Spain is one of the few countries in the EU where Islam has had a historical role in the social and cultural construction of its identity. However, its modern history is marked by acts of repudiation of non-Christian cultures. Opinion polls indicate that certain groups of immigrants from North Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe, but mainly Muslims, are considered to be incompatible with the popular conception of Spanish identity. The reason for this perception is related to the social construction of the immigrant as the ‘other to govern’ by political, academic and media discourses. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that immigration law also plays a fundamental role in this strategy of ‘orientalisation’, namely the attribution of certain qualities to immigrant groups (illegal, antisocial, criminal, inassimilable, terrorist), the aim of which is to legitimise the selective control of immigration. The Spanish immigration and citizenship regime contributes to the construction of otherness, and therefore to the political and legal (re)definition of what ‘being Spanish’ means.

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It is no surprise that development institutions and actors have taken to indicators with such enthusiasm. Where indicators are both a form of knowledge production and simultaneously a technology of governance, they are a form of soft powers that allow such actors to set the standards for what it is to be developed in the twenty-first century. Such measures of civilisation have been dominant throughout a history of Global North–South encounters: measurement was central to the many forms of colonial control, from map-making to craniometry, to the global ‘discovery’ of poverty in the 1940s. This paper seeks to place development indicators in this colonial context by focusing on the issue of comparability or the global claim that underpins global development indicators.

Crowd equity funding is a type of crowdfunding that allows companies to obtain seed or other capital through small equity investments from a large range of investors via an online portal. This form of finance has been viewed as a way to remedy the shortfall of capital for small and medium enterprises. As a result, a number of countries such as the US, Italy and New Zealand have promoted this form of finance. Accordingly, the paper first considers the reasons behind the rise of crowd equity funding on government agendas around the world. It then focuses on the Australian setting, by highlighting the different proposals that have been put forward to introduce legislation friendlier to crowd equity funding. The aim is to view the extent to which the proposed models provide the right balance between investor protection and entrepreneurship.

Legislators around the world are grappling with the question of whether or not the criminal law should be deployed in order to punish HIV transmission that is the result of voluntary sexual encounters between competent, consenting adults. A few years ago, when I was working in South Africa, that country’s Law Reform Commission proposed to declare HIV transmissions that are the result of voluntary sexual encounters among competent consenting adults a criminal offence that ought to fall under the category of rape (Schüklenk, 2003). Rape and voluntariness do not go too well together, so – not being a lawyer – I was surprised about the seemingly otherworldly machinations of legal minds in the context of HIV/AIDS. Matthew Weait points out in his book Intimacy and Responsibility: The Criminalisation of HIV Transmission that many liberal democracies have made HIV transmission a criminal offence, among these Canada, Sweden, Germany, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, the UK and many others. In most countries, HIV infected people who demonstrably knew about their infection have been successfully prosecuted for transmitting HIV to their sexual partners.

Pre-trial detention is used extensively in Latin America as a systematic practice implemented by courts. Despite this fact, few empirical studies have analysed the role of defence attorneys in pre-trial incarceration. This paper attempts to describe the actions taken by lawyers in order to free their clients during the judicial process, using new empirical evidence collected from the incarcerated population in Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, Chile, Mexico and Peru. Results suggest that public defenders request conditional release less frequently but do so more effectively than their private counterparts.

The practice of law today is awash with pictures of all kinds – from those that begin conceptually like graphs, diagrams or flow charts to those that originate in perception, like photographs, or those that emerge from the actions of technology, like animations and fMRI. Pictures are used as evidence, demonstratives, and for argument. The legal academy has yet seriously to come to grips with the changes that this infusion of the visual means for legal thinking and rhetoric. This article explores the intellectual implications of picturing in a discipline that has thought of itself as preeminently about the use of words and their linear logics. To do this, the author has sought out eye movement research, asking the question: Do we read pictures differently from words? If so, what are the implications of this as understood both in cognitive terms and in cultural terms? That is, can the differences in perceptual behaviour be seen as offering clues to differences in cognitive behaviour? Existing knowledge seems to answer these questions in the affirmative, which means that the deeply held cultural bias that maintains that only words containing thought needs revision. This article concludes with reflections on some benefits that adjustments to our understanding might give to legal thinkers.

