This book explores victims' views of plea negotiations and the level of input that they desire. It draws on the empirical findings of the first in-depth study of victims and plea negotiations conducted in Australia. Over the last 50 years, the criminal justice system has seen major changes in both the role that victims play in the justice process and in how the vast majority of criminal cases are finalised. Guilty pleas have become the norm, and many of these result from negotiations between the prosecutor and the defence. The extent to which the victim is one of the participating parties in plea negotiations however, is a question of law and of practice. Drawing from focus groups and surveys with victims of crime, Victims and Plea Negotiations seeks to privilege victims' voices and lived experiences of plea negotiations, to present their perspectives on five options for enhanced participation in this legal process. This book appeals to academics and students in the areas of law, criminology, sociology, victimology and legal studies, those who practice in the criminal justice system generally, those who work with victims, and policy makers.

In three parts, this volume in the AP-LS series explores the phenomena of captivity and risk management, guided and informed by the theory, method, and policy of psychological jurisprudence. The authors present a controversial thesis that demonstrates how the forces of captivity and risk management are sustained by several interdependent "conditions of control." These conditions impose barriers to justice and set limits on citizenship for one and all. Situated at the nexus of political/social theory, mental health law and jurisprudential ethics, the book examines and critiques constructs such as offenders and victims; self and society; therapeutic and restorative; health; harm; and community. So, too, are three "total confinement" case law data sets on which this analysis is based.
The volume stands alone in its efforts to systematically "diagnose" the moral reasoning lodged within prevailing judicial opinions that sustain captivity and risk management practices impacting: (1) the rights of juveniles found competent to stand criminal trial, the mentally ill placed in long-term disciplinary isolation, and sex offenders subjected to civil detention and community re-entry monitoring; (2) the often unmet needs of victims; and (3) the demands of an ordered society. Carefully balancing sophisticated insights with concrete and cutting-edge applications, the book concludes with a series of provocative, yet practical, recommendations for future research and meaningful reform within institutional practice, programming, and policy. The Ethics of Total Confinement is a thought-provoking and timely must-read for anyone interested in the ethical and legal issues regarding madness, citizenship, and social justice.

"It has become clear that there is no criminological exit from embrace of degrading punishments and practices to which our increasingly distorted risk perception commits us. Instead, the path forward must run through a return to the ethical and psychological roots of security and justice. TheEthics of Total Confinement is a quantum step forward in defining and advancing that path."--Jonathan Simon, Adrian A. Kragen Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, UC Berkeley School of Law
"This book boldly calls for a total transformation in the way the law deals with people who are confined because of their perceived depravity or dangerousness. It focuses on three outcast groups--juveniles tried as adults, people with mental illness subjected to hospitalization, and sex offenders committed as dangerous--and, based on an innovative analysis of the relevant caselaw and empirics, shows why current practices not only visit substantial harm on these people but also brutalize those who deprive them of liberty and damage the rest of us by feeding our basest, most uninformed fears. Relying on Aristotelian philosophy, therapeutic and restorative principles, and commonsense justice, the book persuasively argues that we must reorient the training and thinking of all major players in the system if our goal is to promote the maximum amount of human flourishing."--Christopher Slobogin, Milton Underwood Professor of Law, Vanderbilt University Law School
"The Ethics of Total Confinement: A Critique of Madness, Citizenship, and Social Justice deepens our understanding of how our legal system justifies its treatment of those it confines. By bridging gaps among relevant disciplines, the book clarifies to an interdisciplinary audience just how inadequate those justifications turn out to be when measured by psychological, ethical, or justice-based standards. The book's provocative conclusions and recommendations offer much food for thought and suggest potential directions for action."--Dennis Fox, Emeritus Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Psychology, University of Illinois at Springfield
"The Ethics of Total Confinement shows how captivity diminishes the keepers and the kept. It is a book that synthesises in creative new ways reformist visions of justice, virtue and the cultivation of habits of character. This is profound work that opens new paths to dignity, healing and social justice."--John Braithwaite, Australian Research Council Federation Fellow, Australian National University
"The Ethics of Total Confinement offers a useful and wide-ranging perspective grounded in psychological jurisprudence. With its emphasis on the harm done to those most vulnerable to extremes of risk-management, this volume makes a welcome addition to the literature on confinement."--Lorna Rhodes, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Washington
"The provocative thesis of this book develops psychological jurisprudence to conceptualize the ethics of existing total confinement practices, aspiring to greater justice and human flourishing for all. A timely intervention of this kind is most welcome."--George Pavlich, Associate Vice-President (Research), Professor of Law and Sociology, University of Alberta

