The United Kingdom had the experience of at least five different kinds of emergency throughout the twentieth century. The first and most serious is war, though not all wars (including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) create or created national emergencies. Nevertheless, the world wars of 1914–1918 and 1939–1945 almost certainly did, especially in the latter case with its risk – albeit short-lived – of invasion by a foreign power. The other causes of emergency were: second, the long-term internal conflict in Northern Ireland in what seemed like a separatist armed struggle, with one community pitted against another, and against the State (1969–2007); third, short-term but large-scale industrial action, which in at least one case (1926) was thought to border on the subversive; while the fourth has been an array of natural disasters, sometimes caused by adverse weather conditions, and sometimes caused by disease; finally, and most recently, there is the threat posed by international terrorism in the wake of 9/11 and our experiences in London in July 2005. Although emergency situations can thus arise for a host of reasons, it might be argued that the foregoing list is far from complete, with a sixth category of emergency being the various economic and fiscal crises that have engulfed the country from time to time, notably in 1931, when emergency powers were taken, and again after the end of World War II, when the country was financially exhausted by the demands of conflict.

This paper draws on an analysis of case studies from the line of research that examines contractual and working relationships in the aerospace industry (Cullen, Keast and Simpson, 2002; Cullen, Hickman, 2001; Cullen, 2005). These studies found a divergence between the parties’ intended working relationship and the agenda prescribed by formal contracts. The paper proposes that the ramifications of the contractual arrangements engender strains between the dynamic nature of collaborative transactions and the laissez-faire presumption of conflictual relations that underpins western commercial contract law, which in turn influences contractual relations and formal agreements.

When a state claims its practices are lawful but at the same time another claims this unlawful, a paradox emerges. Legal indeterminacy becomes the ordinary rule, while the resolution of disputes is designated the exception. To illustrate how international law deals with paradoxes, this paper will employ the dichotomy of upstream–downstream trans-boundary interstate relations. Here the paradox arises, since upstream states traditionally advocate for the free utilisation of water within their territory, while downstream states instead advocate for the waters full continued flow. Although, from a logical perspective, such a paradox would typically be viewed as something negative, from a social perspective, paradoxes also draw attention to the frames of common sense. Indeed, by employing a Luhmannian-inspired theoretical framework, this paper proposes that, through a sociological understanding of paradoxes, one can more adequately rediscover and reconceptualise the manner in which international law institutionalises conflicting expectations into a more harmless, bounded and permitted contradiction.

International law has both less and more to offer to the cosmopolitan project than one might think. As currently understood, international law presages a global system of obligations comprising the convergent systems of universal customary international laws and near-universal conventional instruments (treaties), both of which legal forms are characterised by natural law tendencies. From the point of view of a pluralistic cosmopolitanism, this is a dead end. Thinking beyond these formulae requires that international law be treated as a species of general law rather than state-centred law.

The debate surrounding judicial recognition of faith-based arbitration is typically framed as a multicultural contest between the liberal, gender-equal neutrality of public law and the patriarchal particularity of religious law. Within this framework, the state is understood as advancing the goal of protecting the ‘encultured subject’ from the disempowering effects of her religion. The author departs from this trend by reading the Canadian controversy over Islamic family law arbitration against a legal landscape that already authorises and encourages parties to settle matters of property division and support through private ordering. The author argues that faith-based arbitration and its normative driver, multiculturalism, were already nested within the domain of privatisation and neoliberal ideals of choice, liberty and autonomy. Facilitation of private ordering in family law paved the way for faith-based arbitration. Through a close reading of Supreme Court of Canada family law jurisprudence about the enforcement of marital contracts, the author argues that concerns more properly directed at privatisation per se have been aimed at the putative content of religious norms. The author offers a policy proposal that addresses these concerns as they arise in the context of faith-based arbitration.

This article provides a politico-jurisprudential account of the corporate personality which develops contemporary thinking about collective and shared intentions and their practical applications. It provides a model of corporate personality that is based on recent work by Bratman, Hurley, Raz and Sugden on the issues of shared intentions, interlocking preferences, and other supporting attitudes. The article will additionally detail issues of choice, coercion and will in relation to the work of scholars such as Dworkin and Velleman.

