The paper is an attempt to examine how Carl Schmitt's constitutional theory can be useful to analyse the Constitution of the State of Israel designed in the late 1940s – the impact of which Jacob Taubes once certified. The author analyses three projects created then by Leo Kohn through the prism of Schmitt's concept of Verfassung and Verfassungsgesetz. He also reads in the context of Schmitt's philosophy (from Constitutional Theory and The Nomos of the Earth) the constitutional situation of Israel as a country where, first, the Constitution has not been passed and the basic matter of its legal system is regulated by the Basic Laws; second, citizens of Arab origin are excluded from the national community; and third, the borders of the state remain fluid and change due to the constant partition of the land.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, efforts to quantitatively measure the global health situation and/or governments’ reaction vis-à-vis the pandemic have flourished. In spite of the significance of data in the fight against the pandemic, however, such global knowledge is largely questionable, insofar as it exposes itself to the many hazards and fallacies associated with global attempts to frame the social world in numbers. This is why the paper attempts to identify the hazards and fallacies most commonly associated with global measurements of social phenomena and to verify whether and to what extent these hazards and fallacies affect numerical representations of the pandemic and its effects. To this end, the paper analyses ten English-language global numerical initiatives that were launched between January and May 2020, and reviews them in light of existing critical literature on global numbers. The aim is to provide a deeper understanding of global measurements of health and related law-and-policy measures, and to suggest caution about their use as a basis for knowledge and action in the context of the pandemic.

This paper highlights the intersection of gender, sexuality and class in shaping the ways in which ‘leftover’ women navigate legal and social discrimination. ‘Leftover women’ is a stigmatising term in China that refers to women who do not get married by the time they reach their late twenties. Based on my fieldwork in China with queer and heterosexual ‘leftover’ women, I introduce two strategies of stigma management: ‘buying a licence to be deviant’ and ‘identity-hopping’. The former is a strategy adopted by heterosexual women with financial resources and a desire frequently expressed by queer women. ‘Buying a licence to be deviant’ refers to the strategy of accumulating sufficient financial resources to justify one's choice to be deviant and deal with the legal consequences of the evasion of the population policies. ‘Identity-hopping’ is popular among those with a lower social and financial status, who use the law's labelling function to hop from one stigmatised identity to another as a way to deal with stigma. From an intersectional lens, this paper advances law and society's study of stigma and discrimination by emphasising the hierarchy of stigmatised identities and the strategy of using the law's power of labelling identities to hop from one identity to another. It also demonstrates how the intersection of gender, sexuality and class complicates the ways in which leftover women understand and engage with the law.

An exploratory qualitative analysis of Law and Development (L&D) course descriptions reveals plurality and heterodoxy across time zones through the way in which they approach ‘law’ and ‘development’. We see this contestedness as a manifestation of the inherent power asymmetries of the field and offer the notion of time zones to better describe plural and contested forms of L&D knowledge. We seek to explore teaching as an important arena where knowledge is created and argue that the characteristics of substantive complexity and methodological heterodoxy of L&D provide promising conditions for making teaching more inclusive and reflexive. In this way, teaching can help in further provincialising the field. Additionally, inclusiveness and reflexivity can also have an impact on the epistemological trajectory of L&D more broadly by giving voice to a diversity of narratives, concepts and values.

This paper examines the reciprocal interplay between Peter Fitzpatrick's life and work, between significant people, events, ideas and values, and the ways in which he made and re-made himself. It illuminates Peter's struggle, especially from the 1990s onwards, to place ethics centre stage in both life and law. Drawing on archival and secondary research, including interviews with Peter's family, former colleagues and students, this contribution to legal life writing adds to what we already knew about Peter and his scholarship. It assesses and clarifies his key ideas and their intersection with his ethics and lived experiences. It is hoped that the paper will encourage those who are less familiar with Peter's work, or who find his writing daunting, to tackle it anew and appreciate its significance.

This paper shows that social inequalities are cumulative and occur at each stage of the dispute pyramid, from the identification of a conflict through to satisfaction with its outcome. Based on a large and original survey on ordinary people's representations of and practices within the legal system in France (N = 2,660), our study finds that an individual's contact, or lack of contact, with a legal intermediary, who may be a legal professional or a non-legal professional, has a very significant impact on the decision to take a case to court. Contact with a legal intermediary also influences the individual's satisfaction with the outcome, but not in the same way for all plaintiffs: income is a more determining factor in satisfaction with the outcome in cases where the judge makes a decision than in cases where a solution is found outside the courtroom.

