The existing legal definition of rape in England and Wales is gendered, only recognising men as offenders. The law also only recognises as victims of rape those who are penetrated by a penis, either vaginally, anally or orally. This therefore excludes the female perpetrator–male victim paradigm, and more specifically those cases where male victims are ‘forced to penetrate’ female perpetrators. This paper argues that consideration needs to be given to legally recognising and thus labelling forced-to-penetrate cases as rape. Applying a methodology that draws upon the lived experiences of male victims, it is argued that there are significant similarities between compelled-penetration cases and those cases legally recognised as rape, not only because they both involve non-consensual penile penetration, but because there are clear similarities in the aggressive strategies used by perpetrators and the subsequent harms experienced by victims.

This paper uses legal consciousness to discuss the influence of Portuguese culture on women's perceptions of and reactions to domestic violence. It is based on an in-depth small-scale study of Portuguese women living in England, and proposes that culture is central in shaping their behaviour, regardless of whether they experienced violence or not. The cultural characteristics that influence women the most are analysed here under the themes of ‘familism’, ‘shame and community pressure’ and ‘acculturation’. These do not operate all at the same level and their influence can change according to structural and individual circumstances. As such, the paper suggests that immigrant women's perceptions of and reactions to domestic violence can only be fully understood by articulating national culture with other structural and individual variables; this will enable a multilayered and situated understanding of women's legality that avoids a simplistic attribution of their behaviour to national or ethnic provenance.

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.

The paper compares the involvement of four regional economic courts in legal disputes mirroring constitutional, political and social crises at national or regional levels. These four judicial bodies of the EU, the Andean Community, the East African Community and the Central American Integration System have all faced varied forms of resistance to their involvement and their general authority. By comparing these four case-studies from across the globe, the paper identifies institutional and contextual factors that explain the uneven resistance. While the regional economic courts in Central America and East Africa were subject to backlash from the Member States, their counterparts in Europe and Latin America avoided backlash but at the price of achieving only a narrow authority.

At first glance, it appears that the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights – the first pan-continental court of the African Union (AU) for human rights protection – epitomises the advances made by international courts in Africa in the past decade. Since its first judgment in 2009, the Court has taken a robust approach to its mandate and its docket is growing apace. However, a closer look at the overall context in which the Court operates reveals that it is susceptible to many of the patterns of resistance that have hampered other international courts in the region, which cut across the development of its authority and impact. This paper analyses the forms and patterns of resistance against the African Court and the actors involved, emphasising the additional difficulties entailed in mapping resistance to a young court compared to long-established courts, such as the European and Inter-American human rights courts.

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.

This paper identifies an impasse between two conceptions of ‘property rights’. Formal conceptions explain ‘property rights’ in terms of an alienable right to exclude, that has moral significance in terms of individuals’ preference satisfaction, and describe a trust beneficiary as having a right against the trustees’ right. Functional conceptions explain a ‘property right’ in terms of the entitlements in a resource, which has moral significance in terms of a range of individual and social values, and describe a trust beneficiary as having a share in entitlements in the resource. This impasse has general implications for the normative analysis of property law and particular implications for the practical application of redistributive statutory provisions to discretionary trusts. The solution to this impasse lies in the abandoning the language of ‘property’ when we are concerned with the entitlements in a resource.

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).

This paper combines an empirical analysis of national and international attempts to deal with the problem of poverty in China with a normative analysis of capability theory, as developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. In this way, it attempts to highlight the centrality of normative approaches to poverty and its elimination. The paper is in five parts. Section I analyses the history, development and effectiveness of social assistance under the Minimum Living Standards Scheme (MLSS) in China; Section II provides an outline of capability theory; Section III analyses the history, development and effectiveness of the United Nations Development Program's (UNDP) Millennium Development Goals, with a focus on the elimination of poverty in China; Section IV emphasises the importance of a capability approach to the measurement of poverty and outlines what needs to be done to reduce poverty in China; while Section V discusses what still needs to be done to promote an effective anti-poverty strategy in China.

This paper attempts to counter legal studies’ common reading of court TV shows by starting with an understanding of them as television, rather comparing them to ‘real courts’. It analyses two recent examples of British court TV shows – Judge Rinder (ITV, 2014–) and Judge Geordie (MTV, 2015) – to draw out how the text's form establishes particular kinds of ‘televisual legal consciousness’. Judge Rinder’s daytime address and his camped authority allow a frame in which humour can disarm conflict and reveal wider political injustice. Judge Geordie’s irreverent upturning of the judged into judge draws upon the registers of youth reality television to privilege affect and emotion. In staging some of the tensions between law's masculine rationality and popular culture's feminine emotionality, these shows enact their interdependence. Such an analysis that includes attention to form, address and genre allows us a deeper exploration of the relationship between television, law and the everyday.

This paper analyses the visualisation of rape and sexual assault in legal and scholarly language. It begins with a critique of the Court of Appeal ruling in R v. Evans (Chedwyn) and its forensic examination of the details of a female rape complainant's consensual sexual activity with other men. The case is analysed in light of a visual metaphor used by Ellison and Munro to describe the removal of popular misconceptions about rape. The paper contextualises that discussion with reference to the idea of the male gaze and its affirmation of a phallocentric cultural and social world in which the objectification of female difference is entrenched. The paper finally challenges that assessment, however, sketching an alternative approach to visual-critical scholarship that embraces interdisciplinarity and a literary sensibility to break (or at least to loosen) the association between the prurient eye of the male voyeur and the criminal justice gaze.