Justice and Power in the Sociolegal Studies asks what interdisciplinary work in the law and society tradition tells us about the relationship of law and justice, as well as the way power operates in and through law. The fundamental concepts of justice and power provide points of departure for leading scholars to explore the various domains of socio-legal research. As they note the explicitness of the engagement with issues of power and the relative silence about -- or indirectness in (...) taking on -- questions of justice found in most law and society research, they ask how engagement with issues of power and silence about justice constituted law and society as a research field caught between a desire to have political impact and, at the same time, to maintain its scientific respectability. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on the challenges of complying with public health guidance to isolate or quarantine without access to adequate income, housing, food, and other resources. When people cannot safely isolate or quarantine during an outbreak of infectious disease, a critical public health strategy fails. This article proposes integrating sociolegal needs screening and services into contact tracing as a way to mitigate public health harms and pandemic-related health inequities.

This investigation focused on relationships among sexual assault, self-blame, and sexual revictimization. Among a female undergraduate sample of adolescent sexual assault victims, those endorsing greater self-blame following sexual assault were at increased risk for sexual revictimization during a 4.2-month follow-up period. Moreover, to the extent that sexual assault victims perceived nonconsensual sex is permitted by law, they were more likely to blame themselves for their own assaults. Discussion focuses on situating victim-based risk factors within sociocultural context.

In debates about criteria for human death, several camps have emerged, the main two focusing on either loss of the "organism as a whole" (the mainstream view) or loss of consciousness or "personhood." Controversies also rage over the proper definition of "irreversible" in criteria for death. The situation is reminiscent of the proverbial blind men palpating an elephant; each describes the creature according to the part he can touch. Similarly, each camp grasps some aspect of the complex reality of death. (...) The personhood camp, in contrast to the mainstream "organism" camp, recognizes that a human organism can still be a biological living whole even without brain function. The mainstream camp, in contrast to the personhood camp, recognizes that a person can be permanently, even irreversibly unconscious, and still be a living person so long as his/her body is alive. The author proposes that hylomorphic dualism incorporates both these key insights. But to complete the picture of the entire "death elephant," a fundamental paradigm shift is needed to make sense of other seemingly conflicting insights. The author proposes a "semantic bisection" of the concept of death, analogous to the traditional distinction at the beginning of life between "conception" and "birth." To avoid the semantic baggage associated with the term "death," the two new death-related concepts are referred to as "passing away" (or "deceased") and "deanimation," corresponding, respectively, to sociolegal ceasing-to-be (mirror image of birth) and ontological/theological ceasing-to-be of the bodily organism (mirror image of conception). Regarding criteria, the distinguishing feature is whether the cessation of function is permanent (passing away) or irreversible (deanimation). If the "dead donor rule" were renamed the "deceased donor rule" (both acronyms felicitously being "DDR"), the ethics of organ transplantation from non–heart-beating donors could, in principle, be validly governed by the DDR, even though the donors are not yet ontologically "deanimated." Thus, the paradigm shift satisfies both those who insist on maintaining the DDR and those who claim that it has all along been receiving only lip service and should be explicitly loosened to include those who are "as good as dead." Even so, a number of practical caveats remain to be worked out for non–heart-beating protocols. (shrink)

Is the Miranda warning, which lets an accused know of the right to remain silent, more about procedural fairness or about the conventions of speech acts and silences? Do U.S. laws about Native Americans violate the preferred or traditional "silence" of the peoples whose religions and languages they aim to "protect" and "preserve"? In Just Silences, Marianne Constable draws on such examples to explore what is at stake in modern law: a potentially new silence as to justice.Grounding her claims about (...) modern law in rhetorical analyses of U.S. law and legal texts and locating those claims within the tradition of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault, Constable asks what we are to make of silences in modern law and justice. She shows how what she calls "sociolegal positivism" is more important than the natural law/positive law distinction for understanding modern law. Modern law is a social and sociological phenomenon, whose instrumental, power-oriented, sometimes violent nature raises serious doubts about the continued possibility of justice. She shows how particular views of language and speech are implicated in such law.But law--like language--has not always been positivist, empirical, or sociological, nor need it be. Constable examines possibilities of silence and proposes an alternative understanding of law--one that emerges in the calling, however silently, of words to justice. Profoundly insightful and fluently written, Just Silences suggests that justice today lies precariously in the silences of modern positive law. (shrink)

