by religious pluralism might be sought. Its wide-ranging comparative analyses and perspectives based on materials published in various languages provide a clear exposition of the range of religious issues with which the contemporary state is increasingly being confronted. Providing a compact but thorough historical and theoretical exposition, this book is an invaluable resource for students, constitutional scholars, judges and legal practitioners.

This volume of "Studies in Law, Politics, and Society" includes a special collection of chapters entitled "Making Sense of the Past: When History Meets Law." The articles in this symposium consider the ways in which history has shaped law and how we make sense of past events. In addition, the volume contains general articles that explore pressing legal issues such as the prison boom, First Amendment controversies, and the work of cause lawyers. As has long been the tradition with this series, Volume 53 illustrates the vibrancy of interdisciplinary legal scholarship throughout.

How does order emerge out of the multiplicity of bodies, objects, ideas and practices that constitute the urban? This book explores the relation between space, law and control in the contemporary city - and particularly in the context of urban 'mega events' - through a combined geographical and normative analysis. Informed by the recent spatial, affective and material 'turns' in the humanities and social sciences, Andrea Pavoni addresses this question by pursuing an innovative and trans-disciplinary approach, capable of accounting for the emergence of order in urban space both at the conceptual and empirical levels. Two overarching objectives are pursued. First, to account for the increasing convergence of logics, techniques and technologies of law, security and marketing into novel, potentially oppressive spatial configurations. Second, to envisage a consistent ethico-political strategy to counter this evolution, by rethinking originally and in radically spatial terms the notion of justice. Forging a sophisticated and original analysis, this book offers an analysis that will be of considerable interest to those working in critical urban geography, critical legal studies, critical event studies, surveillance and control studies.

This volume deals with the manifold ways in which histories are debated and indeed historicity and historiography themselves are interrogated via the narrative modes of the truth commissions. It traces the various medial responses (memoirs, fiction, poetry, film, art) which have emerged in the wake of the truth commissions. The 1990s and the 2000s saw a spate of so-called truth commissions across the Global South. From the inaugural truth commissions in post-juntas 1980s Latin America, to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up by the incoming post-apartheid government in South Africa and the twinned gacaca courts and National Unity and Reconciliation Commission in Rwanda and that in indigenous Australia, various truth commissions have sought to lay bare human rights abuses. The chapters in this volume explore how truth commissions crystallized a long tradition of dissenting and resisting cultures of memorialization in the public sphere across the Global South and provided a significant template for contemporary attempts to work through episodes of violence and oppression across the region. Drawing on studies from Latin America, Africa, Asia and Australia, this book illuminates the modes in which societies remember and negotiate with traumatic pasts. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of human rights, popular culture and art, literature, media, politics and history.

Basic freedoms cannot be abandoned in times of conflict, or can they? Are basic freedoms routinely forsaken during times when there are national security concerns? These questions present different conundrums for the legal profession, which generally values basic freedoms but is also part of the architecture of emergency legal frameworks. Unleashing the Force of Law uses multi-jurisdiction empirical data and draws on cause lawyering, political lawyering and Bourdieusian juridical field literature to analyze the invocation of legal norms aimed at the protection of basic freedoms in times of national security tensions. It asks three main questions about the protection of basic freedoms. First, when do lawyers mobilize for the protection of basic freedoms? Second, in what kind of mobilization do they engage? Third, how do the strategies they adopt relate to the outcomes they achieve? Covering the last five decades, the book focusses on the 1980s and the Noughties through an analysis of legal work for two groups of independence seekers in the 1980s, namely, Republican (mostly Catholic) separatists in Northern Ireland and Puerto Rican separatists in the US, and on post-9/11 issues concerning basic freedoms in both countries

China and Islam examines the intersection of two critical issues of the contemporary world: Islamic revival and an assertive China, questioning the assumption that Islamic law is incompatible with state law. It finds that both Hui and the Party-State invoke, interpret, and make arguments based on Islamic law, a minjian (unofficial) law in China, to pursue their respective visions of 'the good'. Based on fieldwork in Linxia, 'China's Little Mecca', this study follows Hui clerics, youthful translators on the 'New Silk Road', female educators who reform traditional madrasas, and Party cadres as they reconcile Islamic and socialist laws in the course of the everyday. The first study of Islamic law in China and one of the first ethnographic accounts of law in postsocialist China, China and Islam unsettles unidimensional perceptions of extremist Islam and authoritarian China through Hui minjian practices of law.

