This paper examines China's emerging animal anti-cruelty law and the extent to which it meets established animal welfare norms or not. Features that render the draft laws distinctly Chinese include the restrictive interpretation of cruelty as deliberate abuse, stringent pet control stipulations, and compromises on the consumption of dogs and cats. Meanwhile, the draft laws also reflect the Western experience. Animals are categorised according to their use; the ‘unnecessary suffering’ concept is the central philosophical tenet; and the enactment of the law will certainly result from strategic, pragmatic compromise. We conclude that 200 years of animal protection policy-making, the involvement of policy elites in drafting the Chinese laws, and the globalisation of trade, have made it difficult for China to do anything other than develop an animal protection regime broadly consistent with what exists in the West, although some unique Chinese features can also be identified in the proposed laws.

The Revolution of 25 April 1974 had a strong impact on justice in Portugal. Initially, it can be said that there was evidence of a process of democratisation involving the judicial structures, together with effective improvements to conditions allowing for independent and autonomous professional performance. However, in analysing the course of judicial reforms, it can be seen that changes took place more on a legislative level than in terms of the performance of the courts, proving that the evolution of the judicial system still demands a change of the legal culture. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to reflect on the evolution of the legal architecture in Portugal, seeking to determine whether the transition to a democratic judicial system is complete or whether, on the contrary, we are still faced with the process of justice in transition, delaying any changes in the current legal culture.

This paper argues for a new approach to understanding statelessness. It explores the limits of international laws on statelessness and the relationships between statelessness, diaspora and nationalism. It discusses how the condition of statelessness has affected Kurds, and how statelessness has been constructed and experienced at an individual and collective level in the diaspora. It argues for an expanded definition of the international laws of ‘stateless’ person: adding to the accepted de jure and highly contested de facto definitions, by also suggesting a third, new, category of ‘socially stateless’ people. The paper examines the concept of diaspora itself from the perspective of Kurdish interviewees and explores how, for stateless groups like Kurds, ‘living in diaspora’ can mean more than one place, including their land of origin. It will suggest the concept of ‘double’ or ‘multiple’ diasporas, where stateless people do not feel that they belong either to their country of origin or to the country in which they now live. The paper discusses the idea that when an ethnic community is stateless, then even those individuals who have an official nationality, citizenship or passport may often describe themselves as stateless. The relationship between statelessness, diaspora and nationalism is highlighted; and the impact of this on diaspora involvement in homeland politics, conflict and peace is explored. The paper also argues that the lack of protection which international law(s) offer around statelessness paradoxically create new forms of nationalism.

This paper aims to conduct a descriptive analysis of a total of 2,172 semi-structured interviews with sentenced inmates in Mexico City during 2002–2008 in order to explain how public legal defence works, how this service is evaluated by the inmates who took part in the interviews, and how the traditional division between public and private services constitutes an important distinction in the way in which criminals interact with, and are processed by, the legal system. Our findings suggest that, in the case of Mexico City: (i) to be tried by a public defender not only implies that the person accused holds a bigger chance of getting a softer sentence than those defended by private lawyers; but also, (ii) that the population will have a better perception of the justice process.

Socio-legal studies in Belgium represent a diverse patchwork of many topics studied from many angles. This paper first presents a brief historical account of socio-legal studies and their organisation, in the north and south of the country. It has no ambition to give a full overview of socio-legal studies in Belgium, let alone be exhaustive. It merely focuses on the content and features of two topics that have constituted major strands of research over the last thirty years: courts and dispute processing, and public opinion about law and justice. It ends with some reflections on the nature of Belgian socio-legal research, as well as some recommendations on future orientations.