In his tale of the struggles and privations of the mining community in the industrial south of Wales in the early decades of the twentieth century, Lewis Jones, ex-miner and socialist activist, put aside the usual tools of political activism – of oratory and pamphlet propaganda – and instead turned to fiction as a means of educating and mobilising the political energy of the workforce. In doing so, Jones represented the extent to which the law was pivotal to the social organisation delivering injustice to working people. When one turns to history and to the legal record, the contestable accounts, elisions and absences from the record speak eloquently of the extent to which selective doctrine contributes to that injustice. The resultant message resonates with debates on the relationship between society, politics and the rule of law itself.

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This article presents an empirical study of Jewish and Muslim women who go through divorce in Canada, drawing on a ‘left law and economics’ methodology. Religious law and family law have long been considered outside the market and, as a result, are more rarely accounted for in the law and economics literature. According to dominant narratives, religious family law is experienced by women either as an exceptional form of oppression or as a form of spiritual religious identity. In this article, I apply a ‘left law and economics’ approach to deconstruct these notions. On the basis of my socio-legal fieldwork with Jewish and Muslim women in three Canadian cities, I identify the background formal and informal legal rules, social norms and distributional practices that help produce asymmetric bargaining locations for women. I employ the economic language of costs/benefits to illustrate the ways in which religious parties bargain strategically upon divorce, although these market claims are surprisingly underrecognised by the legal system. Such empirical knowledge helps disenchant the idea that religious law is systematically used as punishing forces that make women worse off economically or morally inferior. It also allows for a distributive analysis which reveals how husbands and wives negotiate economic resources, desires and day-to-day decisions in all kinds of fair and unfair ways, flying in the face of conventional narratives surrounding women and religion.

Hospitality is a self-contradictory concept. Both inclusionary and exclusionary forces are present at the very threshold of hospitality. This article shows how this contradiction works in the practice of migration law. The author takes a Dutch case, the case of Abdirizaq Salah Sheekh, to reveal the force of this contradiction from the moment the asylum seeker arrives on the territory, all the way through to the end of his story at the European Court of Human Rights. The case is, in fact, a symptomatic indictment of how aliens are treated in the Netherlands and, in a more general sense, in Europe as a whole. This article not only demonstrates how the question of hospitality commences with language − the moment we start communicating with the alien − the author also argues that in the violent collision produced by the the two contradictory demands of hospitality, a new subject is created. Not only is the migration procedure questioned, but also the subject of migration law.

In recent years there has been an increased interest in mediumship. This has been part of a broader fascination with paranormal issues that has been fostered by new modes of dissemination and communication. This article focuses upon attempts made by the criminal law to regulate mediums, and, in particular, the disjunction between the ‘genuine medium’ and the ‘vulnerable consumer’. It charts historical approaches of the law and provides a critique of the current legal landscape, including the new regulatory framework under the Unfair Commercial Practice Regulations 2008, and the possibility of an action under the Fraud Act 2006. It concludes that the law has continually struggled to adequately deal with this phenomenon, and that the current regime is likely to prove similarly ineffective given the fundamental conceptual legal problem of proving what may be un-provable.

This article examines how well imported institutional models fare in their recipient sites, how far they are modified by the conditions they encounter, and which variables determine the outcomes. The analysed set of variables consists of particular actors and agencies involved in the transplant project; the strategy they choose for its implementation; and the local in terms of those who might support it and those who might oppose it. The arguments of the article are based on the findings of research carried out on social engineering projects undertaken in Russia and Bosnia. The projects consisted of the establishment of new bodies closely modelled on the UK Press Complaints Commission.

This issue of the journal includes the first article to be published in an exciting new section entitled ‘Law in other contexts’. This section is dedicated to making available specially commissioned reports of socio-legal research in places where English is not the first language. In this way the journal hopes to bring attention to work which may not be easily accessible to those without knowledge of the relevant language (and culture). It is also hoped that this may – eventually – make some contribution to putting into question the Anglo- American hegemony over how this academic field is constituted, which questions are considered important to ask, and which methods are thought appropriate for studying them. Articles will be included regularly in issues of the journal as they become available. Potential authors from a variety of jurisdictions have already been contacted (and others will be contacted in the future).

This article presents a selective survey of current law and society research in the Netherlands. After a brief historical sketch, it focuses on contemporary Dutch studies on legal effectiveness and several studies on courts and dispute resolution. Based on a review of both fields, I identify two important trends in Dutch law and society research. The first trend is that, since the 1970s, most researchers have been interested in ‘old gap studies’, which primarily focus on the efficacy of law. In recent years, however, public opinion in the Netherlands has become increasingly critical of the Dutch justice system. I argue that this has generated a second trend in Dutch law and society research, which I refer to as ‘new gap studies’. Unlike traditional gap studies, their primary focus is not the efficacy but the legitimacy of law. In the final section, I draw several general conclusions and I look forward to the future of law and society research in de Netherlands.

The Idea of Justice is one of those books that – whether we agree with its ultimate conclusions or not – will be virtually impossible to ignore. And for good reason: it takes on one of the great political philosophers of our time, John Rawls, and deepens, enriches and challenges some basic Rawlsian ideas. Sen's basic argument is that the Rawlsian approach to justice, which has profoundly influenced the development of contemporary political theory since the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971, is so focused on ideal, transcendentally just institutions that it is unable to offer practical guidance for advancing justice in an increasingly borderless world. Sen's ambitious critique of Rawls takes him on a winding but engaging path, through political and moral philosophy, economics, history and law. Along the way, he challenges mainstream economic theories of rationality, explores deontological and consequentialist ethics through the lens of classical Indian thought, articulates and defends an understanding of freedom in terms of capability, and rethinks the relationship between development, agency and democracy in a global context.