This textbook offers comprehensive coverage of the Equality Act 2010 and deals also with the equality aspects of the Human Rights Act 1998 and European Convention on Human Rights. It encourages critical analysis of equality law to equip the reader with an understanding of the enduring challenges that frame equality law and contemporary responses to those challenges. New content includes a chapter on age discrimination and analysis of the Public Sector Equality Duty. Structured so as to be accessible to the student approaching discrimination law for the first time, the book is also sufficiently detailed and analytical to appeal to the well-informed reader, and to provide those engaged in research with a solid base for further independent study. For the undergraduate student studying discrimination law as a free-standing subject or as part of a wider course, the book provides a one-stop shop. This book is also a key core text for any postgraduate discrimination law course.

When a death is investigated by a coroner, what is the place of the family in that process? This accessibly written book draws together empirical, theoretical and historical perspectives to develop a rich, nuanced analysis of the contemporary inquest system in England and Wales. It investigates theories of kinship drawn from socio-legal research and analyses law, accountability and the legal process. Excerpts of conversations with coroners and officers offer real insights into how the role of family can be understood and who family is perceived to be, and how their participation fundamentally shapes the investigation into a death.

This book addresses the intersection of two current major concerns in Australia: law and justice responses to domestic violence - including harsher punitive measures - and the over-representation of Indigenous Australians in the criminal justice system, which are similar concerns in New Zealand, Canada and the US. Nancarrow re-conceptualises typologies of violence and provides a means of understanding and explaining female use of violence without undermining the hard-won gains of the women's movement. It does, however, argue for a paradigm shift, which has implications for every aspect of the system we have built to stop men's violence against women (law, police policy and practice, counselling and advocacy for victims, and interventions for those who perpetrate violence). The book is based on quantitative and qualitative research and explores the nature of Indigenous intimate partner violence and the types of violence that domestic violence law sought to address.

The question of tolerance and Islam is not a new one. Polemicists are certain that Islam is not a tolerant religion. As evidence they point to the rules governing the treatment of non-Muslim permanent residents in Muslim lands, namely the dhimmi rules that are at the center of this study. These rules, when read in isolation, are certainly discriminatory in nature. They legitimate discriminatory treatment on grounds of what could be said to be religious faith and religious difference. The dhimmi rules are often invoked as proof-positive of the inherent intolerance of the Islamic faith (and thereby of any believing Muslim) toward the non-Muslim. This book addresses the problem of the concept of 'tolerance' for understanding the significance of the dhimmi rules that governed and regulated non-Muslim permanent residents in Islamic lands. In doing so, it suggests that the Islamic legal treatment of non-Muslims is symptomatic of the more general challenge of governing a diverse polity. Far from being constitutive of an Islamic ethos, the dhimmi rules raise important thematic questions about Rule of Law, governance, and how the pursuit of pluralism through the institutions of law and governance is a messy business. As argued throughout this book, an inescapable, and all-too-often painful, bottom line in the pursuit of pluralism is that it requires impositions and limitations on freedoms that are considered central and fundamental to an individual's well-being, but which must be limited for some people in some circumstances for reasons extending well beyond the claims of a given individual. A comparison to recent cases from the United States, United Kingdom, and the European Court of Human Rights reveals that however different and distant premodern Islamic and modern democratic societies may be in terms of time, space, and values, legal systems face similar challenges when governing a populace in which minority and majority groups diverge on the meaning and implication of values deemed fundamental to a particular polity.

Most people would agree that tax systems ought to be 'just', and perhaps a great deal more just than they are at present. What is more difficult is to agree on what tax justice is. This book considers a range of different approaches to, and ideas about the nature of tax justice and covers areas such as: - imbalances in international tax arrangements that deprive developing countries of revenues from natural resources and allow wealthy taxpayers to use tax havens; - protests against governments and large business; - attempts to influence policy through more technical means such as the OECD's Base Erosion and Profits Shifting project; - interpersonal matters, such as the ways in which tax systems disadvantage women and minorities; - the application of wider philosophical or economic theories to tax systems. The purpose of the book is not to iron out these underlying differences into a grand theory, but rather to gain a more precise understanding of how and why we disagree about tax justice. In doing so the editors are assisted by a stellar cast of contributors from four continents, with a wide variety of views and experiences but a common interest in this central question of how to agree and disagree about tax justice. This is, of course, not only an intellectual exercise but also a necessary precursor to achieving real-world change.

