This issue of the journal includes the first article to be published in an exciting new section entitled ‘Law in other contexts’. This section is dedicated to making available specially commissioned reports of socio-legal research in places where English is not the first language. In this way the journal hopes to bring attention to work which may not be easily accessible to those without knowledge of the relevant language (and culture). It is also hoped that this may – eventually – make some contribution to putting into question the Anglo- American hegemony over how this academic field is constituted, which questions are considered important to ask, and which methods are thought appropriate for studying them. Articles will be included regularly in issues of the journal as they become available. Potential authors from a variety of jurisdictions have already been contacted (and others will be contacted in the future).

In this paper, we adopt an experimentalist approach to determining the content of international human rights for assessing national mandatory work programmes for recipients of social assistance (MWPs). This approach implies going back and forth between law and experience in order to determine the better way to secure human rights in an ever-changing environment. After having identified six criteria for evaluating MWPs in the soft case-law of international bodies, we confront this emerging international human rights framework with an empirical study on MWP practices in the Netherlands. This confrontation reveals that specific aspects of the capability for voice of working welfare recipients are absent in the human rights framework and that the framework is not gender-neutral. Including these aspects, we construct an experimentalist human-rights-based instrument that is suitable for evaluating national MWPs.

Studies exploring the link between the representation of judges, photography and mass media tend to focus on the appearance of cameras in courtrooms and the reproduction of the resulting photographs in the press at the beginning of the twentieth century. But more than fifty years separate these developments from the birth of photography in the late 1830s. This study examines a previously unexplored encounter between the English judiciary and photography that began in the 1860s. The pictures where known as ‘carte de visite’. They were the first type of photographic image capable of being mass produced. It is a form of photography that, for a period of almost twenty years, attracted a frenzy of interest. Drawing upon a number of archives, including the library of Lincoln's Inn, London's National Portrait Gallery and my own personal collection this paper has two objectives. The first is to examine the carte portraits of senior members of the judiciary that were produced during that time. What appears within the frame of this new form of judicial portraiture? Of particular interest is the impact the chemical and technological developments that come together in carte photographs had on what appears within the frame of portraits. The second objective is to examine the manner in which they were displayed. This engages a commonplace of scholarship on portraiture; the location and mode of display shape the meaning of what lies within the frame of the picture. Carte portraits were produced with a particular display in mind: the album. They were to be viewed not in isolation, but as part of an assemblage of portraits. Few albums survive. Those that do offer a rare opportunity to examine the way carte portraits of judges were used and the meanings they generated through their display. Three albums containing carte portraits of judges will be considered.

In this comment, the author takes issue with Professor Tushnet’s favourable stance on the protection which political controls can afford human rights relative to legal ones. Writing in a jurisdiction with no formal legal instrument of human rights enables the author to speak with experience of the operation of political controls in a ‘pristine parliamentary environment’. The author outlines the ineffectiveness in the Australian experience of counter-terrorism since September 11 of many of the mechanisms which Tushnet has suggested impose constraints upon the diminishment of liberties. The comment concludes that the essential condition for the enhancement of political controls is the presence of legal ones.

Across scholarship and legal practice, family law is widely recognised as a subject that is inextricable from the social and cultural forces that shape our understanding of how families work and how they are positioned within society. This paper argues that it is now time to build upon this by integrating an explicit awareness of political context into how we teach family law. This is because teachers of family law are now faced with an urgent challenge: the encroachment of neoliberal governance into all corners of family justice. Neoliberal ideas are far from new, but they are increasingly shaping dominant ideas about what family law is for, who should be entitled to use it and, even in some circumstances, questioning the very legitimacy of family law or legal processes as means for supporting families experiencing breakdown. In response to this challenge, this paper advocates the importance of guiding students to look beyond family law doctrine in order to consider how political initiatives, trends and debates have the power to shape the procedures and processes through which family disputes are resolved. It will argue that drawing this contextual awareness into family law studies is crucially important to ensure that the future development of family law as both a scholarly discipline and an area of practice is centred on the needs and lived experiences of families who need it.

Aristotle, in his Ethics, argued that good legislators should pay more attention to friendship than to law. Common law, however, has trouble with friendship and has historically taken the view that agreements between friends are unenforceable for lack of intention to create legal relations. The roots of this presumption against amicable agreements lie in theology and antique ecclesiastical case law. Those sources are reviewed here and it is argued that seemingly progressive decisions that accord cohabiting friends legal recognition as spouses have the paradoxical effect of depriving them of contractual capacity. They join traditionally married couples in the ‘amity’ of the household which case law defines as an Alsatia outside of law. It is argued that such a consequence is both unintended and undesirable.

In this paper, I take George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's thesis that metaphors shape our reality to approach the judicial imagery of the new criminal justice system in Mexico (in effect since 2016). Based on twenty-nine in-depth interviews with judges and other members of the judiciary, I study what I call the ‘dirty minds’ metaphor, showing its presence in everyday judicial practice and analysing both its cognitive basis as well as its effects in how criminal judges understand their job. I argue that the such a metaphor, together with the ‘fear of contamination’ it raises as a result, is misleading and goes to the detriment of the judicial virtues that should populate the new system. The conclusions I offer are relevant beyond the national context, inter alia, because they concern a far-reaching paradigm of judgment.