Transgender individuals and families throw existing taxonomic classification systems of identity into perplexing disarray, illuminating sociolegal dilemmas long overdue for critical sociological inquiry. Using interview data collected from 50 cisgender women from across the United States and Canada, who detail 61 unique partnerships with transgender and transsexual men, this work considers the pragmatic choices and choice-making capacities of this social group as embedded within social systems, structures, and institutions. Proposing the analytic constructs of “normative resistance” and “inventive pragmatism” to (...) situate the interactional processes between agency and structure in the everyday lives of this understudied group of cisgender women, this work theorizes the liminal sociolegal status of an understudied family form. In so doing, it exposes the increasingly paradoxical consolidation and destabilization of sociolegal notions of identity, marriage, normativity, and parenthood—challenging, contributing to, and extending current theoretical and empirical understandings of agency and structure in twenty-first-century families. (shrink)

Pursuing Justice in Africa focuses on the many actors pursuing many visions of justice across the African continent--their aspirations, divergent practices, and articulations of international and vernacular idioms of justice. The essays selected by editors Jessica Johnson and George H. Karekwaivanane engage with topics at the cutting edge of contemporary scholarship across a wide range of disciplines. These include activism, land tenure, international legal institutions, and post-conflict reconciliation. Building on recent work in sociolegal studies that foregrounds justice over and (...) above concepts such as human rights and legal pluralism, the contributors grapple with alternative approaches to the concept of justice and its relationships with law, morality, and rights. While the chapters are grounded in local experiences, they also attend to the ways in which national and international actors and processes influence, for better or worse, local experiences and understandings of justice. The result is a timely and original addition to scholarship on a topic of major scholarly and pragmatic interest. Contributors: Felicitas Becker, Jonathon L. Earle, Patrick Hoenig, Stacey Hynd, Fred Nyongesa Ikanda, Ngeyi Ruth Kanyongolo, Anna Macdonald, Bernadette Malunga, Alan Msosa, Benson A. Mulemi, Holly Porter, Duncan Scott, Olaf Zenker. (shrink)

This text seeks to situate sociolegal studies in a global context.

Numerous laws have passed to move away from criminalising youth who trade sex. Specialised courts have also been established to support youth. Despite proponents' contention that specialised, trauma-informed courts are less punitive than typical interventions, research is limited. This article explores one specialised dependency court's efforts to assist youth ‘at risk’. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic observations, I argue that laws and trauma-informed court interventions intensify the supervision of youth and families while inadvertently concealing the gendered-racialised effects of child welfare (...) system involvement. Ethnographic findings contribute to sociolegal and anti-carceral feminist research on carceral control beyond the criminal legal system. This work also explores the ethics of carceral-trauma entanglements that accompany decriminalisation’s afterlife. (shrink)

This encyclopedia entry focuses primarily on Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s theoretical contributions, but also discusses how through her activism, intersectionality – as a framework or an analytic sensibility for making visible the sociolegal invisibility of women of color (and multiply oppressed social groups more generally) – has become praxis, revealing how Black women and other women of color fall “through the cracks” of mutually exclusive anti-racist and feminist discourses or, rather, are pushed into the chasm produced by their respective uninterrogated (...) sexisms and racisms. The brutal paradox that Crenshaw’s oeuvre reveals is that those who are violently located in the basements of social hierarchies, where others make their ascents on their backs, are also those whom emancipatory discourses consistently fail, rendering them marginal in their representations and mobilizations while relying on their creative energies, redirecting them from serving their own immediate interests to advancing those of others with which their experiences only partly coincide. Yet, this representational and epistemic violence undermines transformative movements from within, since it is only by addressing all systems of oppression simultaneously, and by disarticulating their interconnections, that they can ever be dismantled. (shrink)

This book examines the importance of flat ontologies for law and sociolegal theory. Associated with the emergence of new materialism in the humanities and social sciences, the elaboration of flat ontologies challenges the binarism that has maintained the separation of culture from nature, and the human from the nonhuman. Although most work in legal theory and sociolegal studies continues to adopt a non-flat, anthropocentric and immaterial take on law, the critique of this perspective is becoming more and more (...) influential. Engaging the increasing legal interest in flat ontologies, this book offers an account of the main theoretical perspectives, and their importance for law. Covering the work of the five major theorists in the area - Gabriel Tarde, Bruno Latour, Manuel DeLanda, Karen Barad and Graham Harman - the book aims to encourage this interest, as well as to explicate the important problems of and differences between these perspectives. Flat ontologies, the book demonstrates, can offer a valuable new perspective for understanding and thinking about law. This book will appeal mainly to scholars and students in legal theory and sociolegal studies; as well as others with interests in the posthumanist turn in philosophy and social theory. (shrink)