This book examines the role of law in regulating and influencing the lived experiences of posted workers in Europe. The ‘posting’ of workers is an unusual type of labour mobility, where workers are hired out to provide a specific service in another country. Although it involves a specialised area of law, it is one that serves as a magnifying glass for the long-standing tension between the economic and social dimensions of law’s regulatory role. As an atypical form of labour migration, posting also touches upon broader themes concerning the role and purpose of labour law in a changing world of work. Taking up these themes through interviews with posted workers, lawyers and employers, the book adopts a sociolegal approach to consider how the law shapes the precarious lived experiences of posted workers in Europe. Giving voice to those with first-hand experience, the book goes on to propose solutions that might address the precarity of posted work. This book will be of interest to scholars, researchers and practitioners working in the areas of labour law, sociolegal studies, EU law, and migration.

This book is dedicated to a topic which has for a long time lacked the attention it deserves within the academic world. It intends to address in a coherent and comprehensive manner the problem of the environmental rights of the child, which are not identical to the ones of adults whose environmental rights have been appraised from a general point of view. In the absence of any international law instrument explicitly granting a child the right to a clean environment, drawing on an extensive and original analysis of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the practice of its monitoring body, this book undertakes an assessment of the extent to which these challenges may be overcome through a greater engagement between international law on the rights of the child and international environmental law. The result is the first comprehensive study on the manner in which these two mutually reinforcing legal regimes can interact to strengthen the protection of children's environmental human rights at stake in the increased strategic environmental and climate litigations at both the national and international level. The book is recommended reading for, amongst others, policy makers, international environmental lawyers and human rights lawyers and practitioners. Additionally, lecturers, students and researchers from a range of disciplines will also gain from seeing how new legal scholarship and intertwined branches of international law contribute to the continual development of the living rights of the human rights conventions. Francesca Ippolito is Associate Professor of International Law in the Department of Political and Social Science of the University of Cagliari, Italy. She holds the Jean Monnet Chair on European Climate of Change - REACT for 2021-2024.

In Children's Rights Under the Law, Professor Samuel M. Davis examines ways in which the law relates to children, from private law (torts, contracts, property, child labor, and emancipation) to public law (First Amendment rights of children in school, abortion decision-making for children, school discipline, compulsory school attendance, and regulation of obscenity). Professor Davis discusses the major Supreme Court decisions involving the parent-child-state relationship. He describes issues of medical decision-making for children, personal freedoms of children, and property entitlements of children, and addresses issues that arise in the educational context, or "school law." Professor Davis also covers child neglect and abuse, and summarizes major Supreme Court cases in the juvenile justice area, discussing the broad jurisdiction of the juvenile court, arrest and search and seizure as they apply to children, and police interrogation of children. Finally, he examines how some cases are prosecuted as criminal cases in adult court, issues related to the adjudicatory process (akin to the trial in adult court), and issues related to disposition in juvenile court (akin to the sentencing phase of criminal proceedings).

The essays in this volume take on the challenge of explaining the current formation of the relation between sovereignty, law and violence in what is termed 'Democracy's Empire'.
Contains a situated discussion of the institution of democracy and related
juridico-political problems
Examines the historical and philosophical legacies which inform Democracy's Empire - such as the Roman Republic, the separation between Church and State in the enlightenment, formations of revolutionary violence, and the relation between norm and exception
Poses the problem of violence and death at the heart of the institution of democracy including examples such as South Africa and Iraq
Offers a mixture of historical and philosophical treatment of democracy as a juridical problem of constitutional violence

Court decisions are typically seen as one-off interventions relating to an incident in a person's life, but a legal decision can impact on the person as they were and the person they will become. This book is the first to explore the interactions of the law with the life course in order to understand the complex life journey as a whole. Jonathan Herring reveals how the law privileges 'middle age' to the detriment of the whole life story and explains why an understanding of the life course is important for lawyers. Relevant to those working in family law, elder law, medical law and ethics, jurisprudence, gender and the law, it will promote new thinking by exploring the engagement of the law with the life course of the self.

An appreciation of the development and evolution of the United Kingdom constitution is vital in order to understand the existing nature of the constitution, proposals for reform and the many complex challenges it faces. Ann Lyon presents a vivid overview of fourteen hundred years of English legal history taking us on a rich journey from a feudal society to the fractured Union of the present day. Drawing on key constitutional themes, Constitutional History of the United Kingdom provides insight and context to modern constitutional problems. This second edition has been revised and updated to bring coverage up to the present day, including parliamentary reform; the Scottish referendum on independence and further drives for enhanced devolution; the effect of EU membership on the UK Constitution; and the impact of the European Convention on Human Rights and the Human Rights Act 1998. Constitutional History of the United Kingdom offers an accessible and highly valuable overview for students with little or no prior knowledge of British history.

