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Founded in 1997, Cambridge Studies in Law and Society is a hub for leading scholarship in socio-legal studies. Located at the intersection of law, the humanities, and the social sciences, it publishes empirically innovative and theoretically sophisticated work on law's manifestations in everyday life: from discourses to practices, and from institutions to cultures. The series editors have longstanding expertise in the interdisciplinary study of law, and welcome contributions that place legal phenomena in national, comparative, or international perspective. Series authors come from a range of disciplines, including anthropology, history, law, literature, political science, and sociology.

  • Series Editors: Mark Fathi Massoud, University of California, Santa Cruz, Jens Meierhenrich, London School of Economics and Political Science, Rachel E. Stern, University of California, Berkeley

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141 results in Cambridge Studies in Law and Society

Page 1 of 8

Risk and Resistance
  • How Feminists Transformed the Law and Science of AIDS
  • Aziza Ahmed
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2025
    Print publication:
    30 September 2025
  • How did women come to be seen as 'at-risk' for HIV? In the early years of the AIDS crisis, scientific and public health experts questioned whether women were likely to contract HIV in significant numbers and rolled out a response that effectively excluded women. Against a linear narrative of scientific discovery and progress, Risk and Resistance shows that it was the work of feminist lawyers and activists who altered the legal and public health response to the AIDS epidemic. Feminist AIDS activists and their allies took to the streets, legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts to demand the recognition of women in the HIV response. Risk and Resistance recovers a key story in feminist legal history – one of strategy, struggle, and competing feminist visions for a just and healthy society. It offers a clear and compelling vision of how social movements have the capacity to transform science in the service of legal change.

From Manners to Rules
  • Advocating for Legalism in South Korea and Japan
  • Celeste L. Arrington
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    30 June 2025
  • From Manners to Rules traces the emergence of legalistic governance in South Korea and Japan. While these countries were previously known for governance characterized by bureaucratic discretion and vague laws, activists and lawyers are pushing for a more legalistic regulatory style. Legalism involves more formal, detailed, and enforceable rules and participatory policy processes. Previous studies have focused on top-down or structural explanations for legalism. From Manners to Rules instead documents the bottom-up change agents who are shaping legalistic governance in East Asia's main democracies. By comparing recent reforms in disability rights and tobacco control, the book uncovers the societal drivers behind legalism and the broader judicialization of politics. Drawing on 120 interviews and diverse sources, From Manners to Rules challenges the conventional wisdom that law and courts play marginal roles in Korean and Japanese politics and illuminates how legalistic governance is transforming citizens' options for political participation.

Immoral Traffic
  • An Ethnography of Law, NGOs, and the Governance of Prostitution in India
  • Vibhuti Ramachandran
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2025
    Print publication:
    28 February 2025
  • This insightful ethnography delves into the complex intersection of India's anti-prostitution law and global anti-trafficking campaigns, and how they impact sex workers in both voluntary and involuntary situations. Immoral Traffic examines the role of legal actors and NGOs in implementing these interventions, revealing the mix of paternalism, humanitarianism, punitive care, bureaucracy, and morality in their efforts. Through a sequence of interventions prescribed by India's anti-prostitution law, the book follows the experiences of sex workers, from rescues to courts to carceral shelters. It sheds light on the ways in which donor-driven NGOs draw upon this law to implement anti-trafficking agendas, and how these interventions are navigated by women removed from the sex trade. Detailed and eye-opening, this book is a valuable resource for scholars and students of anthropology, law and society, gender and sexuality studies, South Asian studies, global studies, and critical studies of NGOs and humanitarianism.

A Sociology of Post-Imperial Constitutions
  • Suppressed Civil War and Colonized Citizens
  • Chris Thornhill
  • Published online:
    06 December 2024
    Print publication:
    12 December 2024
  • Covering the period from the eighteenth century to the present, A Sociology of Post-Imperial Constitutions combines global history and historical legal sociology to explain how democratic constitutions were created by imperialism and military policies related to imperialism. It challenges common views about the relation between democracy and peace, examining how, in different locations and different periods, the constitutional ordering of citizenship both reflected and perpetuated warfare. It also isolates the features of constitutional systems that have been successful in obviating military violence, separating democracy from its military origins. It discusses how the emergence of democratic government after 1945 depended on a dialectical transformation of the war/law nexus in constitutional rule. It then assesses ways in which, and the reasons why, many contemporary constitutions have begun to remilitarize their societies and to rearticulate military constructs of legitimacy.

