Sociolinguistics and the Legal Process is an introduction to language, law and society for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students. Its central focus is the exploration of what sociolinguistic research can tell us about how language works and doesn't work in the legal process. Written for readers who may not have prior knowledge of sociolinguistics or the law, the book has an accessible style combined with discussion questions and exercises as well as topics for assignments, term papers, theses and dissertations. A wide range of legal contexts are investigated, including courtroom hearings, police interviews, lawyer interviews as well as small claims courts, mediation, youth justice conferencing and indigenous courts. The final chapter looks at how sociolinguists can contribute to the legal process: as expert witnesses, through legal education, and through investigating the role of language in the perpetuation of inequality in and through the legal process.

After thirty years of Mao era (1949-1979) which was struggle-based, the Communist Party of China has begun to change its position as a pioneering revolutionary party, evolving into a universal ruling party that transcends class interests. Meanwhile, administrative and judicial reforms oriented toward a more efficient, serving government and the rule of law have been actively carried out. As the earliest work on constructive jurisprudence of new proceduralism in China, this book elaborates on the ideological confrontation on the "direction of China". It includes academic debates on politics and law which the author has been involved in, and top-level institutional design in China. Besides, this book introduces, analyzes and evaluates the focus of Chinese contemporary jurisprudence, making some critical summarizing propositions on the practical experiences. A review of Western contemporary jurisprudence and the forefront of legal research is also covered, aiming to provide ideological resources for the rule of law in China. Scholars and students in Chinese legal and social transformation studies will be attracted by this book. Furthermore, it will help different civilizations conduct rational dialogues on justice and order.

This title was first published in 2003. The Logic of Equality proposes a formal-logical method for examining the indeterminacy of legal discourse, using the example of the non-discrimination norm. It shows that the indeterminacy of a legal concept does not mean that it is completely chaotic - the indeterminacy of the non-discrimination norm arises out of, and presupposes, a determinate formal structure, which remains fixed and constant both within and across jurisdictions, regardless of institutional or doctrinal differences. To illustrate the argument, cases are presented from a variety of jurisdictions including the United States Supreme Court, the European Court of Human Rights, the European Court of Justice, and the German Constitutional Court. The book is aimed at theorists who are interested in the analysis of legal discourse, including comparative legal scholars and those who specialise in human rights and/or discrimination law.

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 book provides a systematic and interdisciplinary examination of law and legal institutions in Malaysia. It examines legal issues from historical, social, and political perspectives, and discusses the role of law in relation to Malaysian multiculturalism, religion, politics, and society. It shows how the Malaysian legal system is at the heart of debates about how to deal with the country's problems, which include ethnic and religious divisions, uneven and unsustainable development, and political authoritarianism; and it argues that the Malaysian legal system has much to teach other plural polities, nations within the common law tradition, and federal states.

This book explores the implications of European and Eurasian integration projects for the constitutional orders of post-Soviet countries. On the one hand, the process of Eurasian integration, culminating in the establishment of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), led to the creation of new institutions and mechanisms influencing the domestic legal order of the participating countries. On the other hand, the process of European integration, epitomised through the European Union (EU), constitutes an important source of reference for domestic constitutional developments in the countries which recently concluded a new generation of Association Agreements with the EU. This book analyses the implications of both processes. The book addresses the relevant experience of the countries from Central and Eastern Europe with transitional constitutionalism, mapping out the significance of European and Eurasian integration for protecting the rule of law in the post-Soviet space and identifying the constitutional implications and challenges of the EAEU and the new generation of Association Agreements. It also provides detailed country reports on national constitutional orders in the post-Soviet space and their adaptability to regional integration projects, authored by leading academics from the countries concerned, providing a number of general reflections about the evolution of post-Soviet constitutions in light of European and Eurasian integration projects.

This book critically confronts perceptions that social media has become a 'wasteland' for young people. Law has become preoccupied with privacy, intellectual property, defamation and criminal behaviour in and through social media. In the case of children and youth, this book argues, these preoccupations - whilst important - have disguised and distracted public debate away from a much broader, and more positive, consideration of the nature of social media. In particular, the legal tendency to consider social media as 'dangerous' for young people - to focus exclusively on the need to protect and control their online presence and privacy, whilst tending to suspect, or to criminalise, their use of it - has obscured the potential of social media to help young people to participate more fully as citizens in society. Drawing on sociological work on the construction of childhood, and engaging a wide range of national and international legal material, this book argues that social media may yet offer the possibility of an entirely different - and more progressive -conceptualisation of children and youth.

