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.

Since the 1990s, human trafficking has become the battleground for competing discourses on human rights and penality. While rights solutions are generally presented as in opposition to crime-control measures, in the context of anti-trafficking interventions, rights-based initiatives and criminal governance are often linked together both discursively and in practice. Drawing on the findings of Discourse Analysis of 120 texts about trafficking, this paper explores how dominant discourses and alternative voices construct the relationship between human rights and penality. It is contended that penality is framed as a crucial tenet of human rights. Dominant discourses (the ‘law enforcement’ and the ‘victims first’ discourses) link human rights to state coercive action, seen as a necessary component of their effectiveness. Alternative voices (the ‘incompatibility’ and the ‘transformative justice’ discourses) reject the appropriateness of penal intervention, but they end up preserving what they denounce.

This paper presents a double genealogy of indicators as instruments of governance. These have their roots both in the use of statistical tools for normative purposes by states and in the development of indicators within firms as preferred instruments of ‘new management’. The paper argues that social indicators not only convey information, but are genuine tools of global governance and that, for this reason, their legitimacy depends not only on their accuracy, but also on their accountability. If indicators are intended to produce or effectively produce regulatory effects, they should be subjected to the rule of law and to judicial review. The essay ends by formulating four main principles that these indicators should comply with.

Different organisations recently published reports identifying the challenges and potential solutions to ensure privacy in blockchain platforms. The proposed solutions frequently emphasise the role of privacy-compliance technologies to be incorporated into the blockchain design. Often, these solutions imply a techno-regulatory approach, ignoring that the level of privacy implemented in a blockchain involves legal and policy choices, disregarding the need to implement human participation and contestability in these platforms. Against this backdrop, this paper proposes to examine how privacy-compliance technologies can incorporate human participation and contestability: first, resorting to the interdisciplinary literature to examine how technological design could balance privacy with human oversight; second, discussing the challenges to ensure ex post contestability for aggrieved data subjects; third, examining the difficulties in identifying liable parties in a blockchain platform. The current disregard of the social and human element risks undermining the role of privacy-compliance technologies in the blockchain.

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.

In international human rights law, the right to food has become a widely accepted legal and normative framework for tackling the problem of food insecurity. However, as currently formulated, the right to food is insufficient as a framework to tackle gender-specific barriers that impede women's access to food, which has contributed to the persistence of women's food insecurity globally. While the equal enjoyment of the right to food is guaranteed by the non-discrimination and equality provisions in international law, this notion of equality, associated with the formal equality approach, fails to recognise and address women's historical experience of systemic discrimination. This article argues that women's food insecurity should be approached from a broader formulation of the right to food that is informed by a substantive equality perspective, drawing from contemporary interpretations and elucidations by human rights bodies which have pushed for a more substantive notion of equality.

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.

Research has rarely investigated the actions bureaucrats take to challenge the status quo of their organisation from within. Proposing a power-analytical approach to voice, exit and everyday resistance as political strategies of challenging the bureaucratic status quo, I study the difficulties of achieving organisational change in a context of structural constraints on junior bureaucrats’ reformative power. During field research in Niger's Refugee Directorate, I found that despite the associated risks, junior bureaucrats criticised their working conditions and, in confidential conversations, the administration. As precarious staff, they often combined criticism with compliance. In frequent acts of semi-private criticism amongst peers and with external actors, they problematised their working conditions and the state, but performed symbolic conformity in the everyday to avoid sanctions. This strategy nevertheless created autonomy for themselves and mobilised external actors for change-making. In rarer acts of direct criticism voiced to their superiors, the junior staff often complied with the same informal solidarities they vocally criticised.

