This is the first of two volumes announcing the emergence of the new legal realism as a field of study. At a time when the legal academy is turning to social science for new approaches, these volumes chart a new course for interdisciplinary research by synthesizing law on the ground, empirical research, and theory. Volume 1 lays the groundwork for this novel and comprehensive approach with an innovative mix of theoretical, historical, pedagogical, and empirical perspectives. Their empirical work covers such wide-ranging topics as the financial crisis, intellectual property battles, the legal disenfranchisement of African-American landowners, and gender and racial prejudice on law school faculties. The methodological blueprint offered here will be essential for anyone interested in the future of law-and-society.

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.

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 movement away from secularist practices and toward political Islam is a prominent trend across Muslim polities. Yet this shift remains under-theorized. Why do modern Muslim polities adopt policies that explicitly cater to religious sensibilities? How are these encoded in law and with what effects? Sadia Saeed addresses these questions through examining shifts in Pakistan's official state policies toward the rights of religious minorities, in particular the controversial Ahmadiyya community. Looking closely at the 'Ahmadi question', Saeed develops a framework for conceptualizing and explaining modern desecularization processes that emphasizes the critical role of nation-state formation, political majoritarianism, and struggles between 'secularist' and 'religious' ideologues in evolving political and legal fields. The book demonstrates that desecularization entails instituting new understandings of religion through processes and justifications that are quintessentially modern.

For approaching two decades, family courts have been accused of making life changing decisions about children and who they live with made in secret, away from the scrutiny of the public gaze. Recognising the force of these accusations, senior family courts judges have, over that time, implemented a raft of rule changes, pilot projects and judicial guidance aimed at making the family justice more accountable and transparent. But has any progress been made? Are there still suspicions that family judges make irrevocable, unaccountable decisions in private hearings? And if so, are those suspicions justified and what can be done to dispel them? In this important and timely new book, Clifford Bellamy, a recently retired family judge who has been at the sharp end of family justice during all these changes, attempts to answer those questions and more. He has spoken to leading journalists, judges and academic researchers to find out what the obstacles to open reporting are - be they legal, economic or cultural - and interweaves their insights with informed analysis on how the laws regulating family court reporting operate. Along the way he provides a comprehensive review of the raft of initiatives he has seen come and go, summarises the position now and uses this experience to suggest how this fundamental aspect of our justice system could adapt in the face of this criticism. Every professional working in the family justice system - lawyers, social workers, court staff and judges - as well as those who job it is to report on legal affairs, should read this informative, nuanced exposition of what open justice means and why it matters so much to those whose lives are upended by the family justice system.

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.

This volume of Studies in Law, Politics and Society brings together an international and interdisciplinary array of scholars to explore issues on the cutting edge of socio-legal research. They consider the complex connections of liberal democracy, human rights, governance in and through courts, the challenges terrorism poses to criminal law, and the problematics of global governance. Taken together, the chapters in this volume point to exciting new directions for legal scholars.

This book critically examines the COVID-19 pandemic and its legal and biological governance using a multidisciplinary approach. The perspectives reflected in this volume investigate the imbrications between technosphere and biosphere at social, economic, and political levels. The biolegal dimensions of our evolving understanding of "home" are analysed as the common thread linking the problem of zoonotic diseases and planetary health with that of geopolitics, biosecurity, bioeconomics and biophilosophies of the plant-animal-human interface. In doing so, the contributions collectively highlight the complexities, challenges, and opportunities for humanity, opening new perspectives on how to inhabit our shared planet. This volume will broadly appeal to scholars and students in anthropology, cultural and media studies, history, philosophy, political science and public health, sociology and science and technology studies.

Corrective and Distributive Justice: From Aristotle to Modern Times retraces the intricate history of the distinction between corrective and distributive justice. This distinction is elaborated in the 5th book of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which was rediscovered in Western Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries by the Scholastics and turned into a central topic in legal and theological scholarship. After a decline of interest in the wake of the enlightenment and secularization, a surprising revival of these notions of justice occurred in U.S. legal and philosophical discourse during the last four decades that has made this distinction a central issue in tort law, restitution and other important fields of private and public law. In literally hundreds of articles and a considerable number of books, the Aristotelian distinction has been elaborated, discussed, and applied.
Englard's unique contribution to this aspect of legal history grants the contemporary reader a historical perspective that is vital for a deepened understanding of the distinction and modern concerns. Organized chronologically, Englard's research covers: Aristotle, High Scholastics, Late Scholastics, Post-Scholastics, and Modernity. The relevant literature is notoriously difficult to access, not only because of its Latin language, but because of the physical rarity of the relevant books scattered throughout the world. This book offers the modern reader a touchstone synthesis of intellectual and legal history.

Nobody's Law shows how people - who are disappointed, disenchanted, and outraged about the justice system - gradually move away from law. Using detailed case studies and combining different theoretical perspectives, this book explores the legal consciousness of ordinary people, businessmen, and street-level bureaucrats in the Netherlands. The empirical research in this study tells an original and alternative narrative about the role of law in everyday life. While previous studies emphasize the law's hegemony and argue that it's 'all over', Hertogh shows that legal proliferation makes it harder for people to know, and subsequently identify with, the law. As a result, official law has become increasingly remote and irrelevant to many people. The central finding presented in this highly topical text is that these developments signal a process of 'legal alienation'- a gradual and mundane process with potentially serious consequences for the legitimacy of law. A timely and original study, this book will be of particular interest to scholars in the fields of law and society, socio-legal studies and legal theory.