The Regulation of Prostitution in China
  • Law in the Everyday Lives of Sex Workers, Police Officers, and Public Health Officials
  • Margaret L. Boittin
  • Published online:
    05 December 2024
    Print publication:
    12 December 2024
  • In this compelling book, Margaret L. Boittin delves into the complex world of prostitution in China and how it shapes the lives of those involved in it. Through in-depth fieldwork, Boittin provides a fascinating case study of the role of law in everyday life and its impact on female sex workers, street-level police officers, and frontline public health officials. The book offers a unique perspective on the dynamics between society and the state, revealing how the laws that govern sex work affect those on the frontlines. With clear and accessible prose, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in law, state-society relations, China, and sex work.

Law and Jewish Difference
  • Ambivalent Encounters
  • Mareike Riedel
  • Published online:
    14 November 2024
    Print publication:
    21 November 2024
  • After centuries of persecution and discrimination, Jews are today often seen as a successful and well-integrated religious minority group in a 'Judeo-Christian West'. This book qualifies this narrative by exploring the legacy of Christian ambivalence towards Jews in contemporary secular law. By placing disputes over Jewish practices, such as infant male circumcision and the construction of eruvin, within a longer historical context, the book traces how Christian ambivalence towards Jews and Christianity's narrative of supersession became secularised into a cultural repertoire that has shaped central ideas and knowledge underpinning secular law. Christian ambivalence, this book argues, continues to circumscribe not only the rights and equality of Jews but of other non-Christians too. In considering the interaction between law and Christian ambivalence towards Jews, the book engages with broader questions about the cultural foundations of Western secular law, the politics of religious freedom, the racialisation of religion, and the ambivalent nature of legal progress.

Negotiating Legality
  • Chinese Companies in the US Legal System
  • Ji Li
  • Published online:
    13 June 2024
    Print publication:
    27 June 2024
  • Despite escalating geopolitical rivalry, the US and China continue to be economically intertwined. Numerous Chinese companies have made substantial investments in the US and are reluctant to exit this strategically important market. While the global expansion of Chinese companies has ignited intense policy and academic debates, their interactions with complex host-state legal systems have largely escaped systematic examination. To fill this knowledge gap, Negotiating Legality introduces a dual institutional framework and applies it to analyzing extensive interviews and multi-year survey data, thereby shedding light on how Chinese companies develop in-house legal capacities, engage with US legal professionals, and navigate litigation in US courts. As the first comprehensive investigation of these crucial topics, this book is indispensable for anyone interested in China's rise, its global impacts-especially on legal systems of developed nations like the US-and the intricate dynamics of US-China relations.

Out of Place
  • Fieldwork and Positionality in Law and Society
  • Edited by Lynette J. Chua, Mark Fathi Massoud
  • Published online:
    11 March 2024
    Print publication:
    22 February 2024
  • Out of Place tells a new history of the field of law and society through the experiences and fieldwork of successful writers from populations that academia has historically marginalized. Encouraging collective and transparent self-reflection on positionality, the volume features scholars from around the world who share how their out-of-place positionalities influenced their research questions, data collection, analysis, and writing in law and society. From China to Colombia, India to Indonesia, Singapore to South Africa, and the United Kingdom to the United States, these experts record how they conducted their fieldwork, how their privileges and disadvantages impacted their training and research, and what they learned about the law in the process. As the global field of law and society becomes more diverse and an interest in identity grows, Out of Place is a call to embrace the power of positionality. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Law and the Epistemologies of the South
  • Boaventura de Sousa Santos
  • Published online:
    07 August 2023
    Print publication:
    01 June 2023
  • Modern state law excludes populations, peoples, and social groups by making them invisible, irrelevant, or dangerous. In this book, Boaventura de Sousa Santos offers a radical critique of the law and develops an innovative paradigm of socio-legal studies which is based on the historical experience of the Global South. He traces the history of modern law as an abyssal law, or a kind of law that is theoretically invisible yet implements profound exclusions in practice. This abyssal line has been the key procedure used by modern modes of domination – capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy – to divide people into two groups, the metropolitan and the colonial, or the fully human and the sub-human. Crucially, de Sousa Santos rejects the decadent pessimism that claims that we are living through 'the end of history'. Instead, this book offers practical, hopeful alternatives to social exclusion and modern legal domination, aiming to make post-abyssal legal utopias a reality.