The purpose of this article is to offer an analysis of the nature of contemporary legal power over the ending of human life in medical contexts. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s characterisations of power relations in the sphere of life and death in The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, it is argued that, in its current regulation of the ending of human life in this area, law displays elements of two of those modes, or forms, of power identified by Foucault – the juridical and the disciplinary. This argument is illustrated by reference to two recent cases – Re A (Children) and Re B (an adult: refusal of medical treatment) – and set against a background of shifting modes of governmentality (here, the movement from medicalisation to legalisation). Through an analysis of the forms of legal power in this particular context, the article also has a broader purpose – to advance an alternative approach to the question of power within the academic medical law field. Specifically, unlike the standard form of legal academic inquiry in this area – that is, one which is driven mainly by a concern for ethics and resolving ethical dilemmas – it is suggested that an appreciation of the importance that institutional context(s) and requirements play in medical law is necessary if we are to understand fully both the factors constitutive of legal power and the subtle, and often controversial, effects that flow from the manner in which it is exercised and asserted.

There is now a well-established ‘spatial turn in law’. However, it remains oriented towards notions of space rather than law. How, then, to capture both the spatiality of law and the legality of space? This article draws on Bruno Latour's concept of the legal construction of the ‘social’ to explore the assemblage of the city of law. It shows how law functions as a particular form of association in urban life by tracing two key forms of urban legal association in London, the city of law. The first form is ‘legal ordering’. This seeks to order urban life through domination, and includes citadel law, police law and laws of exception. The second is ‘legal consociations’, which build new forms of urban life, such as urban rights, the rights of the city and the right to the city. Finally, the article explores the creation of a spatial justice that can build more just legal associations.

In recent years, assisted reproductive technologies have played an important role in shaping the lives of many individuals throughout the world. Their promise to make people become parents is believed to fulfil the most elementary interests a person may have. It is argued and legally acknowledged that such interests constitute with much significance a person's self-identity and sense of belonging to the living society, also constituting her reproductive liberty or the right to procreate. Despite their significance and importance, access to these technologies and to fertility care specifically may not always accord with the principle of equality and justice. It will be argued that, in some cases, such unequal access reflects various forms of discrimination between different groups in society. It is the purpose of this article to show that such a phenomenon is the result of an underdeveloped and unregulated area of law, characterising many Western countries. Specifically, it demonstrates conceptual deficiencies in so-called ‘procreative liberty’ with regard to the content and scope of the right to procreate, the values underlying such a right, and the legal and social institutions supporting and securing it. The article highlights these deficiencies, making them more evident when the notion of ‘reproductive liberty’ applies to positive and modern attempts to become parents, especially but not exclusively those brought by men.

In recent years there has been an increased interest in mediumship. This has been part of a broader fascination with paranormal issues that has been fostered by new modes of dissemination and communication. This article focuses upon attempts made by the criminal law to regulate mediums, and, in particular, the disjunction between the ‘genuine medium’ and the ‘vulnerable consumer’. It charts historical approaches of the law and provides a critique of the current legal landscape, including the new regulatory framework under the Unfair Commercial Practice Regulations 2008, and the possibility of an action under the Fraud Act 2006. It concludes that the law has continually struggled to adequately deal with this phenomenon, and that the current regime is likely to prove similarly ineffective given the fundamental conceptual legal problem of proving what may be un-provable.

In England and Wales, the judiciary, Her Majesty's Courts and Tribunal Services (HMCTS) and the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) have embarked on an ambitious reform whose aims are to radically transform and restructure court services and introduce digital justice for the overall purpose of improving access to justice in relation to the resolution of disputes. The reality in the courts of England and Wales is that the current reform means automation of processes. Digital transformation offers a real chance to improve access to justice particularly for low-value claims where a simplified process is more proportionate to the value of the dispute. This paper argues therefore that, for everyday low-value civil disputes, alternative dispute resolution (ADR) processes should be at the core of any design. In addition, fashioning new means to deliver access to justice should not just be about increasing government efficiency, but also about using technology to design and create innovative, new, agile and ‘user-centric’ pathways.

The Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 represents the most significant change to the rights of homeless people in England for decades. Through an analysis of the history of homelessness legislation in England, but focusing on the ‘ground-breaking’ 2017 Act, this paper explores how the homeless population is represented and ‘constructed’ in this new legislation and what this tells us about the place of homeless people in our society. In so doing, this paper exposes how the 2017 Act – a state instrument of apparent homelessness prevention – can be read and understood as contributing to rather than obviating the marginalisation and social exclusion of homeless people.