The rule of law, an ideology of equality and universality that justified Britain's eighteenth-century imperial claims, was the product not of abstract principles but imperial contact. As the Empire expanded, encompassing greater religious, ethnic and racial diversity, the law paradoxically contained and maintained these very differences. This book revisits six notorious incidents that occasioned vigorous debate in London's courtrooms, streets and presses: the Jewish Naturalization Act and the Elizabeth Canning case (1753-54); the Somerset Case (1771-72); the Gordon Riots (1780); the mutinies of 1797; and Union with Ireland (1800). Each of these cases adjudicated the presence of outsiders in London - from Jews and Gypsies to Africans and Catholics. The demands of these internal others to equality before the law drew them into the legal system, challenging longstanding notions of English identity and exposing contradictions in the rule of 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.

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.

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 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.

This book examines the intersections between the ways that marriage was represented in eighteenth-century writing and art, experienced in society, and regulated by law. The interdisciplinary and comparative essays explore the marital experience beyond the 'matrimonial barrier' to encompass representations of married life including issues of spousal abuse, parenting, incest, infidelity and the period after the end of marriage, to include annulment, widowhood and divorce. The chapters range from these focuses on legal and social histories of marriage to treatments of marriage in eighteenth-century periodicals, to depictions of married couples and families in eighteenth-century art, to parallels in French literature and diaries, to representations of violence and marriage in Gothic novels, and to surveys of same-sex partnerships. The volume is aimed towards students and scholars working in the long eighteenth century, gender studies, women's writing, publishing history, and art and legal historians.

This excellent research review contains the very best studies that take an economic approach to the study of judicial behaviour. The authors hail from the disciplines of business, economics, history, law, and political science, and the topics they cover are equally varied. Subjects include the judges' motivations, judicial independence, precedent, judging on collegial courts and in the hierarchy of justice and the relationship between judges and the other government actors.

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

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.

This book explores the answers to fundamental questions about the human mind and human behaviour with the help of two ancient texts. The first is Oedipus Rex (Oedipus Tyrannus) by Sophocles, written in the 5th century BCE. The second is human DNA, with its origins around 4 billion years ago, and continuously revised by chance and evolution. With Sophocles as a guide, the authors take a journey into the Genomic era, an age marked by ever-expanding insights into the human genome. Over the course of this journey, the book explores themes of free will, fate, and chance; prediction, misinterpretation, and the burden that comes with knowledge of the future; self-fulfilling and self-defeating prophecies; the forces that contribute to similarities and differences among people; roots and lineage; and the judgement of oneself and others. Using Oedipus Rex as its lens, this novel work provides an engaging overview of behavioural genetics that demonstrates its relevance across the humanities and the social and life sciences. It will appeal in particular to students and scholars of genetics, education, psychology, sociology, and law.

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.

Difference, diversity and disagreement are inevitable features of our ethical, social and political landscape. This collection of new essays investigates the ways that various ethical and religious traditions have dealt with intramural dissent; the volume covers nine separate traditions: Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, liberalism, Marxism, South Asian religions and natural law. Each chapter lays out the distinctive features, history and challenges of intramural dissent within each tradition, enabling readers to identify similarities and differences between traditions. The book concludes with an Afterword by Michael Walzer, offering a synoptic overview of the challenge of intramural dissent and the responses to that challenge. Committed to dialogue across cultures and traditions, the collection begins that dialogue with the common challenges facing all traditions: how to maintain cohesion and core values in the face of pluralism, and how to do this in a way that is consistent with the internal ethical principles of the traditions.

The United States needs someone who represents the poor and disenfranchised. Someone who has a seat at the table for any discussions of policy, funding, or priorities in the administration of justice. The United States needs a Defender General. In these times of reckoning-at last-with America's original sin of slavery and racist policies, with police misconduct, and with mass-incarceration, many in our country ask, "What can we do?" In this powerful and insightful book, Andrea D. Lyon explicates what is wrong with the criminal justice system through clients' stories and historical perspective, and makes the compelling case for the need for reform at the center of the system; not just its edges. Lyon, suggests that we should create an office of the Defender General of the United States and give it the same level of importance as the Attorney General and the Solicitor General. Such an office would not be held by someone who represents law enforcement, or corporate America, but rather by someone who represents and advocates for accused individuals, collectively before the powers that be. A Defender General would raise his or her voice against injustices like those involving the unnecessary killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, or the Texas Supreme Court's refusal to let an innocent man, cleared by DNA, out of prison. The United States needs a Defender General.

The effects of COVID-19 are visited disproportionately on the already disadvantaged. This important text maps out ways in which those already disadvantaged have been affected by legal responses to COVID-19. Contributors tackle issues including virtual trials, adult social care, racism, tax and spending, education and more. They reflect on the implications of COVID-19 and express concerns with policy and practice developments and with the neutral version of the law and the economy which has taken root. Drawing on diverse resources, this text offers an account of the damage caused by legal responses to the pandemic and demonstrates how the future response can be positive and productive.