In 2001, the Legal Services Commission (LSC) introduced a new pilot, the Family Advice and Information Network (FAInS), which recognised that family law clients typically face a cluster of legal and non-legal issues. Family lawyers involved in FAInS were encouraged to address a client’s legal problems, and then refer the client to other services for assistance with non-legal issues. In this way, family law clients were to be offered a holistic service, with the lawyer acting as a ‘case manager’ who helped match services to their client’s individual needs. This article presents data drawn from an evaluation of FAInS, and shows that lawyers did not regularly refer their clients to other services, with referrals largely being limited to mediation. We conclude that family lawyers are not necessarily the most appropriate gatekeepers, and propose a number of alternatives for providing a multi-agency approach to resolving family law issues.

This article examines how the adoption of children under Hindu law in India is regarded by British private international law and immigration law. Through an analysis of case-law, it focuses particularly on how British judges regard the legitimacy of exclusion by the British immigration control system of children who have been adopted under a ‘foreign’ legal system which essentially permits private adoption arrangements. Examining the background to the regime of Indian Hindu law adoptions (which applies to Sikhs as well as Hindus), and the private international law and immigration rules which apply to such adoptees in the UK, the article finds some evidence in the judicial decisions of a more activist, human-rights-based, plurality-conscious position being taken. However, tracking the case-law further, the article concludes that such activism has not been followed through in more recent decisions leaving the conflictual position between transnational adopters and British legal systems largely unresolved.

The largely unfettered realm of hardware and software code offers limitless possibilities in expanding the use and influence of information and communication technologies. As transcendent technologies they are unrestrained by the divergent equivalence of human categories of difference such as gender, race and class, or conceptual binary oppositions such as good/evil, happy/sad, freedom/oppression. Whilst a material grounding in earlier forms of embodied social experience remains an essential precondition of interaction with virtual systems, it is suggested that the virtual world is in the process of transforming the real world or, at least, subordinating it as slave to the machine world. This shift has fostered an imbalance of power between human and the posthuman, and consequently the epoch of the machine is often alleged to be both modern miracle and monster. Just as at a human level, rational thought processes restrain ideas which are unruly and require control, ICT advancements have proliferated to the point where these technologies also need to be classified, constrained where necessary, and diluted into the real world in real time. In this current climate of endless technological transformation, along with the growth of mass surveillance technologies together with the expansion of regulatory state powers, it is clear that any further innovations cannot be left to market forces without first considering the groundwork for the development of an appropriate monitoring mechanism. Before an appropriate set of regulatory mechanisms can be explicated, it is first necessary to consider the nature of the evolving transgressive human–machine relationship and the possible implications for humanity in the modern hypermediated world.

Privacy rights are growing apace, as can be seen from a continuing stream of judgments from UK and European courts, the rise of special interest privacy groups and other institutions tasked to protect privacy. Privacy has – its proponents suggest – at last arrived as a fully fledged legal right. However, despite these advancements, I suggest that privacy is becoming less prevalent in society; primarily because of technological and cultural changes, but also because the technical legal implementation of privacy is highly problematic. In this article it is argued that this seeming paradox should be more critically examined by socio-legal researchers who, to date, have done little to test the assertions and assumptions of the privacy lobby. This article maintains that there is a need for more investigation of the basis and assumptions behind data protection and privacy law and that a more robust analysis of the claims and rhetoric for these rights will change our attitudes towards privacy developments. The sociological conception that ‘underlying all social interaction there seems to be a fundamental dialectic’ will be used to undermine the legal notion of privacy as an individualistic ‘fundamental right’.

The Indian government has recently introduced legislation to regulate ‘altruistic’ surrogacy while banning ‘commercial’ surrogacy amidst the criticism that India has become the ‘baby factory’. In the past decade, academic discourse has raised socioethical and legal issues that surfaced in the unrestricted transnational commercial-surrogacy industry. Most of the literature and ethnographic studies centred on the issues of informed consent, autonomy, decision-making and exploitation. With the proposed legislation, the Indian government has shown its will to regulate surrogacy, including the medical intermediaries as well as the contract between the intending parents and the surrogate mother-to-be. The present paper addresses the legal and socioethical context in which India introduced the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill 2019. It examines the extent to which the proposed law responds to the legal challenges and socioethical concerns that surfaced in the course of unregulated transnational commercial-surrogacy arrangements in India. It argues that, even though the proposed legislation addresses and responds to some of the legal and ethical concerns such as informed consent and legal parentage, it stops short of ensuring the welfare and well-being of the surrogate. Second, the legal certainty of parentage and the child's rights comes at the cost of the physical and psychological well-being of the surrogate. Finally, it argues that, by presupposing the surrogate as an autonomous agent and yet imposing the requirement of marriage, the Bill overlooks the sociocultural realities of patriarchal hierarchies entrenched in Indian society – that, in its conception of ‘family’, the focus on the ‘traditional’ family not only presents a narrow view of the heteronormative family and perpetuates the patriarchal notions of gender roles, but also fails to take into consideration maternal pluralism in surrogacy arrangements, undermines the modern family and, above all, discriminates against the single person's and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities’ right to found a family. Since many countries that served as centres for international commercial-surrogacy arrangement (such as Cambodia, Thailand and Nepal) have recently started to take steps to prohibit or limit transnational surrogacy arrangements, the analysis of Indian law in the present paper will provide a useful context within which these countries can effectively regulate surrogacy while safeguarding the surrogate's rights and interests.