As part of the ‘War on Terror’ declared in response to the 11 September 2001 attacks, countries introduced legislation to bolster national security, often at the expense of personal freedoms and long-established legal principles. Like the Cold War, the ‘War on Terror’ is cast as a global struggle of good against evil. New Zealand defied Cold War logic with its anti-nuclear policy. Examining the difficulties of upholding personal freedoms and the rule of law while bolstering national security, this article analyses New Zealand's anti-terrorism legislation and shows that it has steadily moved away from its initial measured approach. It argues that New Zealand could and should develop an anti-terrorism model appropriate to low-risk societies, and that, like its anti-nuclear stance during the Cold War, such an independent approach would be a valuable contribution to the world community.

This paper examines women’s entry and advancement within Québec’s, civil law tradition of a dual system of notaires and avocats in law practice. The two arms of the profession have developed along exclusive legal jurisdictions codified through law, contrasting professional structures, and different styles of legal practice. Yet, they share a common foundation through law school and professional training and their respective practices of law occasionally overlap and conflict in the competition for clientele, services and professional status. Women’s representation in Québec law practice has risen to nearly fifty percent and their entry to law in large numbers coincides with the emergence of exclusionary processes within and across the professional divide. Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital provides new insight to gendered career dynamics in law practice, specifically an understanding of cultural repertoires of resources mobilised in successful careers, resources that are also at the centre of disputes over the professional status and legal jurisdictions between notaires and avocats. The analysis demonstrates that women and men within these two professional groups are not only equipped with differential stocks of capital, but that the conversion rates also differ. Particularly among the avocats, men receive greater exchange on their investments in human and social capitals and their cultivated ‘habitus’ also better enables men to garner enhanced job rewards.

This paper deals with social anthropologists serving as expert witnesses in asylum proceedings in the UK. It argues that it is not a fundamental epistemological divide, but rather massive power differentials that characterise the relationship between social anthropologists and legal practitioners in this context. Within a narrow framework provided by the law, which focuses on ‘true facts’ and ‘objective evidence’, social anthropologists have to position themselves, and they often must do so somewhere along a spectrum from positivist to post-positivist positions (regarding, for example, such concepts as ‘culture’ and ‘identity’). This, as well as their subordinate position in the context of the proceedings, sits uneasily with the professional, moral and ethical standards of their discipline. Engagement as an expert, therefore, comes with certain costs for social anthropologists that range from having to bend one's own epistemological perspective to the risk of being ‘demolished’ as an expert (and beyond) in sometimes implicitly politicised asylum decisions.

Kawashima's well-known arguments on Japanese legal consciousness represent characteristic concerns of Japanese socio-legal scholarship: comparison between Japan and the West on the one hand, and law and practice on the other. Such concerns originated much earlier, before World War II. Suehiro, the early founder, relied on Ehrlich's idea of living law to make law fit social reality. In contrast, Kawashima urged Japanese people to make modern law ‘our living law’. He also argued that Japanese consciousness was the main cause of the small volume of litigation. This thesis became a focus of empirical research by Japanese and foreign scholars. Kawashima played a significant role in establishing the sociology of law as a subject in law. In subsequent empirical studies, Kawashima's thesis has been critically assessed. Yet the sociology of law as an empirical science and the characteristic concerns his work represents are distinctive features of the sociology of law in Japan.

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.

This paper reviews scholarship regarding migrants’ legal consciousness. After discussing the personal, geographic and methodological scope of the reviewed studies, the conceptualisation of legal consciousness is examined in light of evolutions in general legal consciousness studies. Thereafter, factors emerging as shaping migrants’ legal consciousness are analytically clustered at four levels: individual characteristics, relational factors, cultural dynamics, and public policies and discourse. Future research on legal consciousness could shift its gaze towards understudied migrant groups as well as places. We suggest being more explicit regarding the conceptualisation of dimensions of what is ‘legal’ and of ‘consciousness’, and adopting a pluralist approach to law. The analytical grouping of the factors impacting migrants’ legal consciousness may serve as a useful reference point for future research and facilitate a more comprehensive appraisal of the various dynamics shaping migrants’ legal consciousness.

