This article explores the cultural and legal contexts in which the construction of childhood sexual abuse has taken place over the past three decades in the United States. It also explores a theoretical debate that pits ‘logico-scientific’ accounts of reality against narrative accounts of reality. This debate is of central importance to the study of social and legal responses to childhood sexual abuse, which is categorised in this article as a problem of sexual and domestic violence from a feminist perspective. Some feminists argue that narratives may serve an empowering function in legal and other institutions by giving voice and legitimacy to survivors of sexual and domestic violence. Other feminists argue that narratives of domestic and sexual abuse that fail to identify the social systems of inequality associated with abuse may produce hyper-individualistic and depoliticising accounts of these problems. In this article, the author argues, with Ewick and Silbey, that it is possible to specify the kinds of narratives that contribute to political discourse and confrontation surrounding issues of childhood sexual abuse. The strategic use of social science and expert testimony in criminal and civil court cases, the construction and cultural significance of autobiographical narratives, and the proliferation of narratives in popular media that deal with child sexual abuse are all discussed. It is argued that autobiographical accounts of child sexual abuse, such as those of Dorothy Allison and Maya Angelou, internally illuminate the contexts of inequality which perpetuate abuse and shape the lives of survivors, while discourses in legal institutions and popular media tend to reproduce hegemonic constructions of women, children, and the problem of childhood sexual abuse.

The problem of women's access to self-defence has been internationally recognised. This paper presents original empirical data on women's use of self-defence in practice alongside critical feminist analysis of the requirements of self-defence under Scots law. The empirical findings confirm that women are rarely successful with self-defence at trial level and the doctrinal analysis further demonstrates that self-defence does not adequately reflect women's experience of violence, especially sexual violence, and instead continues to reflect male experiences of (public) violence. It is intended that this research will form part of a larger developing evidence base, the type of which has been called for (Fitz-Gibbon and Vannier, 2017) and can be used to support reform in this area. As such, it represents a significant contribution to socio-legal work that has considered the issue of women's access to criminal defences.

The fact that migration cases seldom raise any questions under Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is neither inevitable nor justified. This article reaffirms the equality provision as a useful and indeed necessary mechanism for the European Court of Human Rights to deal with such applications. More concretely, we build on our previous work, which identified a legal tool suitable for achieving this reorientation in judicial practice: the principle that we call ‘migratory vulnerability’, once recalibrated away from a group-based approach to a notion of vulnerability as situational and socially induced. In this article, we explain how the principle of migratory vulnerability, even if it does not represent an inherently suspect ground of differentiation, enables us to identify instances of discrimination defined as a measurable disadvantage that is disproportionate or arbitrary and cannot, therefore, be reasonably justified on the basis of the Convention. This presupposes a move away from nationality as a privileged ground in migration-related cases and from the ‘comparator’ test to determine Article 14 ECHR violations, to also encompass situational experiences. We end with two examples that show that this reconceptualization is both workable in practice and of added value, enabling the Court to find violations that presently go undetected.

The last year has seen a revolt against the recommendations of the Zellick Report (1994) in England and Wales, and pressure on universities worldwide to bring serious criminal conduct within their own disciplinary structures. This paper examines the reasons why the Zellick Report advised against this, and why higher-education institutions have now turned their back on a number of its recommendations. Factors including student pressure and concerns about low conviction rates for sexual offences in the criminal courts have been cited, but this paper argues that universities will struggle to create a disciplinary system that is fair to both those who are accused of such offences and those who have been victims of them. A recent Universities UK report has reversed the Zellick guidance that conduct amounting to a serious criminal offence should never be pursued under university disciplinary structures. Drawing on both authors’ experiences as practitioners, and using the first author's experience of university disciplinary matters as a case-study, this paper reviews the practical problems of bringing such serious conduct under university disciplinary structures, focusing particularly on the intersection of criminal and internal disciplinary proceedings. It concludes by suggesting possible ways of ameliorating these.

This paper argues that law and society are disconnected in practice, and that this is attributable, in part, to law’s disconnection from the arts and humanities in our schemes of formal education. When we draw out the legal yarn from its cultural fabric, we find that it is remarkably thin. It is especially inadequate to describe the complexity of human interconnection, and even lacks a language to express such commonplace connections as unmarried romantic cohabitation and non-profit clubs. To understand human interconnection and the law’s connection to society, we must read the law ‘in context’ – as being one fabric, one textile, with other literatures – and we must read with an appropriate ethic. To that end, this paper reads the law in the context of Dickens’s Bleak House, which has been called ‘a novel of connections’, and Forster’s Howards End, which exhorts us to ‘connect the prose and the passion’.

