This paper considers the relationship between litigants in person (LiPs) and conspiracy theories and seeks to answer two questions: how, and why, do some LiPs come to be conspiracy theorists? The majority of LiPs, of course, do not become conspiracy-minded. There is also no evidence that LiPs are more likely than anyone else in legal proceedings to be conspiracists, only, perhaps, that it is more obvious when they are. But there continue to be individuals who have conspiracist explanations for difficulties or failures they experience throughout legal proceedings. And while it is widely held that some LiPs hold eccentric beliefs about the law, there has been little attempt to understand how and why LiPs may come to acquire or articulate these beliefs. This is presumably because it has not been considered important to interrogate the views of people already often assumed to be ‘difficult’ or eccentric. This paper contends, however, that trying to understand how and why these conspiracist beliefs are acquired matters very much. This is because conspiracy theories can give us a critical insight into how negative experiences of litigation can result in a loss of faith or trust in legal institutions.

Drawing primarily from qualitative interviews conducted between 2017 and 2018, this empirical study tells a granular story of how legal actors mobilised during the Lawyers’ Movement in Pakistan (2007–2009) from the perspective of lawyer-leaders who organised, steered and sustained support for the Movement through rapidly shifting political conditions. By underscoring the contribution of lawyer-leaders in empowering judges, the article seeks both to displace uncritical assumptions and arguments about courts as the nucleus of legal mobilisation in Pakistan, and to highlight the crucial role of political parties in the restoration of the judiciary against the backdrop of disintegrating lawyer-judge coalitions. Given Pakistan’s political context of a ‘hybrid regime’, the article reflects on the unsuitability of the ‘legal complex’ theory of ‘political liberalism’ for analysing and understanding the Movement, and locates it instead in the literature on legal mobilisation in authoritarian regimes.

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.

This paper examines how deportation became a solution to rough sleeping in pre-Brexit England. It identifies relationships between the social regulation of vulnerable and marginalised adults, contemporary governance arrangements and bordering practices characteristic of Britain's ‘hostile environment’. Drawing on media reports and grey organisational literature, the focus of discussion is events across 2015–2018 in which three London-based charities were criticised for working with the Home Office to deport homeless migrants under its European Economic Area Administrative Removal policy. The overall tenor of criticism was that collaboration with the government compromised the organisations’ independence and charitable missions and aims. This diminished their capacity to both advocate for vulnerable adults and effectively challenge oppressive state practices. The paper observes how state and nonprofit relations structure institutional and socio-legal responses to marginalised and ‘othered’ adults through commissioning and contracting mechanisms. It demonstrates that the social and legal control of homeless migrants may be differently constituted by institutions delivering services in relation to citizenship, vulnerability and marginalisation. This analysis incorporates a broader appraisal of institutional motivations, values and beliefs in social welfare delivery, including the historic role of charitable agencies in the criminalisation of social welfare users. Taken together, the paper offers an interdisciplinary critique of the relationships between border control, neoliberal governance and the sociocultural and historic construction of homeless migrants.

This article detects a persistent imbalance between the zest for critical research and the thinness of critical methodology in the study of European Union (EU) law. The question that drives this investigation is: What can critique contribute to EU legal studies? The article draws on the methodological wealth of critical social theory to explicate how the critique of EU law could further evolve and why it matters. This analysis posits that the lack of adequate methodological engagement leaves EU law scholarship to drift between the problematic idea of unmasking critique, on the one hand, and that of supposedly non-normative critique, on the other hand. The article makes a case for a more dialectical method of critique to clarify how the critique of EU law is always preceded by a choice between competing rationalisations of society. These findings highlight that social theory should be of continuous interest to EU law scholars and that a socio-legal critique of EU law is not reducible to empirical research alone.

For older persons, age discrimination can undermine equal participation in modern service and consumer societies. One way to tackle age discrimination is to implement anti-discrimination policy and legislation. However, age discrimination is an ambiguous concept that can be interpreted in different ways and differences in the interpretation can impact the scope and application of related policy and legislation. Hence, to understand how policy, legislation and their central constructs operate within society, it is necessary to look beyond the letter of the law or policy text and explore the interpretations of age discrimination employed by actors in the field. We interviewed experts from Austria and Ireland, who by virtue of their professional or representative position co-structure the conditions for people to claim they have experienced age discrimination. Based on 12 expert interviews and two focus groups, each involving six representatives of the major national advocacy and interest organisations on ageing, we reconstructed four interpretation patterns of age discrimination: age discrimination as the ‘denial of dignity’, as the ‘denial of recognition of contribution’, as the ‘denial of participation’ and as the ‘lack of consideration of need’. The findings are discussed with reference to the concepts of recognition and representation, and considerations are provided on possible legal and political implications of this research.