HIV prevention and treatment are undergoing impressive technological and practice changes. In-home rapid testing, prophylaxis before risky sex, and treatment as prevention give cause for remarkable optimism and suggest the possibility of an AIDS-free generation. These changes in HIV prevention and treatment might affect HIV policy in several different directions. One direction would be further entrenchment of the currently prevailing punitive approach. A different direction would be a shift away from use of the criminal law as a method for discouraging risky behaviour and towards a strategy aimed to encourage the use of the new treatment and prevention possibilities. When such abrupt technological changes are accompanied by sharp changes in regulatory regimes, they are identified in the public policy literature as a ‘punctuated equilibrium’. A shift away from criminalisation in HIV policy, if sufficiently widespread and transformative, could reach the level of a punctuated equilibrium. This paper presents a critical assessment of the implications of the changes in available forms of treatment and prevention for the continued appeal of criminalisation as an approach to HIV policy. We conclude that criminalisation is less justifiable in the light of what might be circumstances ripe for a punctuated equilibrium.

This paper explicates the relation between vagrancy and public disorder, a relation constituted by a dialecticism that is at once (dis)continuous and (dis)connected. This relationship is important not only to appreciate the place of public disorder vis-à-vis contemporary urban public space and social life, but historical vagrancy as well. The paper examines the refashioning of vagrancy, paying attention to the semantic legal reformatting of its constitution and how this process permits the regulation of essentially the same historical problems and concerns by translating them into legally sound language, visible in the shift from vagrancy to public disorder. This shift was necessary not simply to preserve the vestiges of vagrancy, now conspicuous in public disorder, but for the preservation of the images of, and imaginations about, Law, including its claims to justice. Loosely taking its cue from the visual culture movement which pays homage to the place of images in the ordering of the social world, the paper invokes (and, then, conflates) the concepts of image and imagination and explicates the manner in which the images of, and imaginations about, Law spearheaded the transmutation of the legal category of vagrancy by re-imagining the vagrant, a re-imagining which itself was the product not just of the Law's imagination, but, imaginations about the Law as well. The paper concludes by locating the place of the image and imagination to propounding a narrative of, and about, Law.

The international right to social security has been given limited attention as a vehicle for addressing women's poverty. This paper highlights some of the issues shaping women's poverty globally that require a more responsive right to social security. It discusses the nature and purpose of social security and examines the international law relating to this right, arguing that recent interpretations lack an adequate framework for ensuring women's interests are fully accommodated. The paper challenges the relationship between the right to social security and traditional conceptions of work that exclude women's labour. It also argues that the right must have application at the transnational level if it is to address the changing nature of women's work. Drawing on ideas of substantive equality, it proposes an approach to the development of the right from a gender perspective including a set of principles to be followed in applying the right.

This article reviews approaches to the needs of disabled people in Asia and the Pacific, the only part of the world currently lacking regional human rights machinery. The article examines some of the social policy choices involved in prioritising different possible approaches to meeting the needs of disabled people in the region, with a focus on a proposed regional disability rights tribunal (DR-TAP). It is argued that this is not the top priority for immediate action; rather it is contended that capacity building and culturally appropriate attitudinal and other change strategies should instead be pursued over the medium-term horizon.

This article develops a general critique of the economic approach to environmental regulation, drawing on the insights of systems theory. It highlights, first, the problematic of subjugating the regulatory system to a single purpose – which in the context of environmental economics is interpreted as the utilitarian maximization of collective welfare. Second, it questions the teleological pretence of the regulatory project as it is configured in the economic literature. It highlights in this context the problem of trans-systemic incompatibilities, which impede the incorporation of economic ideas into the systems of law and politics. Environmental economics in both its normative and sociopolitical strands, fails to provide a convincing response to this dilemma. The article discusses two examples of the reconstruction of economic ideas within the legal and political domains, drawing on the EU and US regulatory experience. This twofold critique of the economic approach can be extended, it is argued, to every regulatory project with far-reaching teleological ambitions. The article applies this critique to some alternative regulatory visions, such as self-regulation, reflexive law and responsive regulation, noting in this context the limitations of systems theory itself. It concludes with a discussion of the role of intuition in regulatory decision-making.