The Social Constitution
  • Embedding Social Rights Through Legal Mobilization
  • Whitney K. Taylor
  • Published online:
    15 June 2023
    Print publication:
    29 June 2023
  • In The Social Constitution, Whitney Taylor examines the conditions under which new constitutional rights become meaningful and institutionalized. Taylor introduces the concept of 'embedding' constitutional law to clarify how particular visions of law come to take root both socially and legally. Constitutional embedding can occur through legal mobilization, as citizens understand the law in their own way and make legal claims - or choose not to - on the basis of that understanding, and as judges decide whether and how to respond to legal claims. These interactions ultimately construct the content and strength of the constitutional order. Taylor draws on more than a year of fieldwork across Colombia and multiple sources of data, including semi-structured interviews, original surveys, legal documents, and participation observation. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Entangled Domains
  • Empire, Law and Religion in Northern Nigeria
  • Rabiat Akande
  • Published online:
    18 May 2023
    Print publication:
    01 June 2023
  • Set in Colonial Northern Nigeria, this book confronts a paradox: the state insisted on its separation from religion even as it governed its multireligious population through what remained of the precolonial caliphate. Entangled Domains grapple with this history to offer a provocative account of secularism as a contested yet contingent mode of governing religion and religious difference. Drawing on detailed archival research, Rabiat Akande vividly illustrates constitutional struggles triggered by the colonial state's governance of religion and interrogates the legacy of that governance agenda in the postcolonial state. This book is a novel commentary on the dynamic interplay between law, faith, identity, and power in the context of the modern state's emergence from colonial processes.

Prosecutors, Voters, and the Criminalization of Corruption in Latin America
  • The Case of Lava Jato
  • Ezequiel A. Gonzalez-Ocantos, Paula Muñoz Chirinos, Nara Pavão, Viviana Baraybar Hidalgo
  • Published online:
    05 April 2023
    Print publication:
    06 April 2023
  • Lava Jato, a transnational bribery case that started in Brazil and spread throughout Latin America, upended elections and collapsed governments. Why did the investigation gain momentum in some countries but not others? The book traces reforms that enhanced prosecutors' capacity to combat white-collar crime and shows that Lava Jato became a full-blown anti-corruption crusade where reforms were coupled with the creation of aggressive taskforces. For some, prosecutors' unconventional methods were necessary and justified. Others saw dangerous affronts to due process and democracy. Given these controversies, how did voters react to a once-in-a-generation attempt to clean politics? Can prosecutors trigger hope, conveying a message of possible regeneration? Or does aggressive prosecution erode the tacit consensus around the merits of anti-corruption? Prosecutors, Voters and The Criminalization of Corruption in Latin America is a study of the impact of accountability through criminalization, one that dissects the drivers and dilemmas of resolute transparency efforts.

Law and Precarity
  • Legal Consciousness and Daily Survival in Vietnam
  • Tu Phuong Nguyen
  • Published online:
    17 March 2023
    Print publication:
    09 March 2023
  • Why do some people invoke the law (or resist it) as a way to solve their problems and achieve more stability in life, only to end up in another challenging and uncertain situation? This book offers an original understanding of the important, but understudied, paradoxical effects of law on the survival strategies of Vietnamese people who are caught to live and work in precarious circumstances. It demonstrates how precarity influences the way people perceive, engage with, or resist the law; yet law, at the same time, creates and reinforces such a condition. Understanding the mutually reinforcing relationship between law and precarity sheds a new light on the way law enables individuals to better their condition but ultimately makes matters worse rather than better. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of law and society, political economy, anthropology, and Asian studies.

Clean Air at What Cost?
  • The Rise of Blunt Force Regulation in China
  • Denise Sienli van der Kamp
  • Published online:
    28 January 2023
    Print publication:
    19 January 2023
  • China's green transition is often perceived as a lesson in authoritarian efficiency. In just a few years, the state managed to improve air quality, contain dissent, and restructure local industry. Much of this was achieved through top-down, 'blunt force' solutions, such as forcibly shuttering or destroying polluting factories. This book argues that China's blunt force regulation is actually a sign of weak state capacity and ineffective bureaucratic control. Integrating case studies with quantitative evidence, it shows how widespread industry shutdowns are used, not to scare polluters into respecting pollution standards, but to scare bureaucrats into respecting central orders. These measures have improved air quality in almost all Chinese cities, but at immense social and economic cost. This book delves into the negotiations, trade-offs, and day-to-day battles of local pollution enforcement to explain why governments employ such costly measures, and what this reveals about a state's powers to govern society.

Discounting Life
  • Necropolitical Law, Culture, and the Long War on Terror
  • Jothie Rajah
  • Published online:
    27 October 2022
    Print publication:
    03 November 2022
  • Extrajudicial, extraterritorial killings of War on Terror adversaries by the US state have become the new normal. Alongside targeted individuals, unnamed and uncounted others are maimed and killed. Despite the absence of law's conventional sites, processes, and actors, the US state celebrates these killings as the realization of 'justice.' Meanwhile, images, narrative, and affect do the work of law; authorizing and legitimizing the discounting of some lives so that others – implicitly, American nationals – may live. How then, as we live through this unending, globalized war, are we to make sense of law in relation to the valuing of life? Adopting an interdisciplinary approach to law to excavate the workings of necropolitical law, and interrogating the US state's justifications for the project of counterterror, this book's temporal arc, the long War on Terror, illuminates the profound continuities and many guises for racialized, imperial violence informing the contemporary discounting of life.