Many different indicators are used to monitor poverty and poverty-related deprivations. Two kinds of legitimacy worries may arise about any such indicator: one regarding its reliability as a measure of progress and another regarding the uses to which it is being put. This essay will touch upon both worries, beginning with the latter.

Existing policies on HIV testing were developed decades ago when HIV infection led nearly inevitably to AIDS and death. Since then rapid clinical progress has occurred. HIV infected people with access to life-preserving care and treatment no longer experience an existential threat to their life and wellbeing. HIV infection today, at least in North America and Western Europe, represents a chronic but manageable illness. Moreover, with treatment most infected people are rendered, to all intents and purposes, non-infectious. In this paper, we discuss the ethical, policy and legal implications of the changing clinical picture of HIV/AIDS. In particular, we propose significant changes to existing HIV testing policies as well as to policies pertaining to the criminalisation of infected people's sexual behaviour in North America and Western Europe.

This paper examines the intersection between a distinctly Canadian legal culture and the legal architecture, symbolism and iconography of its Supreme Court building in Ottawa. I begin from the premise originally put forward in Resnik and Curtis’s study of legal architecture. I proceed with an analysis of the Court’s history, aesthetic and decorative elements, geography and design, artistic and legal vision of the architect, and the social, political and historical contexts in which it was created, as well as key legal and constitutional concepts embodied by the Court’s legal architecture and a comparative analysis with another courthouse in Montreal (the Édifice Ernest Cormier). The paper demonstrates that the challenges of creating a courthouse that reflects the legal traditions and evolving social norms as well as the aspirations of a dynamic, democratic and pluralistic society are almost impossible. It remains a problematic question whether the image of justice that the Court evokes to the observer is the most ‘eloquent three dimensional representation of the role the Supreme Court has assumed in the life of the nation’ (Canada and Supreme Court, 2000, p. 207).

In France, judicial expertise operates within a specific institutional framework at the same time as it covers a distinctive community of practitioners called upon for their technical or scientific knowledge to serve justice. Indeed, while experts in the US are selected by the litigants, the French model features judge-appointed experts. This model could offer better guarantee of independence and neutrality, to the point that recent developments in the US suggest the emergence of a new court-appointed expert. What does such an institutional model involve in terms of evidence production? To answer this question, this paper looks at two areas of expertise in France: economic experts and forensic pathologists. Through an ethnography of the co-production of legal evidence, it analyses the black box of the French practices of legal expertise and allows the way in which the institutional context influences the producing of legal evidence, beyond differences between a scalpel and a calculator, to be understood.

While private corporations have become increasingly influential in the global economy, a comprehensive legal framework for their activities is missing. Although international and regional legal instruments may govern some aspects of, for instance, international investments and the supply of goods and services, there is no overarching structure for assessing the impact of large-scale private projects. In the absence of such a comprehensive framework, specific rules of private law allow profit-seeking companies to expand their activities on an economic basis, mostly without having to heed social concerns (Pistor, 2019). This is particularly problematic insofar as multinational companies have obtained power to set the rules for their engagement with states, organisations and individuals, for instance in the form of transnational investment contracts. Given the fragmented nature of the legal sphere in which such contracts are elaborated and performed, those who face the harmful consequences of such investments may not be able to participate in decision-making processes. The contracts remain in ‘wild zones’ of globalisation (Fraser, 2014, p. 150), where powerful private companies rule.

The autonomous position of legal professionals is no longer self-evident. Professionals are under increased pressure to reform. This phenomenon is not only true for legal professionals. A broader trend – which is recognised for the medical profession, academic profession and alike – is that paraprofessionals are gaining a more prominent position. In this paper, we focus on the developments in the Dutch public justice system. We conduct a case-study on the role of paraprofessionals in courts and in the public prosecution service – two understudied legal institutions in this regard. By drawing on empirical data unfolding the working routine of the judiciary and the prosecution service, we find two paradigms that define the thinking about professionalism: a traditional ‘pure professional’ paradigm and a new, more hybrid paradigm that includes (policy-based) managerial thinking. The latter appears to be enhanced by a New Public Management (NPM) approach within these institutions. Although we observe resistance among (para)professionals towards professional changes and ambiguity in the relationships between professionals and paraprofessionals, we also observe that managerialism has changed the work processes and the division of labour between professionals and paraprofessionals.

There is a growing international emphasis on the importance of diversity in the judiciary and the impact of the individual in decision-making. However, it can be a challenge to gain insight into the individuals who sit on the bench. For instance, there is limited official information about the individuals who sit on the High Court of Australia. One of the rare glimpses provided by the justices themselves is their judicial swearing-in speech. Drawing on a case-study of the swearing-in speeches of High Court justices sitting between 2008 and 2016, this paper illustrates how these speeches can illuminate key demographic information about the judiciary, as well as facets of the individual rarely explored in studies of judicial diversity: personality and values. This study demonstrates how swearing-in speeches can assist with filling information gaps about judicial diversity, and so extend debates about judicial selection.

The 1987 film RoboCop is not just a science fiction action story; it is also a critique of the neoliberal resurgence in law and politics at the end of the twentieth century. In particular it critiques the privatisation of police services, and the expansion of private property claims to cover a cyborg policeman, notwithstanding its human components. I connect the critique in the film with the broader academic literature dealing with the privatisation of police forces and the expansion of private property claims, particularly copyright and patents. Finally, I consider whether, as a result of the neoliberal expansion of private property rights over the last few decades, the law could now justify a private property claim over a cyborg like the one in the film.