By highlighting a large number of recent studies mainly based on empirical methods, the aim of this paper is to emphasise and illustrate the rising influence of legal sociology in France today, and the interesting results produced. More generally, it is noteworthy to emphasise the growing importance of law and legal domains as a topic of great interest in French social sciences in general. It remains an open question whether this trend is linked to the ‘judicialisation’ of French politics and society and its influence over the academic field, or, alternatively, to the growing capacity of social scientists to resist the monopolistic claim of French academic lawyers on the analysis of legal subjects and to develop their own. Nevertheless, those trends converge towards a better knowledge of French legality, relevant from a national perspective, as well as to assess its contribution to socio-legal knowledge in general.

HIV prevention and treatment are undergoing impressive technological and practice changes. In-home rapid testing, prophylaxis before risky sex, and treatment as prevention give cause for remarkable optimism and suggest the possibility of an AIDS-free generation. These changes in HIV prevention and treatment might affect HIV policy in several different directions. One direction would be further entrenchment of the currently prevailing punitive approach. A different direction would be a shift away from use of the criminal law as a method for discouraging risky behaviour and towards a strategy aimed to encourage the use of the new treatment and prevention possibilities. When such abrupt technological changes are accompanied by sharp changes in regulatory regimes, they are identified in the public policy literature as a ‘punctuated equilibrium’. A shift away from criminalisation in HIV policy, if sufficiently widespread and transformative, could reach the level of a punctuated equilibrium. This paper presents a critical assessment of the implications of the changes in available forms of treatment and prevention for the continued appeal of criminalisation as an approach to HIV policy. We conclude that criminalisation is less justifiable in the light of what might be circumstances ripe for a punctuated equilibrium.

Capacity legislation aims to protect individual autonomy and avoid undue paternalism as far as possible, partly through ensuring patients are not deemed to lack capacity because they make an unwise decision. To this end, the law employs a procedural test of capacity that excludes substantive judgments about patients' decisions. However, clinical intuitions about patients' capacity to make decisions about their treatment often conflict with a strict reading of the legal criteria for assessing capacity, particularly in psychiatry. In this article I argue that this tension arises because the procedural conception of capacity is inadequate and does not reflect the clinical or legal realities of assessing capacity. I propose that conceptualising capacity as having ‘recognisable reasons’ for a treatment decision provides a practical way of legitimately incorporating both procedural and substantive elements of decision-making into assessments of capacity.

This article analyses the legal processes of recognising customary and religious (Muslim) marriages in South Africa's constitutional democracy. It argues that the best interpretation of the Constitution requires laws that address cross-cutting issues of recognition and redistribution relating to religion/culture and gender, and that the best way to achieve this is through a ‘pluralistic solidarity’ that enables dialogue on how to secure cultural and religious recognition without undermining the rights of women. It examines how the different processes of cultural/religious law reform in South Africa have become sites of struggle over the meaning of collective and individual identity, public/private power, citizenship and rights, and gender and democracy, and how particular sociopolitical conditions, ideological struggles and overarching conflicts and interests have shaped each process of law reform. Thus it distinguishes between the ideal and the possible, the normative and the strategic, in law reform. It notes the conditions under which the incomplete process of recognition of Muslim marriage law has seen a greater deference to religious norms and private regulation than customary law reform, which saw a greater institutionalisation of gender equality norms. The article concludes by emphasising the open-ended nature of legal processes, the possibilities of using courts to challenge ongoing inequalities in religion and custom, and the ever-present role of politics in legal outcomes.

The intersections of gender, religion and migration status have attracted only limited commentary to date. The significance of migration status as a marker of gender inequality, and one that further increases the burden of intersecting axes of discrimination, requires further scrutiny. This article examines the rise of civic integration requirements within the European Union and the significance of this rise for religious freedoms and complex ideals of gender equality. Particular attention is given to recent developments in the UK and France in the context of wider debates on immigration and integration policies. Against the background of diminishing sovereignty and the expansion of rights to non-citizens, states are rethinking the significance of citizenship and migration status and the criteria to be applied in determining membership and access to the nation-state. The adoption in France of the Charte des Droits et des Devoirs du Citoyen Français marks a further step in the expansion of integration conditions imposed by states, and signals a continuing willingness to deploy juridical forms to enforce such conditions. Of particular concern to this Special Issue are the implications of civic integration requirements for migrant religious women and for feminist engagement with migration laws and the discourse of rights.

In a society where suicide is lawful how should we respond to a life-threatening treatment refusal by someone whose decision-making might be affected by a mental disorder? In considering this question this article examines the three established concepts currently employed by the law to analyse such cases: mental capacity, best interests and mental disorder. It then considers whether a supported decision-making model based on a notion of universal capacity, such as that espoused by the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, might alleviate some of the dilemmas arising from the application of the traditional legal concepts.

This paper describes the ways in which, over the past three decades, law has come to serve as an obstacle in the fight against HIV, and how it contributes to the stigmatisation of, and discrimination against, people living with the virus. It argues that in order to make unsafe law safer, policy-makers, legislators and those responsible for the interpretation and enforcement of law must base their HIV response not on populist morality but on the strong evidence base provided by three decades of clinical, scientific and social research. Drawing on that research and the author's own involvement in policy development in this area, it suggests that rights-based arguments are, while important, insufficient as the basis for delivering the changes that are necessary, discusses the difficulties involved in achieving those changes, and argues that legal scholarship and research has an important role to play in HIV activism and combating the global epidemic.

