Laws seeking to resolve war-related problems face a significant dilemma. While the legal establishment in a war-affected country drafts laws based on normative approaches suited to peacetime and stable settings, the civilian population pursues crises livelihoods that are markedly unsuited to compliance with or use of such laws. What emerges are socio-legal instabilities that aggravate instead of resolve wartime problems. With a socio-legal examination of Ukraine’s wartime housing Compensation Law, this article describes six sets of instabilities that compromise the utility of the law and aggravate or create additional problems: (1) the case-by-case approach, (2) administrative and institutional capacities, (3) legal vs. available evidence, (4) the timeframe for claims submission and awareness raising, (5) excluded segments of civil society and (6) prohibitions on selling properties. Approaches from international best practice that may be able to attend to these instabilities are then suggested.

The aim of this paper is to inform a sociological jurisprudence of the implied duty in the contract of employment of mutual trust and confidence. Present analyses of the emerging term have been doctrinal in nature. Such scholarship contributes a normative internal perspective to what can be understood as the jurisprudential project of guarding and maintaining law as a practice of regulation. This paper seeks to generate knowledge that will allow for an extension of the jurisprudential analysis to take into account how mutual trust and confidence may manifest in contemporary conditions of work. This is achieved by, first, presenting original sociological data of the employment relation in a work context likely to demonstrate practices that resonate with features of mutual trust and confidence – that of early-stage digital technology startups – and, secondly, contrasting this empirical account with doctrinal conceptions of the term. Findings unsettle the dominant jurisprudential account of mutual trust and confidence as positively contributing to the social goal of labour law as operating to counter the power of capital.

This Article provides a novel insight into how earlycareer scholars in the UK may combine different theoretical tools in their research, and the implications that this may have for the socio-legal discipline. This Article draws upon the author’s experience of combining theoretical tools from different schools of thought: Feminist legal theory, Bourdieusian theory, and Actor Network Theory, within the context of recent research into experiences of those representing themselves in family court hearings in England and Wales. Combining these theories for the first time, this Article explores the difficulties, tensions, and benefits of combining tools within socio-legal research and reflects upon the influence of the pedagogical and institutional resources that characterize the socio-legal research environment in the UK. This Article argues that the task of combining different tools provides scholars with the opportunity to work politically, because the process of reconciling tensions between different approaches requires researchers to reflect upon the worldviews that underpin their selected theories. In this sense, it argues that combining different theories within socio-legal research is a political activity, because researchers are required to reflect not only on how theoretical choices may contest, expand, or develop dominant assumptions that characterize socio-legal scholarly traditions.

This article discusses the state of socio-legal scholarship on Southeast Asia and situates the special journal issue in relation to its key patterns, emerging trends, and future directions. Southeast Asian literature in leading socio-legal journals exhibits an imbalanced geographical coverage and tends to cluster around research on state law’s intersection with Islamic and/or customary norms, women’s equality and legal status, and land and the natural environment. These prevailing patterns lead to uneven attention paid to Southeast Asia. However, growing bodies of work along the major themes of legal pluralism, law and development, and dispute processing show the potential of Southeast Asian research to advance important debates and sub-fields in the scholarship at large. Proposals from a December 2012 workshop initiative further identified research directions that could enrich this field of study as well as understandings of law-society relations in Southeast Asia.

The controversy over the provincial spatial planning regulation for Bali Province reflects the dynamic of Balinese society in the era of regional autonomy. The dynamic is polarised between expanding the tourism and real estate industry for economic reasons and constraining such expansion for the sake of protecting Bali’s environment and culture. Thus, the law governing space becomes an essential means to intervene in crafting the relations between competing interests over space. The application of the law itself is also complicated by the condition of legal pluralism which provides different and sometimes conflicting sources of legality to be used to justify the interests of legal actors. This article aims at highlighting how space is produced in a pluralistic legal setting and examining whose interests are served by the condition of legal pluralism in contemporary Bali. Employing socio-legal methods with Lefebvre’s conception of space and legal pluralism as an integrating analytical framework, the article contributes to the literature on spatial planning law in Indonesia that is dominated by “legal centralism” and a given notion of space.

This article examines the regulation of directors' remuneration in EU, UK and Belgian law. The author argues that there are two categorises of norms for the regulatory framework of directors' remuneration: one is market-based, market efficiency norms of agency costs; the other is socio-legal norms. The paper argues that agency costs – a responsive mode of governance – alone cannot adequately address the problems of directors' remuneration. On the other hand, socio-legal norms – which are value and ethics-focused – can better construct a paradigm capable of addressing a broader issue of directors' remuneration in the EU context. Agency costs-based regulation has been used by the EU whereas socio-legal matters have been left to Member States. The article shows how socio-legal norms could form the underlying basis of the regulatory regime by examining the laws in the UK and Belgium. It is concluded that the European Court of Justice will need to carry out the role of negative integration by harmonising these social values in developing EU company law.