Throughout the history of the modern state, homosexuality has been a legal category, and not simply a medical or a psychiatric one. Fear of that legal subject manifests itself in law and policy not only about ‘the family’ but also about nationhood and citizenship. This is an article about this fear of the ‘Wandering Gay’, about the ways in which this fear has influenced domestic and international law regarding recognition in same-sex relationships, and about ways in which it can be overcome. I begin by introducing the Wandering Gay as a hidden driving cultural concept behind a state's reluctance (and in some places, outright objection) to recognise same-sex relationships. I then compare American and Israeli immigration policies concerning immigrants' sexuality, and discuss the different focuses of each system: while American policy (prior to its reform) was mainly concerned with ‘sexual deviancy’, Israeli policy was concerned with otherness, particularly non-Jewishness, in general. However, as I argue, homosexuality is one way in which individuals are ‘othered’ by Israeli immigration policy, since they cannot acquire legal status based on their marital status. I then contend that marriage is being used as a weapon against LGBT individuals, and that this is done from within a discourse that elevates marriage to a right that only heterosexual citizens are entitled to. I argue that marriage is used as a means of discrimination against minorities, and I question whether the proper solution to this violation of human rights is indeed to add more and more minorities to the privileged class of those who can marry, thus equipping them with the weapon of marriage to use against others.

In the last decade, several states have increasingly tried to ‘un-sign’ to their humanitarian obligations by seeking ways to circumvent European or international law. Through an analysis of a recently passed act in Australia on the management of asylum seekers, this paper examines how the practice of ‘un-signing’ can be seen as a symptomatic instance of reconfiguring asylum in late modernity. We focus on the proliferation of ‘legal pragmatics’ in the management of refugees. By ‘legal pragmatics’, we refer to the processual ways in which the state attempts to hollow out international refugee law and in which courts respond by reinstating it. Normative consequences are the criminalisation and the juridification of refugees. We argue that the proliferation of ‘legal pragmatics’ illuminates not only the ever-expanding reach of neoliberal changes in domestic legislation, but also the limitations of human rights to adequately respond to the neoliberal vicissitudes of humanitarian government.

In this contribution, I examine the links between the human rights basis of the UN Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) and its embeddedness in the UN Sustainable Development Agenda 2030. While the GCM grew out of a development framework, it was rapidly incorporated into the UN human rights system. Even during the negotiation of the GCM, human rights took priority over development. The resistance that was manifested against the GCM on its endorsement by the UN General Assembly was directed not against its development links, but rather concerns about its human rights impact. This paper examines the placing of migration in this dual framework and the ways in which outcomes compatible with both are achievable.

By ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2018, Ireland has undertaken inter alia the obligation to implement ‘an inclusive education system at all levels and lifelong learning’, as required by Article 24. However, concerns have been repeatedly expressed about the practice of inclusive education in Ireland in terms of admission policies, funding, school choice and reduced timetabling. This paper investigates whether, and to what extent, the current approach to special educational needs (SEN) in Ireland complies with the aim of ensuring an inclusive educational system in which children with disabilities are valued and empowered. Ireland is an interesting case-study due to its history of marginalisation of children with disabilities and its relatively recent engagement with the concept of inclusive education. By using a socio-legal approach, drawing on qualitative interviews with key stakeholders in education combined with a legal analysis of relevant primary and secondary sources, it examines the current practices relating to the education of children with disabilities in Ireland.

In 2014, something happened that changed how the media report on court proceedings in South Africa. The Oscar Pistorius trial proceedings attracted much media attention. International journalists flocked into South Africa in droves. Our newspapers, our televisions, our radios, even our Facebook feeds were flooded with information. An entire twenty-four-hour television channel was created with the sole purpose of televising, and then discussing, the proceedings. Everything about the trial – the judge's rulings, the witnesses who gave evidence and especially the verdict – clogged social-media newsfeeds on laptops and other devices for months on end. This has changed irreversibly the manner in which the media and the justice system in South Africa converge. Through a focus on the debates in and out of the courtroom that the Pistorius trial generated, this paper explores the intersection between the judicial function, the media and the public. It was an important moment in post-apartheid South Africa, ushering in a new way of making and distributing judicial images to the public and thereby bringing into being new ways for the media and the public to access and assess the adjudicative role of judges.

The context of this paper is the several innovative reforms since the Australian government changed the family-law system more than forty years ago with the enactment of the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth). Whilst no-fault divorce was introduced over four decades ago, the watershed effect of replacing a blaming culture with a collaborative problem-solving approach to family disputing has provided a stepping stone for a progressive pathway to less adversarialism in family conflict. This narrative resonates throughout the family-law system today. It also continues to guide the justice discourse in family matters. This paper focuses on developments in the family-law system canvassing several legislative amendments that demonstrate the use of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) as a means of improving access to justice in relation to family disputes in Australia. It is argued that, in the family-law system, justice and ADR are inextricably linked. In support of this contention, the growth, development and evaluation of family dispute resolution is considered; access to justice issues that arise are highlighted. Finally, it reviews ramifications for the future considering recommendations from the recent inquiry into the family-law system.