In his latest book, the renowned political philosopher Michael Sandel asks what has become a pressing question for our age: Is there anything money can't buy? Sandel shows that there are certainly very few. If you've got the money, you can: hunt and kill endangered species like the black rhino; have 24/7 access to a doctor; give your child an elite education; gain a right to pollute the atmosphere; get people to stand in queues for you; place a bet that a particular celebrity will die next year; gain the life insurance policies of people who are seriously ill in the hope of cashing in when they die; and you can even get someone to make an apology on your behalf.

Kawashima's well-known arguments on Japanese legal consciousness represent characteristic concerns of Japanese socio-legal scholarship: comparison between Japan and the West on the one hand, and law and practice on the other. Such concerns originated much earlier, before World War II. Suehiro, the early founder, relied on Ehrlich's idea of living law to make law fit social reality. In contrast, Kawashima urged Japanese people to make modern law ‘our living law’. He also argued that Japanese consciousness was the main cause of the small volume of litigation. This thesis became a focus of empirical research by Japanese and foreign scholars. Kawashima played a significant role in establishing the sociology of law as a subject in law. In subsequent empirical studies, Kawashima's thesis has been critically assessed. Yet the sociology of law as an empirical science and the characteristic concerns his work represents are distinctive features of the sociology of law in Japan.

This article argues that what is seen as a justice cascade may in fact amount to merely an advocacy cascade, which has facilitated justice policies that democratising states would inevitably have pursued (and helped neutralise opposition), but which in causal terms has been far less influential on justice policy than is commonly assumed. Because transitional justice is generally presented in very idealistic terms, scholars in the field have begun to acknowledge that its virtuous effects are more easily presumed than proven (Van der Merwe, 2009, p. 121). Amongst advocates and activists in particular, one sees in the literature an emotional commitment to transitional justice that generally foregoes doubts about its overall efficacy even where isolated shortcomings are accepted. Policy has hitherto proceeded less from analysis to conclusions than from commitments to action. Some argue that ‘the commitment to advocacy has come at the expense of progress in empirical research’ (Vinjamuri and Snyder, 2004, p. 345) – the benefits of certain mechanisms are assumed instead of treated as empirical propositions to be proven rigorously. Because so many of the early debates about transitional justice took the form of partisan advocacy in the dichotomised days of the ‘justice versus peace’ and ‘truth versus justice’, prospective hypotheses about likely outcomes dominated the literature at the expense of retrospective assessments of what generally had or had not worked. For at least a decade, scholars have noted the paucity of studies systematically examining the correlation between transitional justice and social reconstruction. Subsequently, the literature has variously been criticised for its dependency on anecdote and hypothesis (Crocker, 2002, p. 541), analogy (Brahm, 2008, p. 3) and wishful thinking (Olsen, Payne and Reiter, 2010, pp. 25–26). Until recently, scholarship had primarily been based on single or dual mechanism case-studies and comparative qualitative case-studies of a limited number of states, which gave disproportionate emphasis to certain transitions or transition types conducive to study. This in turn made generally applicable policy conclusions difficult to elaborate. It has been argued that human rights research in general, and transitional justice research in particular, are enterprises directed at manufacturing legitimacy for their fields of practice (Gready, 2009, p. 159). Such endeavours must, however, retain at least a threshold plausibility. As a fear developed among practitioners and theorists about the damage to the credibility of transitional justice from wild, unsubstantiated claims, there has emerged in recent years a commendable attempt to clarify the causal relationships (if any) between individual mechanisms and general ends. By employing social science methodologies and hard data, a tentative literature has emerged on how to assess the impact of transitional justice (Thoms, Ron and Paris, 2010). The expectation is that this scholarship can chip away at falsity and overly ambitious claims. This article examines the extent to which two recent works do this. After surveying what is novel about their distinctive methodologies, Part II examines the primary difference between the works, namely the extent to which the work of transnational human rights activists has impacted on the decision of democratising states to pursue criminal accountability for crimes of the past. Part III explores alternative explanations for why states are seemingly more willing to undertake trials and the extent to which the works in question control for these variables. Part IV considers the extent to which the normative change both books note has impacted on the security dilemmas inherent in transitional accountability. The article concludes that transitional justice research has some distance yet to travel in disentangling correlation from cause.

The conclusion of this study of new laws in the UK ends with a note that ‘Without popular authority, the state will continue to blunder along in its futile, repressive and demoralising pursuit of absolute safety’ (p. 241). This closing line not only informs us of the author's critical approach to many of the new laws in Britain, but more importantly gives a strong indication of the breadth of the book and its attempt to situate the rise of the Insecurity State in the changing political and cultural climate – one that in particular has become essentially preoccupied with ensuring our safety, or as Ramsay would perhaps put it, defending our vulnerable autonomy. As such, this is not just an exceptionally useful and well-informed book about the changing nature of law in the UK, but it is more importantly an attempt to situate these developments in the changing nature of the state – indeed in the changing nature and norms of society, a society within which the ‘right to security’ has come to take precedence.

Racist incidents on American university campuses in the 1980s triggered a storm of publications by scholars who coined the phrase ‘hate speech’ for the legal lexicon. Some of the offences had already been subject to legal or institutional penalties for harassment or vandalism. Several universities nevertheless adopted broad codes of conduct to penalise hateful expression. For two decades, however, the US Supreme Court had been marching in the opposite direction. It was interpreting the Constitution's First Amendment to prevent federal or state government from punishing speakers solely on grounds of the viewpoints they express.