Fears that new scientific advances on the mind and the brain which establish that behaviour is determined by causes in one’s mind/brain and/or various past and present internal and external environments will undermine the attribution of legal responsibility are misplaced. Taking responsibility to inhere where conduct reflects upon an individual and where, properly understood, the individual could have done otherwise, determinism, operating in the right sort of way, should be embraced as a condition for responsibility.

For some time now, there has been a perceived need to prepare law students to handle legal issues beyond national borders. Much has been written on how globalisation should shape legal education, but no clear direction has emerged. There is also a contrary impulse to retain a focus on domestic law in order to prepare students for practice in their home jurisdiction. One way of addressing these apparently contrary impulses is to take a skills approach that articulates the analytical processes distinctively active in a more global context. Some of these skills could then be integrated into a variety of courses. However, skills in the global context should not merely replicate domestic conceptions of skills. This paper proposes that students develop abilities in comparative thinking and heuristic question framing, and reviews the advantages and disadvantages of a course in Comparative Advocacy designed to accomplish these goals.

This article explores narrative devices in legal rhetoric, and the use of these devices for asserting the authority to distinguish lawful from unlawful inflictions of bodily harm. The argument made here is that the moral language adopted by judges in criminal appeal judgments on risky sexual and/or violent consensual acts embraces a set of interconnecting narratives otherwise observed in literature, and relating to gender, sexuality and race. I try to show how the reading of these legal cases is enriched by identifying these narratives, locating them as rhetorical strategies and reflecting on their uses in judicial decision-making. In particular, I argue that in the case-law explored here, these interconnected narratives are deployed in order to assert law's dominance over an imagined ‘savage’ other. Through this ongoing repudiation of savagery the distinctions between normative and non-normative, violent and non-violent, lawful and unlawful are constructed.

Despite international and national human rights norms and standards, gender equality remains a goal in most countries. The recent discourse on substantive equality as a strategy for addressing the gender discrimination, disadvantage and deep-rooted social biases has reinforced the importance of working towards indivisible human rights for girls and women under CRC and CEDAW. This paper uses international and comparative national experiences on law and policy to argue that the failure to adopt an indivisibility of rights approach in relation to girl children has made it more difficult to achieve a norm of substantive equality for women. It is argued that the adoption of an intergenerational and rights-based, rather than a social welfare approach, is a necessary step to achieving substantive equality for women.

The legal requirements of transracial adoption of children in England changed in 2014. An amendment to the law removed a requirement that due consideration be given to the ‘child's religious persuasion, racial origin and ethnic and linguistic background’. This change was motivated by the belief that to do so would increase the number of transracial adoptions and thus decrease the number of children in care awaiting adoption. The likelihood of this change being successful is examined through a combination of critical race theory and systems theory. The combination of these theories permits an investigation into the communications between the political, legal and child welfare systems. This paper offers an enriched evaluation of the interactions of the child welfare, legal and political systems that should be of use to those who work in those systems, as well as providing a basis for understanding why this legal amendment will not achieve its objectives.

This paper examines the presence of lonely, isolated and impoverished older citizens in Japan's prison population, many of whom have turned to petty crime only recently and arguably lack a genuine need for corrective services. The paper offers empirical evidence drawn from a mixed-methods study that appears to confirm their compliant, ‘law-abiding’ attributes. It argues that their influx into prisons can be seen, at least in part, as citizens who are already socially excluded and stigmatised leveraging law to assert an additional risk-laden and stigmatised identity, which provides protection. The outcome is the subversion of prisons as de facto aged-care communities. This analysis resonates with an emerging body of literature that Chua and Engel (2018; 2019) have described as the ‘Identity’ school of legal-consciousness scholarship. This literature centres on empirical studies of marginalised cohorts who leverage legal structures to embrace an identity that complicates their stigma while providing desired protections.

The field of carceral geography was lately developed by critical human geographers grappling with the spatiotemporal modes of social control and coercion particular to institutions of incarceration (Moran et al., 2018; Moran and Schliehe, 2017). This has included – in keeping with Michel Foucault's (1991) genealogy of the carceral as an art of disciplinary power – studying the disparate ways in which carceral techniques proliferate from and beyond the built site of the prison, becoming incorporated into other spatial formations. Carceral geographers have characterised this extension as transcarceral (Moran, 2014) or heterotopic (Gill et al., 2018; Moran and Keinänen, 2012). However, despite frequent references to law and legal institutions, carceral geographers generally do not theorise about law. Through a case-study involving an Indigenous woman paroled in Toronto, the author theorises about how carceral spaces are expressed through legal forms and techniques, affecting how paroled individuals, particularly those Aboriginalised, are emplaced within urban space.

