This paper examines how deportation became a solution to rough sleeping in pre-Brexit England. It identifies relationships between the social regulation of vulnerable and marginalised adults, contemporary governance arrangements and bordering practices characteristic of Britain's ‘hostile environment’. Drawing on media reports and grey organisational literature, the focus of discussion is events across 2015–2018 in which three London-based charities were criticised for working with the Home Office to deport homeless migrants under its European Economic Area Administrative Removal policy. The overall tenor of criticism was that collaboration with the government compromised the organisations’ independence and charitable missions and aims. This diminished their capacity to both advocate for vulnerable adults and effectively challenge oppressive state practices. The paper observes how state and nonprofit relations structure institutional and socio-legal responses to marginalised and ‘othered’ adults through commissioning and contracting mechanisms. It demonstrates that the social and legal control of homeless migrants may be differently constituted by institutions delivering services in relation to citizenship, vulnerability and marginalisation. This analysis incorporates a broader appraisal of institutional motivations, values and beliefs in social welfare delivery, including the historic role of charitable agencies in the criminalisation of social welfare users. Taken together, the paper offers an interdisciplinary critique of the relationships between border control, neoliberal governance and the sociocultural and historic construction of homeless migrants.

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.

Issues of what personal autonomy and identity means are investigated in the context of the European Court of Human Rights’ development of Article 8’s right to respect one’s private life into a right to personal autonomy, identity and integrity with particular reference to French anonymous birthing as explored by that court in Odièvre v France and feminist literature on mothering and autonomy. Although much critiqued by feminists, personal autonomy has been reconceptualised to mean something of worth to women. Yet, this version of autonomy can diverge into two directions in terms of individual identity as evidenced in Odièvre and in feminist literature: self-determination or self-realisation/authenticity. Conclusions are reached that making autonomy dependent on claims to ‘authenticity’ restricts personal freedom and thus ultimately identity.

One way of understanding the exile of the Chagos Islanders and their inability to return to their ancestral land is through a reading of the case from a perspective of post-colonial legal scholarship. Chagossians have strong legal rights to land and remedies of compensation and return through a purposive application of the international legal definition of Indigenous, Magna Carta right to abode and international human rights law that could address their dispossession. Yet, the inability of those rights to be meaningfully applied has been constrained because of the post-colonial way they are legally interpreted, creating a legal vacuum in which basic fairness and substantive equality have been routinely compromised. Drawing attention to the continued legal denial of return in the context of decolonisation, ongoing colonialism and the rule of law makes sense of the legal record and explains the expulsion of the islanders despite the moral merits of return.

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.

To date, in Western jurisdictions, many criminal justice reforms are devised and implemented with a close eye on public opinion. These are typically intended to regain or foster legitimacy. However, within this context, there is no common understanding of this concept. This essay aims to provide such a conceptualisation of legitimacy, to enable a consistent and systematic evaluation of attempts to accommodate public opinion. To this end, five levels of legitimacy research are discussed that could structure evaluations of public-opinion-targeted reforms: (1) the normative dimension, (2) the ‘audiences’ addressed, (3) the purpose of the reforms, (4) trust and distrust, and (5) dialogic, or longitudinal effects. Furthermore, since research departing from these five levels of analysis is likely to result in observations that are, by nature, incommensurable, it is argued that an overall assessment of legitimacy always requires a judgment, rather than mere measurement.

Love is ever-present in the debate for the legal recognition of same-sex marriage. Its importance, however, is often underestimated. I will show in this article that much can be gained by viewing this issue through the analytical lens of romantic love. This analysis will show that romantic love is a contested idea. On the one hand it claims to embody a radical and permissive ideology that is capable of penetrating established social and cultural divides. On the other hand, however, love has been accused of replicating patriarchy, and of being ideologically heteronormative. As such, love is not necessarily the answer needed to win the legal argument for same-sex marriage – not unless we begin a process of redefining love for our times.

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.

The Holocaust sits uncomfortably within general theories of representation. Moreover, the Shoah also raises fundamental problems for our understandings of law and justice within modernity. ‘After Auschwitz’ serves as both a temporal and epistemological signifier within and about law and justice within modernity. This article studies the ways in which a new literary genre of French detective fiction, the néo-polar, which emerged after events of May 1968, has posited new understandings of law, justice and memory of the Shoah. Drawing on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and deconstruction, the article argues that the new generation of French writers problematise law, justice and politics through a genre in which ‘fiction’ writes and re-writes history and memory in a search for an impossible justice.

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.

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.

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.

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 develops the idea of transgenerational association. It addresses intrapersonal distributions of wellbeing over time. It develops the notion of temporal distributions between generations, and posits that it is possible to overcome the problems that obstruct ethical individualism. It argues that corporate personality allows us to compare distributions between generations to distributions between the stages of one person.