This article critically examines the insights that biology (including evolutionary analysis and neuroscience data) offers for understanding the relationship between family law and family stability. The paper initially considers evolutionary analysis, comparative anatomy, and neuroscience data to conclude that while the pair bond appears to be a universal feature of human societies, long-term fidelity is not. The second part of the paper considers the benefits and limitations of evolutionary analysis concluding, first, that evolutionary analysis, without connection to modern neuroscience or sociological data, remains highly speculative; second, that where the evolutionary analysis is borne out by modern neuroscience and/or sociological data, it is more persuasive, but often leads to obvious conclusions; and third, that undertaking this type of examination nonetheless leads to new insights or new questions that should prompt productive research.

This is a paper about promulgation, and whether it is a sine qua non of law. The promulgation question has been treated occasionally in the jurisprudential literature, although typically only as a subordinate theorem. This paper does not attempt a thorough conspectus, seeking rather to serve as an introductory to what is a longstanding problem of general interest and concern. An argument for the proposition that laws are things that can be known will be distinguished from two other ways of responding to the promulgation question, which may be attributed respectively to the late H. L. A. Hart and Lon Fuller. The paper defends this proposition about artefactuality and access, and deals with a number of awkward consequences that appear to ensue from its acceptance.

modern life presents us with new, as well as perennial perspectives upon death. this essay explores how we might articulate an apposite conception of rights in relation to death, in a time of a declared respect for individual autonomy and waning adherence to religious belief, and considers these questions with particular reference to the challenges to law and state made by dianne pretty in the months leading up to her death. to such an applicant, with a ‘lay’ experience and apprehension of the role and meaning of law, the prognostications of the court regarding the status of the claim must have seemed surreal indeed – especially where disputable, patchwork value-systems are called upon to lend authority to the decision. the essay concludes that such peregrinations have implications not only for the individual claimant, but for the credibility of law and associated ethics and that the writings of existential philosophers on the subject of death can assist in modelling a more consistent, secular notion of ethics in relation to assisted suicide.

A current trend in sociology characterises the end of the twentieth century as obsessed with risk. Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens are perhaps the leading expositors of this theme. Both emphasise a break with the past as the last millennium approached its conclusion, whereby changes in patterns of work, technological developments and the demise of traditional social forms have ushered in a new modernity. In their view, social organisations became more reflexive in their assessments of the circumstances of daily life, at a time when new technologies created the possibility of damage on a global scale. The result in the new social world is a society focused on risk. Some aspects of this assessment are uncontroversial. New technologies have emerged, whilst the role of the nation state has changed since its apogee in the nineteenth century. Other aspects of this new vision are, however, empirically more problematic. Furthermore, the degree to which social changes actually had the effects identified by Beck and Giddens remains an open question. Using the early twentieth-century regulation of mental defectives as a case study, this paper will interrogate this ‘discontinuist’ vision, exploring whether and how our understanding of risk has changed.

First, many thanks to Carrie Menkel-Meadow, the editors of The International Journal of Law In Context and the sponsors of this series for facilitating this lecture, and for inviting my participation. And a special thankyou to Professor Roger Cotterrell for sharing with us such a generous, humanistic and hopeful account of law’s moral possibilities, when faced with multicultural conflict within a society governed by a liberal rule of law.1 I very much appreciate the opportunity to reflect on this set of claims, although I feel somewhat an outsider to the task, as I’ll explain below. I understand Professor Cotterrell as arguing, first, that traditional Anglo-American jurisprudence has not sufficiently theorised the role of culture and cultures,2 second, that multiculturalism renders inadequate, for different reasons, both Weberian and non-positivist or non-instrumental accounts of law’s liberal aspirations,3 and third, that one possible way for law to contribute constructively to a moral and peaceful multicultural society would be to conceive of itself not just as an instrument for the fulfilment of private and conflicting individual purposes, not just as the target of passions from a more-or-less unified culture, but rather, as a means of respectful communication between cultures,4 albeit one that imposes individualist and liberal side-constraints on the conversation so fostered: to wit, that the law itself, and its parts, must be rigorously respectful of the autonomy and decency of all individuals, and must demand as much from citizens.5