This article proposes a response to legal scholarship’s recent concerns with the complexity of law’s relations with culture, looked at from a sociolegal point of view. It argues that legal studies today must have a comparative dimension, and that they should contribute to an understanding of law in relation to culture, or as a cultural phenomenon. But there are problems with culture as a legal concept (or a social scientific one). Also, many long-established sociolegal ideas about ‘law and society’ are becoming obsolete. A way forward is to relate law to four pure types of community that interact in complex ways in social life and, together, embrace the various dimensions of culture. The article claims that a law-and-community approach to legal study clarifies law’s relation to culture, and provides a framework for comparative studies of law.

Kanaks are the indigenous Melanesian population in New Caledonia. This article explores the experiences unique to Kanak women after colonisation, including the impact of French colonial laws and policies on gender relations in the indigenous community. Kanak women have assumed largely concealed roles in the colonial period. Little literature deals specifically with the impact of French colonisation on Kanak women, possibly reflecting the dominant colonial tendency to discount the historical, cultural, socio-economic and political significance of Kanak women in the colonial era. The French colonisers fortified their control by sharpening and maintaining hierarchical differences based on race, class, gender, sexuality and space between the indigenous peoples and the colonisers. The emphasis on discrete boundaries was reinforced by repressive colonial laws, such as the indigenat, an emblem of colonial control exemplifying collusion between an indigenous patriarchy and the colonial administrators.

The article draws on two Office of National Statistics’ Omnibus sample surveys to provide the demographic context for living-apart-together.The Omnibus sample surveys for this project were funded by the ONS and by the ESRC (grant no. L326253054). The ESRC grant also supported the qualitative research, and we are grateful to Sophie Sarre and Jennifer Burton, who organised and undertook the interviews. The second part of the paper begins to explore the meanings of this form of partnership through interviews conducted with a sub-sample of respondents to the second survey, conducted in April 2004. The exploratory study complicates our understanding of the range of partnership statuses, which in turn has implications for policymakers grappling with whether and how to regulate different statuses in different ways. We conclude that living-apart-together is a significant form of partnership in Britain, and that it may take place at different points in the lifecourse. We explore the idea that this form of partnership further signals the spread of ‘selfish individualism’ and a ‘flight from commitment’. We find instead that living-apart-together represents a different kind of shared life to those involved from that they perceive to characterise co-residential relationships.

What explains the ebb and flow of religion? Some U.S. sociologists have argued that the demand for religion is relatively constant throughout history and across cultures and thus the fluctuations in religion are better accounted for by the supply-side factors such as the number and vigour of religious suppliers. Religious economies operate like commercial economies. Competition is said to be as beneficial for religion as it is for mundane products and results in greater religious vitality and overall levels of participation. This thesis is contrary to traditional secularisation theory, which maintained that religious pluralism undermined the plausibility and survival of all faiths. The religious market model and its supporting rational choice theory are examined in this essay. The bold claims of the model are not borne out by the empirical evidence. While the religious market model generates useful insights and data, its limits need to be observed.

This paper argues that sociological analysis of law, and in particular the idea of ‘law in action’, can generate richer accounts of the role of law in EU integration than research which relies only on supranational and national legal systems’ own internal description of the legal field. A ‘law in action’ concept directs attention to intersections between a ‘legal’ and a ‘social’ sphere. While ‘law in action’ is often perceived in the literature as a normative order, this paper argues that variation in normative openness and closure is an important facet of the ‘law in action’. This argument is developed through an analysis of qualitative empirical data about the implementation of the EU Directive on Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC 96/61/EC). The first part of the paper highlights limits of formal, instrumental and quasi-autonomous conceptions of law in EU integration. The second part develops the idea that ‘law in action’ is a conceptual device for analysing intersections between a ‘legal’ and a ‘social’ sphere. It also argues that political dynamics matter in such intersections. The third and final part of the paper draws on the data and suggests that norm closure is only sometimes achieved in determinations of what constitutes ‘the best available techniques’ (BAT). BAT is the key legal obligation which the IPPC Directive imposes on operators of mainly industrial installations.

I will start this review with a lengthy statement, setting out what I believe is the importance of a rights agenda. The language of rights can make visible what has too long been suppressed. It can lead to new stories being heard in public. As Carrie Menkel-Meadow (1987, p. 52) has put it: ‘Each time we let in a new excluded group, each time we listen to a new way of knowing, we learn more about the limits of our current way of seeing.’