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.

During the 1790s, Mary Hays was one of the most influential radical novelists and polemicists in England. She counted amongst her closest friends and mentors the likes of Joseph Johnson, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. During this tumultuous final decade of the century, she published two novels, The Memoirs of Emma Courtney and The Victim of Prejudice. Both were controversial in the extreme, attracting the opprobrium of conservative critics. What caused such consternation was not merely their vivid description of the myriad political and social injustices suffered by her female compatriots, but the role of the law in perpetuating such injustices. For much of the last two hundred years Hays has been a largely forgotten figure, her novels occasioning rare interest amongst literary critics and historians, rarer interest still amongst jurists. The purpose of this article is to address this neglect, and to recommend Hays as one of the most intriguing and urgent prophets of modern literary and jurisprudential feminism.

The Independent Review of the Mental Health Act 1983 found that people’s experiences and self-knowledge were mislabelled as a ‘lack of insight’. Insight, a psychiatric concept, is defined as an ability to recognise one’s mental illness, awareness of one’s symptoms and compliance with treatment. Across different jurisdictions, legal scholars have raised concerns about the influence of insight on legal provisions for psychiatric care and mental capacity assessments, given its prevalent use in psychiatry and its absence from statutory criteria. However, outside of these findings, little is known about people’s lived experiences of ‘insight’ and the law. This article draws on narrative and photo-elicitation interviews with psychiatric survivors to argue that insight is an extra-legislative proxy for regulating involuntary detention and other coercion masked as consent. Finally, this article draws on the capabilities approach to deliver a justice argument for creating real opportunities to provide informed consent in mental health settings.

By foregrounding a widened view of the rule of law in transnational legal processes, the works under discussion in this symposium can support innovative critical perspectives on global health law –a field that has gained wide attention due to the spread of COVID-19 around the world (Lander, 2020; Bhatt, 2020). Legal and socio-legal scholars in the decade and a half before the pandemic worked on locating global health law and articulating its underlying principles. Lawrence Gostin's 2014 monograph offers a synoptic view centred on international institutions (e.g. the World Health Organization, World Trade Organization, UN Human Rights Council) and problems (e.g. infectious-disease response, tobacco control), along with an elaboration of its normative basis in universal moral principle and international human rights law (Gostin, 2014). Struggles over access to essential medicines and intellectual property in the early 2000s are, for example, represented in terms of the right to health constraining international trade law. Andreas Fischer-Lescano and Guenther Teubner's 2004 reading is oriented more by social theory than by doctrinal or ethical frames (Fischer-Lescano and Teubner, 2004, pp. 1006, 1008). A functional health regime has ‘differentiated out’, they observe, and operates as a discrete communication system across borders, albeit one that is threatened by the preponderant economic system. On this model, the battle for access to medicines amounts to ensuring, via human rights guarantees, that the rationality of the health system is not replaced by that of its economic rival in legal and policy communications (Fischer-Lescano and Teubner, 2004, pp. 1030, 1046).

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, efforts to quantitatively measure the global health situation and/or governments’ reaction vis-à-vis the pandemic have flourished. In spite of the significance of data in the fight against the pandemic, however, such global knowledge is largely questionable, insofar as it exposes itself to the many hazards and fallacies associated with global attempts to frame the social world in numbers. This is why the paper attempts to identify the hazards and fallacies most commonly associated with global measurements of social phenomena and to verify whether and to what extent these hazards and fallacies affect numerical representations of the pandemic and its effects. To this end, the paper analyses ten English-language global numerical initiatives that were launched between January and May 2020, and reviews them in light of existing critical literature on global numbers. The aim is to provide a deeper understanding of global measurements of health and related law-and-policy measures, and to suggest caution about their use as a basis for knowledge and action in the context of the pandemic.

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.

Using a legal-consciousness approach, this paper discusses the issue of stigma and law from the perspectives of a group of older homeless people in Singapore. Focusing specifically on the Destitute Persons Act 2013 Rev. Ed. (DPA), the paper shows the different ways in which homeless people make sense of, negotiate, resist or succumb to the stigma of a homeless identity ascribed by the DPA. From these experiences, two fundamental problems with the DPA are highlighted. First, the DPA imposes a homeless identity that is entangled in archaic legal definitions that often do not relate to contemporary experiences of homelessness in Singapore. Second, the enforcement of the DPA legitimises a differential treatment of homeless people, without addressing the broader complexities of homelessness.