The long history of suicide as a criminal offence still has a significant contemporary effect on how it is perceived, conceptualised and adjudged. This is particularly the case within countries where suicide is largely determined within a coronial system, such as Australia, the UK and the US. This paper details the outcomes of a study involving semi-structured interviews with coroners both in England and Australia, as well as observations at inquests. It focuses around the widely held contention that the suicide rates produced within these coronial systems are underestimations of anywhere between 15 to 50 per cent. The results of these interviews suggest that there are three main reasons for this systemic underestimation. The first reflects the legacy of suicide as a criminal offence, resulting in the highest standard of proof for findings of suicide in the UK, and a continuing stigma attached to families of the deceased. The second is the considerable pressure brought to bear upon coroners by the family of the deceased, who, because of that stigma, commonly agitate for any finding other than that of suicide. The third involves the rise of ‘therapeutic jurisprudence’, wherein coroners take on the responsibility of the emotional well-being of the grieving families, which in turn affects the likelihood of reaching a finding of suicide. The conclusions drawn by the paper are also twofold: first – with respect to the stigma of suicide – it will take a lot more than simple decriminalisation to change deeply held social perceptions within the community. Second, given that suicide prevention programmes and policies are based on such deeply questionable statistics, targeted changes to coronial legislation and practice would appear to be required.

Ever since Evo Morales Ayma became Bolivia's first indigenous president in 2006 and the promulgation of a human-rights-enhancing Constitution (2009) thereafter, indigenous peoples’ rights were gradually recognised. Yet, with the increasing demand for natural resources, indigenous communities have been adversely affected by the state's neo-extractivist policies. While global indigenous rights norms protect their fundamental rights, legal-implementation processes in the country's lowlands reveal dilemmas in terms of the value of laws in practice as well as its reinterpretation on the ground. Namely, in the communities, different positions and camps have emerged in terms of the role and functions of participatory rights. Despite the potential of the latter in strengthening collective-rights regimes and self-determination, community leaders, advisers and other members report how such processes fracture and weaken decision-making mechanisms and human rights claims.

This paper shows that social inequalities are cumulative and occur at each stage of the dispute pyramid, from the identification of a conflict through to satisfaction with its outcome. Based on a large and original survey on ordinary people's representations of and practices within the legal system in France (N = 2,660), our study finds that an individual's contact, or lack of contact, with a legal intermediary, who may be a legal professional or a non-legal professional, has a very significant impact on the decision to take a case to court. Contact with a legal intermediary also influences the individual's satisfaction with the outcome, but not in the same way for all plaintiffs: income is a more determining factor in satisfaction with the outcome in cases where the judge makes a decision than in cases where a solution is found outside the courtroom.

Political liberalism suggests state power must be exercised and justified on terms all citizens can reasonably be expected to endorse, independently of their comprehensive identities or worldviews. For Rawls, a democratic community cannot be united by any shared ends or identities other than those connected with the political conception of justice itself. Republican political thought often seems to undermine this ‘liberal principle of legitimacy’ through its stronger demands of social cohesion and participative civic virtue. Conversely, however, it generally seeks to define citizenship independently of any non-political commonalities citizens might be assumed to share. This theoretical tension was reflected in recent French republican discourses on Islam, gender and national identity. France's recent prohibition on public face-veiling coincided with an officially orchestrated debate on national identity which seemed to challenge the traditional republican conception of national identity as a purely civic and political construct. While couched in republican terminologies, these recent discourses seemed to understand the principle of laïcité, or constitutional secularism, as a bulwark for the pre-political dimensions of national identity. Accordingly, this article outlines how these discourses on religion and gender illuminated tensions and contradictions within the prevailing republican account of national identity.