Contributions to Law, Philosophy and Ecology: Exploring Re-Embodiments is a preliminary contribution to the establishment of re-embodiments as a theoretical strand within legal and ecological theory, and philosophy. Re-embodiments are all those contemporary practices and processes that exceed the epistemic horizon of modernity. As such, they offer a plurality of alternative modes of theory and practice that seek to counteract the ecocidal tendencies of the Anthropocene. The collection comprises eleven contributions approaching re-embodiments from a multiplicity of fields, including legal theory, eco-philosophy, eco-feminism and anthropology. The contributions are organized into three parts: 'Beyond Modernity', 'The Sacred Dimension' and 'The Legal Dimension'. The collection is opened by a comprehensive introduction that situates re-embodiments in theoretical context. Whilst closely bound with embodiment and new materialist theory, this book contributes a unique voice that echoes diverse political processes contemporaneous to our times. Written in an elegant and accessible language, the book will appeal to undergraduates, postgraduates and established scholars alike seeking to understand and take re-embodiments further, both politically and theoretically.

In recent decades, the external action of the European Union (EU) has been undergoing considerable change. An expansion of the EU's external policy portfolio can be observed in many areas as previous policies for internal purposes - such as competition, energy, the environment, justice and home affairs or monetary governance but also gender, science, culture or higher education - have developed external dimensions. This book addresses the EU's potential to become a more joined-up global actor in its external engagement. It uses a single and innovative analytical framework to examine three clusters of policies: EU internal sectoral and cross-cutting policies with long-standing external engagement, those which have been undergoing considerable change, and originally internal policies whose external dimensions are comparatively more recent. It identifies key explanatory factors for the emergence of (certain forms of) EU external engagement and identifies patterns of the evolving relations between EU internal and external sectoral policies. As such, the book examines and assesses exciting new empirical and theoretical research avenues into European integration studies and offers insights into the extent to which the EU may be considered a more joined-up global actor developing sectoral diplomacies. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students as well as practitioners in the fields of European Union politics, European Union foreign policy, European Politics, diplomacy studies, and more broadly law and international relations.

The European Union (EU) has emerged as a key actor in the global investment regime since the 1980s. At the same time, international investment policy and agreements, which govern international investment liberalisation, treatment and protection through investor-to-state dispute settlement, have become increasingly contentious in the European public debate. This book provides an accessible introduction to international investment policy and seeks to explain how the EU became an actor in the global investment regime. It offers a detailed analysis of the EU's participation in all major trade and investment negotiations since the 1980s and EU-internal competence debates to identify the causes behind the EU's growing role in this policy domain. Building on principal-agent and historical institutionalist models of incremental institutional change, the book shows that Commission entrepreneurship was instrumental in the emergence of the EU as a key actor in the global investment regime. It refutes business-centred liberal intergovernmental explanations, which suggest that business lobbying made the Member States accept the EU's growing role and competence in this domain. The book lends support to supranational and challenges intergovernmental thinking on European Integration. This text will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners of European and regional integration, EU foreign relations, EU trade and international investment law, business lobbying, and more broadly of international political economy.

This book is the first to approach Jacques Ranciere's work from a legal perspective. A former student of Louis Althusser, Ranciere is one of the most important contemporary French philosophers of recent decades: offering an original and path-breaking way to think politics, democracy and aesthetics. Ranciere's work has received wide and increasing critical attention, but no study exists so far that reflects on the wider implications of Ranciere for law and for socio-legal studies. Although Ranciere does not pay much specific attention to law-and there is a strong temptation to identify law with what he terms the "police order"-much of Ranciere's historical work highlights the creative potential of law and legal language, with important legal implications and ramifications. So, rather than excavate the Rancierean corpus for isolated statements about the law, this volume reverses such a method and asks: what would a Ranciere-inspired legal theory look like? Bringing together specialists and scholars in different areas of law, critical theory and philosophy, this rethinking of law and socio-legal studies through Ranciere provides an original and important engagement with a range of contemporary legal topics, including constituent power and democracy, legal subjectivity, human rights, practices of adjudication, refugees, the nomos of modernity, and the sensory configurations of law. It will, then, be of considerable interest to those working in these areas.