Is the death penalty a more effective deterrent than lengthy prison sentences? Does a judge's gender influence their decisions? Do independent judiciaries promote economic freedom? Answering such questions requires empirical evidence, and arguments based on empirical research have become an everyday part of legal practice, scholarship, and teaching. In litigation judges are confronted with empirical evidence in cases ranging from bankruptcy and taxation to criminal law and environmental infringement. In academia researchers are increasingly turning to sophisticated empirical methods to assess and challenge fundamental assumptions about the law.
As empirical methods impact on traditional legal scholarship and practice, new forms of education are needed for today's lawyers. All lawyers asked to present or assess empirical arguments need to understand the fundamental principles of social science methodology that underpin sound empirical research. An Introduction to Empirical Legal Research introduces that methodology in a legal context, explaining how empirical analysis can inform legal arguments; how lawyers can set about framing empirical questions, conducting empirical research, analyzing data, and presenting or evaluating the results. The fundamentals of understanding quantitative and qualitative data, statistical models, and the structure of empirical arguments are explained in a way accessible to lawyers with or without formal training in statistics.
Written by two of the world's leading experts in empirical legal analysis, drawing on years of experience in training lawyers in empirical methods, An Introduction to Empirical Legal Research will be an invaluable primer for all students, academics, or practicing lawyers coming to empirical research - whether they are embarking themselves on an empirical research project, or engaging with empirical arguments in their field of study, research, or practice.

Plausible Crime Stories is not only the first in-depth study of the history of sex offences in Mandate Palestine but it also pioneers an approach to the historical study of criminal law and proof that focuses on plausibility. Doctrinal rules of evidence only partially explain which crime stories make sense while others fail to convince. Since plausibility is predicated on commonly held systems of belief, it not only provides a key to the meanings individual social players ascribe to the law but also yields insight into communal perceptions of the legal system, self-identity, the essence of normality and deviance and notions of gender, morality, nationality, ethnicity, age, religion and other cultural institutions. Using archival materials, including documents relating to 147 criminal court cases, this socio-legal study of plausibility opens a window onto a broad societal view of past beliefs, dispositions, mentalities, tensions, emotions, boundaries and hierarchies.

This volume of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society brings together research by graduate students from universities in the United States and the United Kingdom. The work of these students was singled out by their teachers and advisors as showing unusual promise and marking out directions for the next generationA" of interdisciplinary legal scholars. The research collected here is often comparative. It is theoretically informed and rigorous in its methods. Taken together it shows breadth and excellence, and it signals the continuing vibrancy of interdisciplinary legal studies.

Fundamental rights are exploding across all areas of law in Europe. This rights revolution is transforming European judicial culture and the judge's political role at breakneck speed. Not only have fundamental rights become an integral part of litigation in the domestic and European courts, but their advent has provoked an ongoing revolution in French and European procedural, doctrinal, institutional and conceptual structures.
Grounded in comparative law and political science, this book tells the story of the rights revolution. Part of the story is social and intellectual. As the polity has become increasingly complicated both nationally and transnationally, fundamental rights have emerged as a lingua franca within and across European jurisdictions: they offer a pool of common legal terms that address the diversity of interests now litigating in the domestic and European courts.
But that is not the entire story. The fundamental rights revolution is also a product of the complex - and often competitive - inter-institutional dynamics that characterize the judicial arena in our ever more globalized legal space. European legal controversies increasingly play out at the jurisdictional intersection of a range of domestic and supranational high courts, which must interact and coordinate as never before. This growing inter-institutional interface has taken on a competitive logic and inflationary force of its own.
The result has been a group dynamic that has reinforced the ubiquity and preeminence of fundamental rights throughout the European legal field. Almost every European judicial player now faces powerful pressures to jump on the fundamental rights bandwagon or be left intellectually and institutionally behind. This has prompted a frantic race to master and lead the emergent fundamental rights regime.
In telling the story of the rights revolution, the book makes a substantial contribution to understanding the current dynamics of European judiciaries, and the depth of the impact of transnational law on domestic legal culture.

This book develops a responsible and practical method for evaluating the success, failure, or "crisis" of American civil-military relations among its political and uniformed elite. The author's premise is that currently there is no objectively fair way for the public at large or the strategic-level elites to assess whether the critical and often obscured relationships between Generals, Admirals, and Statesmen function as they ought to under the US constitutional system. By treating these relationships-in form and practice-as part of a wider principal (civilian)-agency (military) dynamic, the book tracks the "duties"-care, competence, diligence, confidentiality, scope of responsibility-and perceived shortcomings in the interactions between US civilian political authorities and their military advisors in both peacetime and in war.

This volume of "Studies in Law, Politics, and Society" brings together research on law's cultural life and on institutions and actors who translate interests, preferences, and values into legal policy. It offers perspectives from an interdisciplinary and international community and contains contributions from scholars of theology, political science, criminology, bio-ethics, and law in the United States, Israel, and Canada.

Trials are well known as paradigmatic legal events. Some attract wide attention; others mostly escape notice. Indeed in the United States trials have recently become rare, with some scholars bemoaning the death of the trial. This issue of "Studies in Law, Politics and Society" contains, along with two general interest articles, a symposium on the past, present, and future of the trial. It brings together the work of leading scholars to think about the nature, utility, and limits of trials. This work takes stock of the field, charts its progress, and points the way for its future development.