While legal practice and scholarship are driven by the use and understanding of complex legal terminology, there has been little effort to incorporate the humanistic scholarship of anthropologists and historians into theoretical or practical accounts of these words and their usages. This paper attempts to historicise and complicate a term that serves as a bridge or meeting point between the legal and the political; sovereignty has been conceptualised since the sixteenth century as both a framing device that produces unity within the state while establishing mutual equality within the interstate order, and as the capacity to make law without being subject to that law. Recent anthropological literature has challenged the personification implicit in political–theoretical definitions of sovereignty, arguing instead for a theory of sovereignty that can be applied to ‘complicated’, post-colonial contexts, where legal orders are plural or overlapping and the state is weak or non-existent. What such critiques cannot explain, however, is how the concept of the ‘sovereign state’ became so central to political discourse on a global scale. This paper draws upon legal historical case-studies concerned with the production of the colonial or post-colonial state or the deployment of ‘sovereignty’ as a justificatory concept in colonial settings. In doing so, this paper argues for understanding sovereignty both as a practice across time and space that organises legal institutions and as a justificatory strategy in the intellectual and social history of those institutions, an approach that allows scholars to draw upon the insights of political theorists, anthropologists and historians. While primarily intended to instigate a broader interdisciplinary conversation, this paper also suggests a preliminary conclusion: sovereignty has historically been deployed as a means of including that which cannot be considered the same, mediating the colonial tension between ‘otherness’ and legal homogeneity.

The articles in this Special Issue of the journal explore diverse issues, but all in different ways are stimulated by developments in our understanding of the brain. It is coming to be understood that developments in neuroscience can help those who make the law and those who study it use the insights of scientific knowledge to assist in the understanding of human behaviour. Developments in cognitive neuroscience offer new insights into the nature of normative judgement. As Casebeer and Churchland (2003, p. 170) have noted, ‘the neurobiology of moral cognition is a justifiably hot topic’. As Goodenough and Prehn (2004, p. 1713) note, ‘the great advantage of the cognitive neuroscience approach is that we can now bring together psychological models of cognitive and affective process, experimental paradigms, various behavioural and psychophysiological measurements and functional brain imaging techniques’. Greene and Cohen have argued (2004, p. 1775) that neuroscience will probably have a transformative effect on the law, even though existing legal doctrine can, in principle, accommodate its findings. They foresee, and indeed recommend, a shift away from punishment rooted in retribution towards one adopting a consequentialist approach to the criminal law. That the US Supreme Court in 2005 (see Roper v. Simmons) eventually came to view the death penalty as unconstitutional for offenders who committed their offences when under 18 is in part the product of this shift in thinking. Steinberg and Scott (2003) had shown that adolescents did not meet the law’s requirements for rationality and so were unsuitable candidates for the death penalty.

This paper interrogates the depoliticising effects of a seemingly neutral regulatory drive at the heart of the World Health Organization (WHO)'s promotion of traditional medicine. Emerging at WHO in the late 1960s against a political backdrop of decolonisation and pan-Africanism, traditional medicine has continued to be promoted in subsequent decades, culminating in the latest global Traditional Medicine Strategy (2014 to 2023). Yet WHO's promotion and acceptance of traditional medicine have also become increasingly conditional upon its standardisation and regulation – something that appears fundamentally at odds with traditional medicine's heterogeneity. Drawing on insights from critical law and science and technology studies, we suggest that such a process at WHO has done more than simply disqualify the toxic and the dangerous. Rather, it has implicitly and explicitly marginalised and excluded those aspects of traditional medicine that deviate from scientific, biomedical ways of seeing, knowing and organising.

Focusing on the history of US anthropology between World War II and the high point of the Vietnam War protests in the late 1960s, this paper aims to historicise the assumed epistemological divide between anthropological and legal thinking. It is shown how anthropology as a discipline in the US has restructured some of its basic assumptions and changed its institutional structure in the context of legal interventions in larger struggles, specifically the court-based battles against racial segregation and the legal proceedings related to indigenous land rights before the Indian Claims Commission. Special consideration is given to an analysis of how objectivity is conceptualised in the literature on anthropological expert witnessing: from mechanical objectivity before 1970 to critical objectivity after 1970. The paper concludes with a caveat against exaggerating existing epistemological differences between anthropology and law, and suggests a more pragmatic approach to interdisciplinary communication.

The intersections of gender, religion and migration status have attracted only limited commentary to date. The significance of migration status as a marker of gender inequality, and one that further increases the burden of intersecting axes of discrimination, requires further scrutiny. This article examines the rise of civic integration requirements within the European Union and the significance of this rise for religious freedoms and complex ideals of gender equality. Particular attention is given to recent developments in the UK and France in the context of wider debates on immigration and integration policies. Against the background of diminishing sovereignty and the expansion of rights to non-citizens, states are rethinking the significance of citizenship and migration status and the criteria to be applied in determining membership and access to the nation-state. The adoption in France of the Charte des Droits et des Devoirs du Citoyen Français marks a further step in the expansion of integration conditions imposed by states, and signals a continuing willingness to deploy juridical forms to enforce such conditions. Of particular concern to this Special Issue are the implications of civic integration requirements for migrant religious women and for feminist engagement with migration laws and the discourse of rights.