Who has what and why in our societies is a pressing issue that has prompted explanation and exposition by philosophers, politicians and jurists for as long as societies and intellectuals have existed. It is a primary issue for a society to tackle this and these answers have been diverse. This collection of essays approaches some of these questions and answers to shed light on neglected approaches to issues of distribution and how these issues have been dealt with historically, socially, conceptually, and practically. The volume moves away from the more dominating and traditionally cast understandings of distributive justice and shows novel and unique ways to approach distributive issues and how these can help enlighten our course of action and thought today by creating new pathways of understanding. The editors and contributors challenge readers by exploring the role and importance of restorative justice within distributive justice, exploring the long shadow of practices of trusteeship, and concepts of social and individual rights and obligations in welfare and economic systems, social protection/provision schemes, egalitarian practices and post-colonial African political thought. Distributive Justice Debates in Political and Social Thought empowers the reader to cast a more critical and historically complete light on the idea of a fair share and the implications it has on societies and the individuals who comprise them.

As Eurasia and the adjacent territories become more important to the world, there is increasing interest from international powers, accompanied by attempts to give institutional form to traditional economic and security links within the region. This book includes a range of substantive work from scholars based in the region, offering contrasting perspectives on the process of Eurasian integration and its place in the world. Chapters consider economic, political, social and security developments, with notable studies of the major countries involved in the development of the Eurasian Economic Union. The work also examines the connections between the region and China, greater Asia and the European Union. It outlines the varying dynamics, with populations growing in Central Asia while at best stagnant elsewhere. The book discusses the increasing strategic significance of the region and explores how the new post-Soviet states are growing in national cohesion and political self-confidence. Above all, the book examines the concept of 'Eurasia', outlining the debates about the concept and how various aspects of the legacy of 'Eurasianism' contribute to contemporary plans for integration. The book argues that although regional integration is very much a popular idea in our age, with the potential for economic benefits and increased international influence, in practice contemporary projects for Eurasian integration have been highly ambiguous and contested. Nevertheless, significant steps have been taken towards the creation of the Eurasian Economic Union. The book analyses developments to date, noting the achievements as well as the challenges.

JirA PribA!n's book contributes to the field of systems theory of law in the context of European legal and political integration and constitution-making. It puts recent European legislative efforts and policies, especially the EU enlargement process, in the context of legal theory and philosophy. Furthermore, the author shows that the system of positive law has a symbolic meaning, reflecting how it also contributes to the semantics of political identity, democratic power and moral values, as well as the complex relations between law, politics and morality.

This book explores the challenges of globalisation and digitalisation to labour law and social security under three headings. The first, "The changing foundations of labour law" focuses on the law itself. Here the authors discuss how a changing political setting influences the very foundations of contemporary labour law. The contributions in the second section, "Precarious work - the new normative model?", deal with the challenges that various new business models put to regulating working life and social welfare. The contributions in the final section, "New forms of labour mobility", treat the difficulties related to the protection of workers who move over borders between countries and continents. The book is a contribution to the ongoing debate on the future of labour law.

What should be the primary goals of a judicial appointments system, and how much weight should be placed on diversity in particular? Why is achieving a diverse judiciary across the UK taking so long? Is it time for positive action? What role should the current judiciary play in the appointment of our future judges? There is broad agreement within the UK and other common law countries that diversity raises important questions for a legal system and its officials, but much less agreement about the full implications of recognising diversity as an important goal of the judicial appointments regime. Opinions differ, for example, on the methods, forms, timing and motivations for judicial diversity. To mark the tenth anniversary of the creation of the Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC) in England and Wales, this collection includes contributions from current and retired judges, civil servants, practitioners, current and former commissioners on the JAC and leading academics from Australia, Canada, South Africa and across the UK. Together they provide timely and authoritative insights into past, current and future debates on the search for diversity in judicial appointments. Topics discussed include the role and responsibility of independent appointment bodies; assessments of the JAC's first ten years; appointments to the UK Supreme Court; the pace of change; definitions of 'merit' and 'diversity'; mandatory retirement ages; the use of ceiling quotas; and the appropriate role of judges and politicians in the appointments process.

Labor law is widely considered to be in crisis by scholars of the field. This crisis has an obvious external dimension - labor law is attacked for impeding efficiency, flexibility, and development; vilified for reducing employment and for favoring already well placed employees over less fortunate ones; and discredited for failing to cover the most vulnerable workers and workers in the "informal sector." These are just some of the external challenges to labor law. There is also an internal challenge, as labor lawyers themselves increasingly question whether their discipline is conceptually coherent, relevant to the new empirical realities of the world of work, and normatively salient in the world as we now know it.
This book responds to such fundamental challenges by asking the most fundamental questions: What is labor law for? How can it be justified? And what are the normative premises on which reforms should be based? There has been growing interest in such questions in recent years. In this volume the contributors seek to take this body of scholarship seriously and also to move it forward. Its aim is to provide, if not answers which satisfy everyone, intellectually nourishing food for thought for those interested in understanding, explaining and interpreting labor laws - whether they are scholars, practitioners, judges, policy-makers, or workers and employers.