Seeking Supremacy
  • The Pursuit of Judicial Power in Pakistan
  • Yasser Kureshi
  • Published online:
    08 September 2022
    Print publication:
    15 September 2022
  • The emergence of the judiciary as an assertive and confrontational center of power has been the most consequential new feature of Pakistan's political system. This book maps out the evolution of the relationship between the judiciary and military in Pakistan, explaining why Pakistan's high courts shifted from loyal deference to the military to open competition, and confrontation, with military and civilian institutions. Yasser Kureshi demonstrates that a shift in the audiences shaping judicial preferences explains the emergence of the judiciary as an assertive power center. As the judiciary gradually embraced less deferential institutional preferences, a shift in judicial preferences took place and the judiciary sought to play a more expansive and authoritative political role. Using this audience-based approach, Kureshi roots the judiciary in its political, social and institutional context, and develops a generalizable framework that can explain variation and change in judicial-military relations around the world.

Undue Process
  • Persecution and Punishment in Autocratic Courts
  • Fiona Feiang Shen-Bayh
  • Published online:
    01 September 2022
    Print publication:
    08 September 2022
  • Why do autocrats hold political trials when outcomes are presumed known from the start? Undue Process examines how autocrats weaponize the judiciary to stay in control. Contrary to conventional wisdom that courts constrain arbitrary power, Shen-Bayh argues that judicial processes can instead be used to legitimize dictatorship and dissuade dissent when power is contested. Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa since independence, Shen-Bayh draws on fine-grained archival data on regime threats and state repression to explain why political trials are often political purges in disguise, providing legal cover for the persecution of regime rivals. This compelling analysis reveals how courts can be used to repress political challengers, institutionalize punishment, and undermine the rule of law. Engaging and illuminating, Undue Process provides new theoretical insights into autocratic judiciaries and will interest political scientists and scholars studying authoritarian regimes, African politics, and political control.

The Power of the Jury
  • Transforming Citizens into Jurors
  • Nancy S. Marder
  • Published online:
    25 August 2022
    Print publication:
    15 September 2022
  • Offering an alternative view of the jury process, this book argues that each stage transforms ordinary citizens, who are oftentimes reluctant to serve on juries, into responsible jurors. Jurors, Professor Marder argues, are not found, but rather they are made and shaped by the jury process. This book analyzes each stage of this process, from initial summons to post-verdict interview, and shows how these stages equip jurors with experiences and knowledge that allow them to perform their new role ably. It adopts a holistic approach to the subject of jury reform and suggests reforms that will aid the transformation of citizens into jurors. By studying the jury from the perspective of jurors, it gives readers a better understanding of what takes place during jury trials and allows them to see juries, jurors, and the jury process in a new light.

Practices of Reparations in International Criminal Justice
  • Christoph Sperfeldt
  • Published online:
    23 June 2022
    Print publication:
    07 July 2022
  • Combining interdisciplinary techniques with original ethnographic fieldwork, Christoph Sperfeldt examines the first attempts of international criminal courts to provide reparations to victims of mass atrocities. The observations focus on two case studies: the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, where Sperfeldt spent over ten years working at and around, and the International Criminal Court's interventions in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Enriched with first-hand observations and an awareness of contextual dynamics, this book directs attention to the 'social life of reparations' that too often get lost in formal accounts of law and its institutions. Sperfeldt shows that reparations are constituted and contested through a range of practices that produce, change, and give meaning to reparations. Appreciating the nature and effects of these practices provides us with a deeper understanding of the discrepancies that exist between the reparations ideal and how it functions imperfectly in different contexts.

Global Pro Bono
  • Causes, Context, and Contestation
  • Edited by Scott L. Cummings, Fabio de Sa e Silva, Louise G. Trubek
  • Published online:
    06 May 2022
    Print publication:
    07 April 2022
  • The principle and practice of pro bono, or volunteer legal services for the poor and other marginalized groups, is an increasingly important feature of justice systems around the world. Pro bono initiatives now exist in more than eighty countries – including Colombia, Portugal, Nigeria, and Singapore – and the list keeps growing. Covering the spread of pro bono across five continents, this book provides a unique data set permitting the first-ever comparative analysis of pro bono's growing role in the access to justice movement. The contributors are leading experts from around the world, whose chapters examine both the internal roots of and global influences on pro bono in transnational context. Global Pro Bono explores the dramatically expanding geographical and political reach of pro bono: documenting its essential contribution to bringing more justice to those on the margins, while underscoring its complex and contested meaning in different parts of the world.

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