Rights and rights talk have a long and storied history and have occupied a crucial place in the ideology of liberal legalism. With the development of Critical Legal Studies in the 1970s and 80s, rights were subject to extensive critique. Yet not long after that critique rights were rehabilitated by feminists and Critical Race Theorists. Today, scholars are investigating the role of rights in social movements, in legal consciousness, in organizations, in the international arena, etc. This volume of "Studies in Law, Politics, and Society" contains a Special Issue on rights. It brings together the work of leading scholars to think about the nature, utility and limits of rights. This work takes stock of the field, charts its progress and points the way for its future development.

The law-based, political institutions in many democratic societies are being challenged by fast-growing populist movements, parties, and leaders. In other nations, the state is failing. These seismic changes call for greater attention to be paid to the role society plays in forming and challenging laws-and how the law copes with these challenges. Amitai Etzioni, one of the most respected thinkers in the US, argues for a new liberal communitarian approach as an effective response to populism. This recognizes that different members of the society have differing values, interests, and needs that cannot be fully reconciled to legislation in a populist age. The book considers the core challenge in a variety of contexts, including national security versus privacy, private sector responsibility, freedom of the press, campaign finance reform, regulatory law and the legal status of terrorists. Thus the book offers a timely discussion of key issues for contemporary society and the relationship of the law to the citizen in a fast-changing environment.

This book seeks to make an intervention into the ongoing debate about the scope and intensity of global copyright laws. While mapping out the primary actors in the context of globalization and the modern political economy of information ownership, the argument is made that alternatives to further expansion of copyright are necessary. By examining the multiple and competing interests in creating the legal regime of copyright law, this books attempts to map the political economy of copyright in the information age, critique the concentration of ownership that is intrinsic in the status quo, and provide an assessment of the state of the contemporary global copyright landscape and its futures. It draws upon the current narratives of copyright as produced by corporate, government, and political actors and frames these narratives as language games within a global political project to define how information and culture will be shared and exchanged in the future. The text problematizes the relationship of the state to culture, comments on the global flows of culture, and critiques the regulatory apparatus that is in place to commodify culture and align it with the contemporary nation-state. In the end, the possibility of non-commodified and more open futures are explored. The State of Copyright will be of particular interest for students and scholars of international political economy, law, political science, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, library sciences, and communication studies. It also will appeal to a growing popular audience that has taken an interest in the issues of copyright.

Countries emerging from violent conflict face difficult challenges about what the role of media should be in political transitions, particularly when attempting to build a new state and balance a difficult legacy. Media, Conflict, and the State in Africa discusses how ideas, institutions and interests have shaped media systems in some of Africa's most complex state and nation-building projects. This timely book comes at a turbulent moment in global politics as waves of populist protests gain traction, and concerns continue to grow about fake news, social media echo chambers, and the increasing role of both traditional and new media in waging wars or influencing elections. Focusing on comparative cases from a historical perspective and the choices and ideas that informed the approaches of some of Africa's leaders, including guerrilla commanders Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, Nicole Stremlau offers a unique political insight into the development of contemporary media systems in Africa.

Presenting an integrated approach to information exchange among law enforcement institutions within the EU, this book addresses the dilemma surrounding the need to balance the security of individuals and the need to protect their privacy and data. Providing the reader with a comprehensive analysis of information exchange tools, exploring their history, political background, the most recent legal modifications and the advantages and disadvantages of their use, it includes a comparison between different information exchange tools. Written by an author who has worked as a police officer, Home Affairs counsellor and academic, this is an important read for scholars working with EU Law, Criminal Procedure Law, and International Law as well as for practitioners who directly deal with international police cooperation or who perform criminal investigation both within and outside the EU.

The Formation of English Common Law provides a comprehensive overview of the development of early English law, one of the classic subjects of medieval history. This much expanded second edition spans the centuries from King Alfred to Magna Carta, abandoning the traditional but restrictive break at the Norman Conquest. Within a strong interpretative framework, it also integrates legal developments with wider changes in the thought, society, and politics of the time. Rather than simply tracing elements of the common law back to their Anglo-Saxon, Norman or other origins, John Hudson examines and analyses the emergence of the common law from the interaction of various elements that developed over time, such as the powerful royal government inherited from Anglo-Saxon England and land holding customs arising from the Norman Conquest. Containing a new chapter charting the Anglo-Saxon period, as well as a fully revised Further Reading section, this new edition is an authoritative yet highly accessible introduction to the formation of the English common law and is ideal for students of history and law.

This volume assembles in one place the work of scholars who are making key contributions to a new approach to the United Nations, and to global organizations and international law more generally. Anthropology has in recent years taken on global organizations as a legitimate source of its subject matter. The research that is being done in this field gives a human face to these world-reforming institutions. Palaces of Hope demonstrates that these institutions are not monolithic or uniform, even though loosely connected by a common organizational network. They vary above all in their powers and forms of public engagement. Yet there are common threads that run through the studies included here: the actions of global institutions in practice, everyday forms of hope and their frustration, and the will to improve confronted with the realities of nationalism, neoliberalism, and the structures of international power.