The article aims to test the boundaries of traditional notions and understandings of citizenship and security in transitional societies through the framing of a given question – should paramilitary ex-prisoners be allowed to join the police? The question, considered through an examination of the particular experience of Northern Ireland, acts as a springboard to the deconstruction of broader traditional and transitional assumptions around citizenship and the delivery of security in societies seeking ways out of violent conflict. The article is ultimately concerned, not so much to deliver a final answer to the specifics of the question posed in all contexts, but to problematise notions of citizenship and State to the point where broader questions need to be asked around accepted and preconceived notions of inclusivity, citizenship and security.

This paper reflects on the conceptual approach adopted, in international practice, to the design and implementation of initiatives to promote the rule of law at the national level. It pays particular attention to the understanding, in international practice, of the relationship between the rule of law, democracy, human rights and development. It does so by looking especially at the practice of the UN, and taking into account many empirical and theoretical studies. After first examining the predominant paradigm in the rule of law field adopted by the international community until 2010, and the evolution of international practice thereafter, it concludes that the observance of the rule of law in a given country is determined by political and economic structures, cultural norms, institutions and laws. On this basis, and acknowledging the critical importance of the adopted concepts of rule of law, democracy and human rights, it finds the increasing recognition by the UN of the mutually reinforcing impact of these notions as adequate. This approach allows greater attention to be paid to several socio-economic and political issues that significantly affect the observance of the rule of law in many developing countries, the main recipients of the work of the international community in this field. Based on these findings, it indicates areas for reform.

Children tend to be represented as the quintessential victims of the ‘drug problem’, with drug-using parents, particularly mothers, characterised as vectors of the risks posed. Although evidence of drug use is not per se an impediment to retaining care of, or contact with, children (per Lady Hale in Re B [2013] UKSC 33, at para. 143), it does pose one of the greatest challenges to social and political norms about ‘good parenting’, and often has a powerful impact on decisions about care within UK family courts. While there is a considerable body of scholarship assessing criminal justice responses to drug use, there has been little research into how the family serves as an important site for the constitution of drug harms and the making of ‘drugs’ and ‘addiction’. This paper is informed by qualitative analysis of approximately 150 case reports in which drug use has been cited as relevant in the determination of guardianship/parenting. The purpose will not be to contest the difficult decisions that judges had to make in these cases but, using perspectives rooted in Science and Technology Studies and feminist drug scholarship, to remain attendant to the ontological multiplicity of objects that emerge from attempts to stabilise drug harms in legal narratives.

Global social indicators, as a form of governance and soft regulation, exert pressure for change and compliance through the way they compare and rank the relative performance of states or other units. Is it reasonable then to expect the comparisons they make in the process of carrying out such strategic exercises to be accurate and fair? In particular, how far can they, or should they, be required to be faithful to the requirement to ‘compare like with like’. Using as an example the role of indicators in documenting and responding to the current coronavirus epidemic, I investigate the way their hybrid combination of both comparison and commensuration may help to account for the difficulty they have had so far in establishing stable rankings of best practice.

In this article I critically analyse the two historical models for conceptualising the child: the protectionist model and the children’s rights model. I argue that both models are inappropriate ways in which to conceptualise the child. Protectionism is paternalistic, essentialises the child, and denies the child a voice. Equally problematic, the children’s rights model presumes the social desirability of the liberal individual, and emphasises rights over relationships, and universal principles over concrete situations. Given the flaws inherent in these models, I propose a third way in which to conceptualise the child based on a feminist ‘ethic of care’. Drawing on the work of proponents of an ethic of care, I consider how the ethic might conceptualise the child, and how it might translate into a family law context.

Situated within the larger context of Canadian pipeline decisions, it is argued that pipeline proposals in a geography without pre-existing pipelines are unsuccessful in contrast to proposals repurposing and expanding existing pipelines. The Chippewas of the Thames (the ‘Chippewas’) unsuccessfully opposed Enbridge's expansion, reversal and repurposing to crude oil of the Line 9 pipeline in Ontario, Canada. Analysing the Chippewas’ case within the context of recent oil- and gas-pipeline developments, using a lens of intersectionality focused on identity markers of indigeneity, socio-economic status and geographical location, exposes the naturalised power structures of Canadian law. These structures include the legal institutions of real-property law, Crown ownership of wildlife and fish, implicit ‘standing’ of the economy and assimilation of indigenous rights. Exposing this dichotomy of indigenous rights on paper vs. in practice deepens the consideration of indigenous rights, potentially allowing intersecting oppressions to be addressed.