This book engages the field of practice theory in order to consider law as a social practice. Taking up the theoretical concept of practices, the contributors to this volume maintain that law can be fruitfully understood as one among other social practices. Including perspectives from philosophers of language, experts in practice theory, linguists and legal philosophers, the book examines the twin questions of what it means for law to be considered a practice, and what law's place is among other social (...) practices. The book is comprised of three parts. The first provides a broad methodological framework for discussing how the concept of practice is used in the social sciences, and in law. The second deals with specific problems arising from the use of the concept of practice in the legal context, and from the intersection of different social practices. The third part identifies and addresses the consequences of applying insights from practice theory to law. Together, they offer a comprehensive consideration of what is at stake in understanding law as a social practice. This book will appeal to sociolegal scholars, sociologists of law, philosophers of language and action, as well as philosophers of law and legal theorists. (shrink)

The literature on euthanasia and suicide is substantial and ever growing. In his book Aiming to kill, Nigel Biggar, a theologian, adds to this something that is hard to come across, in a concise but comprehensive form. His book explores the theological basis of the sanctity of life doctrine: rather than merely asserting what the doctrine demands, simply citing as authority that it is a traditional and fundamental principle, he offers an account of its historical and modern-day rationale.The book is (...) divided into four unequal parts, whose quality varies. These chapters are designed to provide: firstly, the appropriate sociolegal and ethical context; secondly, an overview and analysis of arguments relating to the value of life; thirdly, an overview and analysis of arguments on the morality of killing; and finally, a section drawn from the conclusions of previous chapters and expounding the threat of the “slippery slope”.Biggar does not claim to come into the debate without …. (shrink)

In the past decade, a few countries have created a third gender category to legally recognize gender-nonconforming individuals. However, we know relatively little about the response of the gender-nonconforming individuals toward the legal third gender category. To address this gap, this article analyzes the different social, religious, and institutional discourses that have emerged around the recently created third gender category in Pakistan and their influence on the legal consciousness of the Khawaja Sira community, a marginalized gender-nonconforming group. Even though the (...) third gender category was created to address the unique gender identity of the Khawaja Sira community, most continue to legally register as men. My research indicates that the patriarchal stigma, high compliance costs, and limited material benefits associated with the legal third gender category dissuade the Khawaja Sira community from choosing to register. My findings point to the limitations of a legal third gender category within a patriarchal sociolegal order where important benefits associated with the masculine identity are forfeited by registering. In doing so, I caution against over emphasizing the symbolic value of legal recognition for gender-nonconforming groups. (shrink)

Children remain largely absent from sociolegal scholarship on sexual violence. Taking an intersectional approach to the analysis of attorneys’ strategies during child sexual assault trials, this article argues that legal narratives draw on existing gender, racial, and age stereotypes to present legally compelling evidence of credibility. This work builds on Crenshaw’s focus on women of color, emphasizing the role of structures of power and inequality in constituting the conditions of children’s experiences of adjudication. Using ethnographic observations of courtroom jury (...) trials, transcripts, and court records, three narrative themes of child credibility emerged: invisible wounds, rebellious adolescents, and dysfunctional families. Findings show how attorneys use these themes to emphasize the child’s unmarked body, imperceptible emotional responses, rebellious character, and harmful familial environments. The current study fills a gap in sexual assault research by moving beyond trial outcomes to address cultural narratives within the court that are inextricably embedded in intersectional dimensions of power and the reproduction of social status. (shrink)

This article explains the main theoretical aspects of legal ethics, identifies the nature and intellectual structures of legal ethics research, and examines the occurrences, relationships, interconnections, developments and emerging trends of the topic of legal ethics in global legal research, using one of the methods of scientometrics – bibliometric analysis. The annual growth of legal research outputs indexed by Scopus was about 7% over the entire period of study (1991–2020). The most popular type of research outputs in the field of (...) legal ethics are research articles. A multidisciplinary scope of scholarly sources on legal ethics reveals the scholarly development of each field/scientific branch that is both unique and integrated with law and legal ethics, unfolds multifaceted perspectives of legal ethics research, and a contextual sociolegal approach to legal ethics as a social, societal, and political expression. Legal ethics is a much broader and more complex phenomenon than simply a set of codes/rules of ethics and requires integrated research: from an understanding of the particular impact and significance of legal education, ethical rules, and personal morality to ethical decision-making processes, cognitive and social factors. (shrink)