Ronan McCrea offers the first comprehensive account of the role of religion within the public order of the European Union. He examines the facilitation and protection of individual and institutional religious freedom in EU law and the means through which the Union facilitates religious input and influence over law. In addition, the book draws attention to the limitations on religious influence over law and politics that are required by the Union. It shows the extent to which such limitations are identified as fundamental elements of the EU's public order and as prerequisites for membership. The Union seeks to balance its predominantly Christian religious heritage with an equally strong secular and humanist tradition by facilitating religion as a form of cultural identity while simultaneously limiting its political influence. Such balancing takes place in the context of the Union's limited legitimacy and its commitment to respect for Member State cultural autonomy. Deference towards the cultural role of religion at Member State level enables culturally-entrenched religions to exercise a greater degree of influence within the Union's public order than "outsider" faiths that lack a comparable cultural role. Placing the Union's approach to religion in the context of broader historical and sociological trends around religion in Europe and of contemporary debates around secularism, equal treatment, and the role of Islam in Europe, McCrea sheds light on the interaction between religion and EU law in the face of a shifting religious demographic.

For many Europeans, the persistence of America's death penalty is a stark reminder of American otherness. The practice of state killing is an archaic relic, a hollow symbol that accomplishes nothing but reflects a puritanical, punitive culture - bloodthirsty in its pursuit of retribution. In debating capital punishment, the usual rhetoric points to America's deviance from the western norm: civilized abolition and barbaric retention; 'us' and 'them'. This remarkable new study by a leading social thinker sweeps aside the familiar story and offers a compelling interpretation of the culture of American punishment. It shows that the same forces that led to the death penalty's abolition in Europe once made America a pioneer of reform. That democracy and civilization are not the enemies of capital punishment, though liberalism and humanitarianism are. Making sense of today's differences requires a better understanding of American society and its punishments than the standard rhetoric allows. Taking us deep inside the world of capital punishment, the book offers a detailed picture of a peculiar institution - its cultural meaning and symbolic force for supporters and abolitionists, its place in the landscape of American politics and attitudes to crime, its constitutional status and the legal struggles that define it. Understanding the death penalty requires that we understand how American society is put together - the legacy of racial violence, the structures of social power, and the commitment to radical, local majority rule. Shattering current stereotypes, the book forces us to rethink our understanding of the politics of death and of punishment in America and beyond.

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.

Sex work occupies a legally gray space in Johannesburg, South Africa, and police attitudes towards it are inconsistent and largely unregulated. As I. India Thusi argues in Policing Bodies, this results in both room for negotiation that can benefit sex workers and also extreme precarity in which the security police officers provide can be offered and taken away at a moment's notice. Sex work straddles the line between formal and informal. Attitudes about beauty and subjective value are manifest in formal tasks, including police activities, which are often conducted in a seemingly ad hoc manner. However, high-level organizational directives intended to regulate police obligations and duties toward sex workers also influence police action and tilt the exercise of discretion to the formal. In this liminal space, this book considers how sex work is policed and how it should be policed. Challenging discourses about sexuality and gender that inform its regulation, Thusi exposes the limitations of dominant feminist arguments regarding the legal treatment of sex work. This in-depth, historically informed ethnography illustrates the tension between enforcing a country's laws and protecting citizens' human rights.

This book shares state-of-the-art insights on judicial decision-making from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. It offers in-depth coverage of the forefront of the field and reviews the most important issues and discussions connected with an empirical approach to judicial decision-making. It also addresses the challenges of judicial psychology to the ideal of rule of law and explores the promise and perils of applying artificial intelligence in law. In closing, it offers empirically-driven guidance on ways to improve the quality of legal reasoning.

Civil libertarians characterize prostitution as a "victimless crime," and argue that it ought to be legalized. Feminist critics counter that prostitution is not victimless, since it harms the people who do it. Civil libertarians respond that most women freely choose to do this work, and that it is paternalistic for the government to limit a person's liberty for her own good. In this book Peter de Marneffe argues that although most prostitution is voluntary, paternalistic prostitution laws in some form are nonetheless morally justifiable. If prostitution is commonly harmful in the way that feminist critics maintain, then this argument for prostitution laws is not objectionably moralistic and some prostitution laws violate no one's rights. Paternalistic prostitution laws in some form are therefore consistent with the fundamental principles of contemporary liberalism.