This paper examines the tension between law's opportunity to deliver social transformation and the normative limitations that shape its effectiveness as a tool of social struggle. The role of law's normative limitations on legal mobilisation strategies, or the effect of entrenched social interests on permissible legal claims, has not been properly conceptualised in legal mobilisation scholarship. In response, this paper presents a conceptual framework that comprehends the opportunity and limitation of legal mobilisation as caught in the tension between the interpretive opportunity to redetermine legal meaning and the normative deficit inherent to this task. By re-engaging with the theoretical underpinnings of legal mobilisation, we will evaluate the potential for certain types of social transformation using law and revisit the rationale for strategic legal action. We will bring together our conceptual treatment of legal mobilisation with a sobering analysis of the Argentinian factory recuperation movement's mobilisation of legal demands. The movement's relative success in confronting the legal system's commitment to private property rights and winning protections for worker co-operatives presents an opportunity to learn about the effective potential of legal strategy and the extent to which it can be used to confront the normative commitments of a legal system.

This paper reviews scholarship regarding migrants’ legal consciousness. After discussing the personal, geographic and methodological scope of the reviewed studies, the conceptualisation of legal consciousness is examined in light of evolutions in general legal consciousness studies. Thereafter, factors emerging as shaping migrants’ legal consciousness are analytically clustered at four levels: individual characteristics, relational factors, cultural dynamics, and public policies and discourse. Future research on legal consciousness could shift its gaze towards understudied migrant groups as well as places. We suggest being more explicit regarding the conceptualisation of dimensions of what is ‘legal’ and of ‘consciousness’, and adopting a pluralist approach to law. The analytical grouping of the factors impacting migrants’ legal consciousness may serve as a useful reference point for future research and facilitate a more comprehensive appraisal of the various dynamics shaping migrants’ legal consciousness.

The state of research on legal compliance in socio-legal studies is limited and partially outdated. Like theories on coercion, recognition, or legitimacy, notions around compliance with the law appear plausible in themselves. However, each of them hold only part of the explanation and yet they cannot be reconciled due to theoretical incompatibilities. Legal sociologists therefore speak of a theory gap regarding legal compliance. The following article takes on this research desideratum and attempts to formulate an alternative concept of legal compliance based on an entirely new terminology without, however, completely renouncing the previous findings of legal sociology. Relying on the above-mentioned theory gap alongside the introduction of this new terminology, I argue that it is possible to analyze legal compliance while heuristically integrating all previous theoretical concepts of its. As a starting point, the article draws on Bourdieu’s fragmentary sociology of law and, by extending it, proposes a larger practice and field-theory-based interpretation of compliance.

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.

Since contracts form a basic institution of every legal order, the interdisciplinary orientation of concepts of contracts reveals socio-legal inclinations of a legal order more broadly. Contrasting the UK and US Common Law of contracts with developments under German law, this Article examines the relation between normative and social science approaches, notably rooted in economics, economic sociology, and social theory in the genealogy of contract law. A shared leitmotif over the 20th century has been the drive to account for the societal embeddedness of contract. However, conceptualizations of “Contract and Society” differ considerably between legal orders in their disciplinary ingredients and design. In the US, and to a lesser extent also in the UK, the rather continuous reception of legal realism has paved the way for broad interdisciplinary perspectives on contract law, ranging from classical socio-legal, empirical work (e.g., Macaulay), economics (e.g., Williamson), sociology (e.g., Powell), and critical theory (e.g., Kennedy) to today’s landscape, where essentially instrumental and ideal-normative theories compete. Alternatively, in Germany, where the realist heritage was more ephemeral, the transformations of contract law were processed from within legal discourse and foremost in their effects on private autonomy as conceptualized, for example, in German idealism, discourse theory and critical theory. Similarly, the “constitutionalization” of contract law—even if championed for fostering private law’s reflexivity—has, for the most part, defied a socio-legal orientation. Finally, the Article highlights the path dependencies with which these different starting points translate in current debates around the role of contract in transnational governance.

Under the headings of “Rechtssoziologie” in Germany and “sociolegal studies” in the UK, scholarly traditions have developed that relate law to its social environment. This Article identifies key stages in the development the subject took in both countries and the directions of travel. Comparable milestones were passed, and directions were taken in Germany and the UK. This includes the institutionalization of the subject along the lines of programmatic texts; becoming part of university education; and the establishment of research institutes, academic associations, and specialized journals. The development tells us something beyond sociology of law or sociolegal studies, namely about the relation of law and sociology, the parent disciplines themselves, as well as about academic studies and professional and institutional practice. However, in contrast to the UK, there is still more of a distance between the sociology of law and jurisprudence in Germany.

This Special Issue considers the situated and contextualized development of socio-legal, or law and society, scholarship within two materially different legal and academic cultures, namely Germany and the United Kingdom, with a view to achieving a better understanding of why and how such differences in understanding and practice have arisen. The contributions are grouped into three themes. The first reflects upon the influence of institutional contexts and scholarly traditions in terms of the development of those approaches that come under the banner of socio-legal studies. The second features contributions that adopt a comparative perspective in terms of selected areas of law, pointing to notably different approaches taken in Germany and the UK, and considering the development of these respective situations. The third looks at the key contemporary trends, theoretical applications, and methodological approaches taken within both countries’ socio-legal academic contexts.