World War II genocide in Germany, the Rwanda genocide in the early 1990s and the Darfur genocide today are visceral reminders of the devastation and senselessness in the breakdown of human order, a poignant but sad insight into the nature of man and politics. Yet the international community, and by extension the United Nations (UN), have shown a remarkable reluctance to address rape and other forms of gender violence perpetrated during militarised conflicts. Given the psychological toll and devastating effect of rape and the growing number of conflicts, this effort does not speak well to the UN’s commitment to problems that destabilise international peace. It does however raise concerns in the minds of those who see the UN as cherrypicking which conflicts to address while sidestepping others until it is too late. With a view to the Allies’ response to genocide during World War II, this article argues that the realist analytical framework of world politics provides the most plausible basis for explaining variations in international response in militarised conflicts such as Rwanda and Darfur. We present testable hypotheses to conclude that while rape in itself may not be the sole trigger for interventions, states with unstable regimes or sovereign capacity whose government has been deposed are more likely to be the object for interventions or held accountable than those with otherwise stable governments who benefit from the support of a hegemonic power. To victims of crimes of rape caught in militarised conflicts, and to whom justice may come only after a perpetrator regime has been deposed, the conclusion that the decision to intervene is predicated more on political might than justice is disquieting.

The theme of the book symposium ‘The Rule of Law in Transnational Development Projects’ is, as Bhatt's Concessionaires, Financiers and Communities (2020) and Lander's Transnational Law and State Transformation (2020) highlight, ripe for critical reflection. The two books reveal the power wielded by private for-profit actors in the co-constitution of legal norms, often at the expense of local communities in development-investment settings. The co-constitution of legal norms by private actors via ‘contracts’, ‘policies’ and ‘intermediaries’ (Bhatt, Lander and Taekema, Book Symposium Introduction in this issue) development permeates rule of law in the public sphere, including in ways that affect the application of domestic and international legal norms relating to human rights. Of course, rule of law may be defined by ‘thick’ conceptions … as a just system of laws ‘consistent with international human rights norms and standards’ (UN Secretary General, 2004, para. 6) or ‘thin’ conceptions with more formalistic requirements that do not prescribe political or social values. Deontological questions aside, even in its ‘thinnest’ conception, rule of law means that legal norms ‘should be publicly promulgated; be predictable in their application; apply to all citizens, including government officials; and be subject to some form of neutral adjudication in the event of disputes as to their interpretation or application’ (Trebilcock, 2011, p. 209). Yet, rule of law has often been applied ‘to favour entrenched elites over resistance groups, vested interests … over civil disobedience, official actors over unofficial actors and property owners over protestors’ (Simpson, 2012, p. 9).

This paper compares two judgments of constitutional courts (French and German) assessing the constitutionality of statutes concerning veil-wearing and focuses on the underlying conceptions of ‘living together’. This means that what is actually compared is the self-understanding of the respective majority in the two societies as stated in the decisions. This is done by disassembling the concept of ‘living together’ into three elements: the notion of the individual, the meaning of belonging to the national community and the space accorded to religion in public. Each section of this paper examines one of these elements as they are entailed in the judgments and positions them critically within the respective legal cultural and historical contexts. The main aim of this paper is methodological in nature and is namely to show how comparative legal cultural studies can avoid essentialisation and rather highlight the complexity of every cultural context.

‘therapy’ is a legal concept of considerable import, traditionally juxtaposed with, but separate from, research and also, to some degree, marking the boundaries of legitimate medical intervention. the recent case of simms highlighted these issues, in addition to which novel clinical interventions were the subject of specific recommendations in the bristol royal infirmary inquiry report. this article subjects the notion of therapy to analytical scrutiny and considers the extent of proper clinician discretion to innovate and, albeit much more superficially, how medicine should itself evolve. it advocates a new, more (patient) protective model which should generate confidence in the ethical character of contemporary innovatory practices.