The idea of justice and the reality of justice are two very different things. Just Interests examines both concepts, offering accounts from lay people and legal officials to explore how the goals and interests of victims of crimes can be accommodated within the criminal justice process. Robyn Holder challenges the typical classification of ?victim? for those who have been victimized by violence, and re-positions them as members of a political community with diverse interests ? both private and public. Departing from conventional approaches that see victims as a problem for law to contain, Holder draws on democratic principles of inclusion and deliberation to posit a criminal justice approach that mobilizes citizens to produce justice in their ordinary lives. This book will be of fundamental importance for analysts and advocates in governmental and non-governmental organizations to understand victims as citizens first and their engagements with criminal justice as citizenship practices. It will also be a valuable read for socio-legal scholars and researchers examining the constitutive nature of peoples and their public criminal law.

This book makes the legal and political case for Indigenous constitutional recognition through a constitutionally guaranteed First Nations voice, as advocated by the historic Uluru Statement from the Heart. It argues that a constitutional amendment to empower Indigenous peoples with a fairer say in laws and policies made about them and their rights, is both constitutionally congruent and politically achievable. A First Nations voice is deeply in keeping with the culture, design and philosophy of Australia's federal Constitution, as well as the long history of Indigenous advocacy for greater empowerment and self-determination in their affairs. Morris explores the historical, political, theoretical and international contexts underpinning the contemporary debate, before delving into the constitutional detail to craft a compelling case for change.

Digital ecosystems formed on the basis of digital platforms are significantly transforming modern reality. Today it is difficult to imagine life without LinkedIn, Facebook, or Amazon. The total income generated by them is estimated at trillions of dollars. Digital platforms are the main driving force of the digital economy. The impact and growth of digital platforms on social and economic processes today is difficult to overestimate. The pandemic has further deepened their influence on society, as almost all social communication and economic activity has moved to online format on digital platforms. The growth of the share of digital platforms in various segments of the economy was so rapid that regulators around the world were not ready for such large-scale transformations. All this has caused a number of crisis phenomena, when IT giants have grown into an independent branch of "power", which has direct access to the personal and financial data of millions of citizens, and moreover, have the opportunity to directly influence them. This monograph is a unique publication in which, for the first time, a large-scale and sufficiently deep team of experts and scientists from various countries of the world studied in detail the multidimensional phenomenon of the "platform economy" and the measures taken by states to regulate these processes. The book will be interesting to a wide range of readers interested in the problems of the development of digital platforms and the developing branch of law and science - the law of digital platforms.

It is widely claimed that we are facing a 'demographic time bomb' with an increasing older population and a decreasing working population. On the whole there are three conflicting attitudes in society towards older people. Firstly, there are those who see older people as a 'problem': how can we afford their care? Will the NHS be crippled by the expense of caring for older people? Secondly, there are those who are concerned by the maltreatment of older people: how can we protect older people from abuse? How can we be sure they are receiving adequate health care? Finally, there are those who argue that society is squandering the resources that older people can offer and seek ways to empower them to play a more active role in community life. These conflicting views of how to approach the 'problem' of older people are also reflected in the mixed response of the law. This book presents possible solutions to these problems and highlights the need not only to protect older people from abuse and poverty in order to ensure that they have a dignified old age, but also the need to empower older people to live their final years in an active and fulfilling way.

Even though legal aid is available for people seeking asylum, there is uneven access to advice across Britain. Based on empirical research, this book offers fresh thinking on what has gone wrong in the legal aid market. It presents a rare picture of the barristers, solicitors and caseworkers practising immigration law in charities and private firms. In doing so, this book examines supply and demand and illuminates what constitutes high-quality legal aid work/provision, subsequent conflicts with financial rationality and how practitioners resolve these issues. Challenging existing legal aid policy, this book presents innovative insights to ensure public service markets around the globe function well for all those involved.

This book addresses historical issues of colonialism and race, which influenced the formation of multicultural society in Mauritius. During the 19th century, Mauritius was Britain's prime sugar-producing colony, yet, unlike the West Indies, its history has remained significantly under-researched. The modern demographic of multi-ethnic Mauritius is unusual as, in the absence of an indigenous people, descendants of colonists, slaves and indentured labourers constitute the majority of the island's population today. Thus, it may be said that the Mauritian nation was "assembled" during the period in question. This work draws on an in-depth examination of the two labour systems through which the island came to be populated: slavery and indenture. In studying the relevant laws, four legal events of historical importance within the context of these two labour systems are identified: the abolition of the slave trade, the abolition of slavery, private indentured labour migration and state-regulated indenture. This book is notable in that it presents a legal analysis of core historical events, thus straddling the line between two disciplines, and covers both slavery and indentured labour in Mauritian history. Mauritius, as an originally uninhabited island, presents a rare case study for inquiries into colonial legacies, multiculturalism and race consciousness. The book will be a valuable resource to scholars worldwide in the fields of slavery, indenture and the legal apparatus of forced labour.