This study considers how invisibility under the law can lead to stigmatisation. It examines how legal silence affects the stigmatisation process and the identity of male sex workers in Japan. Since male sex work is currently not recognised under Japanese law, male sex workers are not subject to control, regulation, punishment or protection. However, the number of male sex workers in Japan is increasing. Many studies have noted that male sex workers may experience double stigmatisation – referring to the stigma associated with homosexuality and the stigma associated with commercial sex. Male sex workers in Japan, however, may face an additional stigma caused by the fact that the law essentially ignores their existence. This paper draws on fieldwork interviews to show how the silence of the law can exacerbate the marginalisation and disempowerment of a vulnerable social group.

The COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to the massive development and use of health indicators. Drawing on the history of international public health and of the management of infectious disease, this paper attempts to show that the normative power acquired by metrics during the pandemic can be understood in light of two rationales: epidemiological surveillance and performance assessment. On the one hand, indicators are established to evaluate and rank countries’ responses to the outbreak; on the other, the evolution of indicators has a direct influence on the content of public health policies. Although quantitative data are an absolute necessity for coping with such disasters, it is critical to bear in mind the inherent partiality and precarity of the information provided by health indicators. Given the growing importance of normative quantitative devices during the pandemic, and assuming that their influence is unlikely to decrease in the future, they call for close scrutiny.

This brief paper is an account of Peter Fitzpatrick's appointment to the Faculty of Law at Queens University, Belfast, and his consequent transformation, personally and professionally, during his short tenure at Queens.

The 2019 Global Health Security Index (GHS Index) assessed the US and the UK as the two countries best prepared to address a catastrophic pandemic. The preparedness rankings of this index have had little correlation with the actual experiences of COVID-19 in various countries. In explaining this disrepancy, the paper argues that better indicators and more data would not have fixed the problem. Rather, the prevailing paradigm of global health security that informs instruments such as the GHS Index needs to be interrogated. This dominant paradigm narrowly conceptualises global health security in terms of the availability of a technical infrastructure to detect emerging infectious diseases and prevent their contagion, but profoundly undertheorises the broader social and political determinants of public health. The neglect of social and political features is amplified in instruments such as the GHS Index that privilege universalised templates presumed to apply across countries but that prove to be inadequate in assessing how individual societies draw on their unique histories to craft public health responses.

Using a legal-consciousness approach, this paper discusses the issue of stigma and law from the perspectives of a group of older homeless people in Singapore. Focusing specifically on the Destitute Persons Act 2013 Rev. Ed. (DPA), the paper shows the different ways in which homeless people make sense of, negotiate, resist or succumb to the stigma of a homeless identity ascribed by the DPA. From these experiences, two fundamental problems with the DPA are highlighted. First, the DPA imposes a homeless identity that is entangled in archaic legal definitions that often do not relate to contemporary experiences of homelessness in Singapore. Second, the enforcement of the DPA legitimises a differential treatment of homeless people, without addressing the broader complexities of homelessness.

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.

This paper reflects upon the enduring relevance of Peter Fitzpatrick's analysis of incommensurability in the context of post-colonialism and the lived experiences of Indigenous peoples in the US.

Global social indicators, as a form of governance and soft regulation, exert pressure for change and compliance through the way they compare and rank the relative performance of states or other units. Is it reasonable then to expect the comparisons they make in the process of carrying out such strategic exercises to be accurate and fair? In particular, how far can they, or should they, be required to be faithful to the requirement to ‘compare like with like’. Using as an example the role of indicators in documenting and responding to the current coronavirus epidemic, I investigate the way their hybrid combination of both comparison and commensuration may help to account for the difficulty they have had so far in establishing stable rankings of best practice.

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.

This essay sketches the lineaments of the relationship between international law and the jurisprudence of Peter Fitzpatrick. It argues that Fitzpatrick was a model ‘transnational jurisprudent’ who accepted responsibility for the ongoing conduct of lawful relations, even as he offered a thoroughgoing critique of occidental law. For the occidentally trained international lawyer, Fitzpatrick's work offers a way to take up that responsibility by reimagining international law through its historical roots as a parochial law of encounter.

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.