It is now over ten years since the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR or Court) first established that asylum seekers are inherently and particularly vulnerable on account of their very situation as asylum seekers. This occurred in its Grand Chamber judgment in the case of M.S.S. v Belgium and Greece. This article critically examines the Court’s subsequent asylum jurisprudence through the lens of vulnerability. The analysis reveals that the Court has engaged in ‘vulnerability backsliding’. Specifically, it traces the ways in which the Court has surreptitiously reversed the very principle of asylum vulnerability it itself established in M.S.S. The consequence of this backsliding is not only that the judicially recognised concept of asylum vulnerability is undermined, but that some of the most vulnerable applicants that come before the Court suffer renewed marginalisation, and, in some circumstances, exclusion from the ‘special protection’ to which they were previously afforded courtesy of M.S.S.

While access to civil-law institutions has been a traditional area of socio-legal research, access to administrative justice still constitutes an underresearched field. In the field of administrative law, public ombuds institutions represent an important pathway to resolve disputes without invoking a court. To date, we have little knowledge about who uses these ombuds institutions and which factors facilitate access to the ombuds. In this paper, on the basis of our survey among users of the Austrian Ombudsman Board (n = 8,274), we explore the effects of institutional design on the user population. The findings suggest that the two outreach measures – regular consultation days and a weekly TV broadcast – contribute to reducing existing inequalities with regard to users’ sociodemographic characteristics.

Despite the fact that the Millennium Development Goals promised to achieve gender equality and maternal health by 2015, equality remains elusive for too many women. Indeed, austerity, the rise of fundamentalism and the continuing gendered division of labour, especially when it comes to socially necessary but unremunerated care work, have contributed to the increase in gendered inequalities in many areas of social life and in most regions of the world. There is a plenitude of international, transnational and national equality instruments and strategies at the same time as gendered inequality is increasing both within and between nations. These equality instruments and strategies have also had an uneven impact: some women benefit more than others. Moreover, if interpreted in a formal manner, equality can be achieved as much through levelling down men's employment opportunities as by elevating women's life chances.

This essay takes up the question of what it is to teach international law ‘in context’, drawing on experiences of teaching undergraduate survey courses in the US and UK, and designing a new LLM module on Histories of International Law. The essay begins with an exploration of teaching as a particular context of its own – one with constraints which might also function as foils for creativity. It then sketches some aspects of what teaching international law ‘in context(s)’ might involve, including the ways in which contexts of different kinds put in question one's theory of law, and vice versa. It turns, finally, to an examination of the promise and limits of interdisciplinarity – particularly recourse to history as a discipline – in illuminating contexts.

This paper offers a revisionist history of the banning of photography in English and Welsh courts in 1925 and explores the contention that a complete rationale for the ban has never been adequately articulated. While existing accounts of the ban have placed emphasis on the outrage caused by press coverage of a handful of sensational murder trials, this paper offers the first comprehensive analysis of photographs of trial scenes in the decades leading up to the ban. In doing so, it argues that the exposure of the legal system to scrutiny by the press and public, made possible by new technologies and reporting practices, was much more pervasive than has previously been suggested. It also contends that, although parliamentarians claimed that the purpose of the ban was to protect vulnerable members of the public, it actually did a much better job of preserving the interests of the legal, political and social elite, including judges, against a backdrop of fears about an increasingly disrespectful populace. More particularly, it is suggested that the ban allowed the state to take back its monopoly over the production, management and consumption of images of judges and other key actors in the courtroom in an effort to re-impose social order and retain the mystery of law.

I have long felt that Peter Fitzpatrick's 1987 paper, ‘Racism and the innocence of law’, should be closely studied by all law students during, or shortly after, their induction to the study of law. These concise notes on the paper are written primarily in tribute to a friend, colleague and mentor but, in writing them, I hope also to demonstrate how this early instance of a theory about how law is intertwined in racial capitalism could be taught in those law schools that harbour ambitions to be not only critical, but also decolonial. Inevitably, in such a short piece, choices have had to be made about which aspects of the paper to foreground and which to leave out entirely. I trust that my decision to focus on those aspects that can be more readily comprehended by a student with limited knowledge of legal theory and substantive fields of law will not be thought to have unduly watered down its meaning.