This article explores how legal treatises (rasāʾil) were essential sites for the development and expansion of Islamic legal schools’ (madhāhib) positions. The rasāʾil, along with legal dicta (fatāwā)—besides legal commentaries (shurūḥ) and manuals (mutūn)—were among the prime loci where jurists contended with rapid social, political, and economic changes. Although these legal treatises were written to address specific sociolegal issues, I argue that the treatise—as a separate genre—provided a creative space for jurists to reaffirm, restate, or advance a new opinion (...) in the school. These legal treatises were carefully considered and extensively referenced in the authoritative works of the school for their updated legal positions, practical utility for judges in courts, and relevance for official policy purposes. To demonstrate this dynamic, I present a close reading of two legal treatises by Maḥmūd Efendī al-Ḥamzāwī (d. 1887), a key Ḥanafī authority and judge, and the muftī of Damascus (1867–1887). The first covers the issue of criminal law procedures in Islamic/Ottoman courts and the second addresses the topic of hunting with rifles. Both treatises expanded the legal positions of the Ḥanafī school by incorporating new justifications, qualifications, and information. They offer an essential perspective on the status of this genre of legal writing through an exposition of a range of emerging issues in the late nineteenth century. (shrink)

Three-dimensional ‘bioprinting’ is under development, which may produce living human organs and tissues to be surgically implanted in patients. Like tissue engineering and regenerative medicine generally, the process of bioprinting potentially disrupts experience of the human body by redefining understandings of, and becoming actualised in new practices and regimes in relation to, the body. The authors consider how these novel sociotechnical imaginaries may emerge, having regard to law’s contribution to, as well as its possible transformation by, the process of 3D (...) bioprinting. The authors draw on Gilbert Simondon and corporeal, material feminists to account for these disruptions as ‘ontogenetic,’ in the sense that technology can produce new ontologies or beings. The authors focus namely on ontogenesis, individuation and the pre-individual forces that comprise, and yet remain inexhausted by, the process of 3D bioprinting. The authors argue legal phenomena are pre-individual forces that ‘in-form’ ontogenesis. These pre-individual forces are indistinguishable from those implicated in the individuation of the body’s physical form; thereby, the individuation of the bodily material through 3D bioprinting may be expressive and generative of sociolegal phenomena, at least as those relate to the body. The authors conclude that 3D bioprinting shores up conventional, liberal conceptions in law of the human body as individual, bounded and primarily contractual. Three-dimensional bioprinting may introduce ontological difference to the extent it promises and realises a new temporality of the human as a species- and legal-subject, although such a development would only seem to expand, rather than attenuate, a biopolitical regime. (shrink)

This article examines the claim that there are two different and often incompatible ‘worlds’ within which contractual relationships can be placed—a real world created by the parties and an artificial world created by contract law and formal contract documents. This distinction, often made by sociolegal scholars, is usually accompanied by the suggestion that legal reasoning might be improved by more attention to the real world of contracting at the expense of the artificial world of documents and classical doctrine. After (...) examining the relationship between trust and contract, the role of legal institutions in supporting agreement-making and the reasons parties might have for formalizing commercial relationships, the article argues that a sharp distinction between the real and paper deal cannot be drawn and that in many commercial agreements these must be understood as integrated phenomena, rather than wholly discrete aspects of contracting behaviour. The article then considers the capacity of contract law to respond to this finding, with particular reference to the law's approach to uncertainty in agreements and the contextual approach to contract interpretation as developed by Lord Hoffmann in Investors Compensation Scheme and subsequent cases. (shrink)

Political theorists, increasingly, are realizing the virtues of contextuality to conceptual analysis. Just as theory may provide useful standards for the assessment of political practices, so may application of theoretical constructs within particular contexts provide a critical corrective to theory. This essay relates work undertaken within sociolegal studies applying a constitutive methodology to such efforts to contextualize political theorizing. The essay describes how the emphasis placed by constitutive theory on locality and meaning entails a contextual analysis. The essay then (...) demonstrates how a constitutive and contextual approach can enhance our understanding of the moral issues surrounding differentiated citizenship policy. While the most obvious cost associated with differentiated citizenship policy is a loss in formal equality, a contextual assessment demonstrates the prospect of an even deeper, though ultimately contingent, moral loss in self-invention. (shrink)

This article adds to the debate on digital labour by including sexual labour, a feminised form of work that is traditionally excluded from official labour statistics and mainstream labour politics because of the embedded sociolegal, cultural and political context that defines female sexual labour as illegitimate work. This exclusion has been extended to digital labour politics. This article draws on a four-year multi-method qualitative study in the UK, which in part focused on sex work mediated and managed by digital (...) platforms. Drawing on and adding to the literature on women’s digital entrepreneurialism, I argue that digital sex workers embody an ‘entrepreneurial subjectivity’ and narrate ideals of flexibility and choice. However, on closer inspection, digital platforms shape and manage the labour so that agency over labour practices and processes become coerced choices. (shrink)