The three books reviewed here all address the question of the efficacy of international law and advance concerns about its future trajectory, albeit in contrasting ways. As has been well documented, the role of international law – specifically in the regulation of the use of force – has undergone significant scrutiny in the post-Cold War era. To a much greater extent than during the Cold War, contemporary conflicts and crises are invariably discussed with reference to international law, and the legality of a particular use of force has become a significant factor in assessing its legitimacy; one need only think of the importance placed on the legality of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. This increase in prominence suggests that international law has become more important, and unsurprisingly those used to the discipline's previous role as exotic curio have welcomed this sudden promotion (Robertson, 2000).

This paper seeks to explore the relationship between law and morality and its relevance for establishing the legitimacy of international criminal justice (ICJ) within the context of international trials. At present, imperatives for peace and reconstruction in conflict societies are divorced both conceptually and practically from the process of punishment in international criminal trials. It argues that, in order for international trial justice to move beyond partial forms of retributivism requires a profound re-alignment of the rationales underpinning international penality and a merging of retributive and restorative justice forms. The paper suggests that the resolution of ‘truth’ must go further than this by implicating penal law and process as crucial determinants of ‘legitimate’ strategies for intervention, thereby enabling a wider choice of consequent resolutions. The paper suggests that the intrinsic value of international criminal process lies in its capacity to confront the relativism of ICJ by providing the means to engage with its plurality and so increase its legitimacy for all victims and communities affected by social conflict and war. In so doing it considers how law may be transformed into normative guides to conduct and examines the relationship between the processes of legal reasoning and sentence decision-making in international criminal trials.

This paper intervenes in critical socio-legal/post-colonial scholarship on human rights directed at how religion is constitutive of race and shapes who and what is regarded as ‘human’ and entitled to rights. It focuses on the Indian post-colony and legal persecution of the Tablighi Jamaat, a global, quietest Islamic movement, by the Hindu Right government during the Covid pandemic. It analyses how religion structures race in Hindu nationalist discourse to transform the Muslim into a perpetual outsider and an existential and epistemic threat to the Hindu nation and rights of the Hindu racial majority. The discussion connects to the epistemic anxiety generated by the alternative worldviews presented by this racialised ‘Other’ that shape legal consciousness and rights interventions globally. In complicating how anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia are integral to the transnational histories of race and race-making, the analysis triggers a rethinking of human rights interventions and the epistemological closures they enact.

the world bank has in place a set of guidelines for assessing the impact of bank-funded projects on indigenous peoples and requires investors to produce detailed reports and ensure for the provision of adequate compensation. the tendency is to preserve sub-saharan indigenous social structures without inquiring whether a particular indigenous group finds itself oppressed within such structures and wants to escape from them. the bank’s compensation policy should strive to remedy social imbalances if that is the wish of indigenous societies.

Contemporary initiatives to address civilian victimisation in armed conflict increasingly focus on international criminal justice institutions, rules and practices. These institutions are now expected to construct legal recognition of civilian victims of armed conflict, as well as prosecute the perpetrators. This article uses a case-study of the Prosecutor v. Dragomir Milošević heard by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to explore the concept of the civilian. It first examines the international legal frameworks and obligations that enforce the protection of civilians. It then explores the concept of the civilian as defined by the rules of humanitarian law, and the different approaches to defining civilians utilised by the parties to the Milošević trial. The article argues that the current ‘negative’ definition of civilians creates significant difficulties for understanding civilians as a distinct category of persons, and does not adequately capture their choices, actions and experiences in armed conflict.

We are sympathetic to the research aims of the two books examined by this symposium and their desire to understand law's role in generating and contesting social injustice. We are also intrigued by the proposal in the Introduction to this symposium, notably to expand the normative reach of the rule-of-law ideal to private actors, in order to transform it into an ally of counter-hegemonic action. In our research, we share a similar research focus (development projects), methodology (case-studies) and concerns (harmful effects of development interventions) with the authors of the two books. Accordingly, in this contribution, we want to think together with the editors of the symposium – by examining the case-study of the Hidroituango project in Colombia (hereinafter, ‘Hidroituango’) – whether the rule of law can indeed be reimagined to limit the arbitrary exercise of power by private actors, and what benefits this might create for dealing with social injustice. However, since neither Bhatt nor Lander advances an explicit account of rule of law in their books, our critique in this piece is addressed not at them, but rather at the theorists and advocates of rule of law as a political ideal.