Socio-legal studies in Belgium represent a diverse patchwork of many topics studied from many angles. This paper first presents a brief historical account of socio-legal studies and their organisation, in the north and south of the country. It has no ambition to give a full overview of socio-legal studies in Belgium, let alone be exhaustive. It merely focuses on the content and features of two topics that have constituted major strands of research over the last thirty years: courts and dispute processing, and public opinion about law and justice. It ends with some reflections on the nature of Belgian socio-legal research, as well as some recommendations on future orientations.

Formality and informality in housing is a continuum, rather than an either/or proposition, with many examples along the continuum. This paper focuses on three examples of housing solutions – Barbados tenantries, Mexican ejidos and Saint Lucia family land – which are situated at the fulcrum of the continuum, at the point where it tips from formality to informality, and attempts to unravel their formal and informal elements. While the starting hypothesis was that each is informal from a public law point of view but formal from a private law one, closer examination suggests that their private law aspects are more nuanced than first appeared.

This paper follows collegiality, demonstrating how, as a central value of medically trained coroners, it can shape the content of death investigations and certificates. Drawing on ethnographic evidence from a 16-month-long study of the Office of the Chief Coroner (OCC) of Ontario, Canada, I argue that collegiality is an instrument of trust that both affords investigators tremendous access to information, and severely limits the flow of that information into the public domain that the OCC serves. The paper focuses on in-care death investigations, which are those where the OCC's medically qualified coroners find themselves investigating the quality of care delivered by professional colleagues. I show how professional expertise, experience and collegial values often combine to see instances of poor or even incompetent care dealt with privately (rather than publicly) or referred up the medical (rather than public safety) hierarchy. The burden of my argument is that collegial deference to the autonomy and skills of other physicians tends to see coroners expurgate the death certificates they produce. These expurgations obscure competence issues from public view and reduce the accuracy of the certificates. I close with a discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of medically qualified death investigators, as well as potential adjustments to improve the accuracy of in-care death investigations and certifications.

Several noted legal scholars, most prominently Richard Posner, have applied the economic analysis of law to the debate over same-sex marriage. In this note, I argue that the economic approach to law is ill-equipped to deal with the issues of principle, dignity and rights that are at the core of the debate, regardless of the position taken on the issue. Other scholars, such as Darren Bush, acknowledge the shortcomings of the economic approach, such as the importance of the assumptions on which cost-benefit analysis is made, but they do not appreciate that this is symptomatic of the economic approach as a whole, not merely the application of it by some scholars in some cases. My contention is that the economic approach to law is appropriate regarding issues of policy, where trade-offs are essential and necessary, but not regarding issues of principle, with which trade-offs are not so easily made.

Ferrari's book is a welcome addition to the still limited literature on the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) experience which, unlike any other specific response to a disease, played an important role in reshaping modern governance and consolidating key assumptions about the world around us. The ‘mad cow’ crisis began in 1986 when the unfathomable bovine brain disease was identified, but was then reignited with the shocking discovery a decade later that it could pass, and had passed, to humans despite the controls put in place. Scientific confirmation in 1996 that there was a human form of BSE led to political panic and further undermined the then exhausted Conservative Party rule. The retrospective lessons of the experience went far beyond agriculture. The problem was perceived to be one of openness and independence: perhaps government was too dependent upon lobbies and financial interests such as agriculture and, whilst utilising scientific advice, did not allow their independent voice to have influence. Less widely recognised, but even more importantly, the political lesson of the BSE experience was to henceforth tend to avoid being seen to downplay risk, based on the retrospective view that the danger could, and should, have been announced before it was scientifically confirmed. Better to overestimate even apparently limited risks than be caught again committing the now cardinal sin of downplaying them, or simply remaining silent. This is not so much a new-found principle of risk aversion as a variation on an age-old political truism of, above all, making sure that the next crisis is ‘not on my watch’.