In Rethinking EU Consumer Law, the authors analyse the development of EU consumer law on the basis of a number of clear themes, which are then traced through specific areas. Recurring themes include the artificiality of the EU's consumer image, the problems created by the drive towards maximum harmonisation, and the unexpected effects EU Consumer Law has had on national law. The book argues that EU Consumer Law has the potential of enhancing the protecting of consumers throughout the EU and could offer a model for consumer law elsewhere in the world, but in order to unlock this potential, there needs to be a rethink with regard to the EU's approach to consumer law and policy.

The European integration project currently faces profound political, economic, legal, and societal challenges. These challenges seem increasingly to overburden the European Union as well as the cohesion among the Member States, and therefore pose a serious threat to the integration project. The EU faces a major task in coping with this situation and it is one that calls for new approaches and ideas This book addresses the major challenges confronting the EU, analyses the consequences for the integration project, and develops fresh perspectives on the EU's future prospects for coping with the most debated, current and upcoming issues, such as the rise of Euroscepticism or the contested idea of an 'ever-closer union'. Renowned experts in European Studies from the fields of political science, law, economics and sociology provide an interdisciplinary perspective on the different dimensions of the EU's crisis-laden situation and question whether the EU's existing problem-solving mechanisms and methods are sufficient to address the imminent tasks. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of EU Politics, European Politics, European Governance, and more broadly European law, history and the wider social sciences.

How is law mobilized and who has the power and authority to construct its meaning? This important volume examines this question as well as how law is constituted and reconfigured through social processes that frame both its continuity and transformation over time. The volume highlights how power is deployed under conditions of legal pluralism, exploring its effects on livelihoods and on social institutions, including the state. Such an approach not only demonstrates how the state, through its various development programs and organizational structures, attempts to control territory and people, but also relates the mechanisms of state control to other legal modes of control and regulation at both local and supranational levels.

This comprehensive book provides analysis and discussion on the following key issues in EU environmental law: environmental competence, principles and objectives, implementation and enforcement, nature protection, impact assessment, trade and the environment, waste management, climate change and the EU. An accessible work for all students of the subject both academic or professional.

This title was first published in 2001. Taking a multilevel perspective on the Europeanization of refugee policies, this innovative work highlights the entanglement between domestic asylum reforms. Essential reading for scholars of European integration, asylum and refugee policy.

The introduction of self-assessment for income tax collection in the late 1990s marked a striking moment of cultural convergence between the UK and the US. This book analyses the socio-political factors leading to and resulting from this fundamental change in the relationship between taxpayers and the Inland Revenue, using perspectives in comparative law and the new outlooks of modern tax and cultural theory. It will be of interest to those studying theories of compliance, cultural legal studies, and law and society.

This book provides an accessible collection of translated legal sources through which the exploits of criminals and developments in the English criminal justice system (c.1215-1485) can be studied. Drawing on the wealth of archival material and an array of contemporary literary texts, it guides readers towards an understanding of prevailing notions of law and justice and expectations of the law and legal institutions. Tensions are shown emerging between theoretical ideals of justice and the practical realities of administering the law during an era profoundly affected by periodic bouts of war, political in-fighting, social dislocation and economic disaster. Introductions and notes provide both the specific and wider legal, social and political contexts in addition to offering an overview of the existing secondary literature and historiographical trends. This collection affords a valuable insight into the character of medieval governance as well as revealing the complex nexus of interests, attitudes and relationships prevailing in society during the later Middle Ages. -- .

The relationship between environmentally sustainable development and company and business law has emerged in recent years as a matter of major concern for many scholars, policy-makers, businesses and nongovernmental organisations. This book offers a conceptual analysis of the principles of sustainable development and environmental integration in the EU legal system. It particularly focuses on Article 11 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), which states that EU activities must integrate environmental protection requirements and emphasise the promotion of sustainable development. The book gives an overview of the role played by the environmental integration principle in EU law, both at the level of European legislation and at the level of Member State practice. Contributors to the volume identify and analyse the main legal issues related to the importance of Article 11 TFEU in various policy areas of EU law affecting European businesses, such as company law, insurance and state aid. In drawing together these strands the book sets out the requirements of environmental integration and examines its impact on the regulation of business in the EU. The book will be of great use and interest to students and researchers of business law, environment law, and EU law.