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  3. Cambridge Studies in Law and Society

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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139 results in Cambridge Studies in Law and Society

Page 7 of 7

Militarization and Violence against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East
  • A Palestinian Case-Study
  • Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
  • Published online:
    23 January 2010
    Print publication:
    07 May 2009
  • This book examines and discusses the ordeals that women face as violence is perpetrated against them in politically conflicted and militarized areas. In conflict zones, every act is affected by, dependent on and mobilised by militaristic values. The militarization of both the private and public space and the use of the gendered bodies increases the vulnerability of both men and women, and further masculinises the patriarchal hegemonic powers. Through the stories and ordeals of women in politically conflicted areas and war zones, and by sharing voices of Palestinian women from the Occupied Territories, it is shown that claims such as 'security reasoning', fear from 'terrorism', nationalism, preservation of 'cultural authenticity' and preservation of the land can turn women's bodies and lives into boundary markers and thus sites of violence, contestation and resistance.

Fictions of Justice
  • The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa
  • Kamari Maxine Clarke
  • Published online:
    23 January 2010
    Print publication:
    25 May 2009
  • By taking up the challenge of documenting how human rights values are embedded in rule of law movements to produce a new language of international justice that competes with a range of other formations, this book explores how notions of justice are negotiated through everyday micropractices and grassroots contestations of those practices. These micropractices include speech acts that revere the protection of international rights, citation references to treaty documents, the brokering of human rights agendas, the rewriting of national constitutions, demonstrations of religiosity that make explicit the piety of religious subjects, and ritual practices of forgiveness that involve the invocation of ancestral religious cosmologies - all practices that detail the ways that justice is made real.

Culture under Cross-Examination
  • International Justice and the Special Court for Sierra Leone
  • Tim Kelsall
  • Published online:
    18 January 2010
    Print publication:
    22 October 2009
  • The international community created the Special Court for Sierra Leone to prosecute those who bore the greatest responsibility for crimes committed during the country's devastating civil war. In this book Tim Kelsall examines some of the challenges posed by the fact that the Court operated in a largely unfamiliar culture, in which the way local people thought about rights, agency and truth-telling sometimes differed radically from the way international lawyers think about these things. By applying an anthro-political perspective to the trials, he unveils a variety of ethical, epistemological, jurisprudential and procedural problems, arguing that although touted as a promising hybrid, the Court failed in crucial ways to adapt to the local culture concerned. Culture matters, and international justice requires a more dialogical, multicultural approach.

Judges beyond Politics in Democracy and Dictatorship
  • Lessons from Chile
  • Lisa Hilbink
  • Published online:
    08 January 2010
    Print publication:
    23 July 2007
  • Why did formerly independent Chilean judges, trained under and appointed by democratic governments, facilitate and condone the illiberal, antidemocratic, and anti-legal policies of the Pinochet regime? Challenging the assumption that adjudication in non-democratic settings is fundamentally different and less puzzling than it is in democratic regimes, this book offers a longitudinal analysis of judicial behavior, demonstrating striking continuity in judicial performance across regimes in Chile. The work explores the relevance of judges' personal policy preferences, social class, and legal philosophy, but argues that institutional factors best explain the persistent failure of judges to take stands in defense of rights and rule of law principles. Specifically, the institutional structure and ideology of the Chilean judiciary, grounded in the ideal of judicial apoliticism, furnished judges with professional understandings and incentives that left them unequipped and disinclined to take stands in defense of liberal democratic principles, before, during, and after the authoritarian interlude.

Social Citizenship and Workfare in the United States and Western Europe
  • The Paradox of Inclusion
  • Joel F. Handler
  • Published online:
    18 December 2009
    Print publication:
    29 April 2004
  • This book compares workfare policies in the United States and 'active labor policies' in Western Europe that are aimed primarily at the long-term unemployed, unemployed youth, lone parents, immigrants and other vulnerable groups often referred to collectively as the 'socially excluded'. The Europeans maintain that workfare is the best method of bringing the socially excluded back into mainstream society. Although there are differences in terms of ideology and practice, Joel F. Handler argues that there are also significant similarities, especially field-level practices that serve to exclude those who are the least employable or lack other qualifications that agencies favor. The author also examines strategies for reform, including protective labor legislation, the Open Method of Coordination, the reform of social and employment services, and concludes with an argument for a basic income guarantee, which would not only alleviate poverty but also provide clients with an exit option.

Law, Violence and Sovereignty Among West Bank Palestinians
  • Tobias Kelly
  • Published online:
    24 November 2009
    Print publication:
    14 December 2006
  • As the Oslo Peace Process has given way to the violence of the second intifada, this book explores the continuing legacy of Oslo in the everyday life of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Taking a perspective that sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a conflict over the distribution of legal rights, it focuses on the daily concerns of West Bank Palestinians, and explores the meanings, limitations and potential of legal claims in the context of the region's structures of governance. Kelly argues that fundamental contradictions in the process through which the West Bank has been ruled and misruled have resulted in an unstable mixture of legality, fear and uncertainty. Based on long term ethnographic fieldwork, this book provides an insight into how the wider Middle East conflict manifests itself through the daily encounters of ordinary Israelis and Palestinians, offering an evocative and theoretically informed account of the relationship between law, peace-building and violence.

The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa
  • Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State
  • Richard A. Wilson
  • Published online:
    10 November 2009
    Print publication:
    02 May 2001
  • The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was set up to deal with the human rights violations of apartheid during the years 1960–1994. However, as Wilson shows, the TRC's restorative justice approach to healing the nation did not always serve the needs of communities at a local level. Based on extended anthropological fieldwork, this book illustrates the impact of the TRC in urban African communities in Johannesburg. While a religious constituency largely embraced the commission's religious-redemptive language of reconciliation, Wilson argues that the TRC had little effect on popular ideas of justice as retribution. This provocative study deepens our understanding of post-apartheid South Africa and the use of human rights discourse. It ends on a call for more cautious and realistic expectations about what human rights institutions can achieve in democratizing countries.

After Abu Ghraib
  • Exploring Human Rights in America and the Middle East
  • Shadi Mokhtari
  • Published online:
    12 September 2009
    Print publication:
    27 April 2009
  • This book traverses three pivotal human rights struggles of the post-September 11th era: the American human rights campaign to challenge the Bush administration's 'War on Terror' torture and detention policies, Middle Eastern efforts to challenge American human rights practices (reversing the traditional West to East flow of human rights mobilizations and discourses) and Middle Eastern attempts to challenge their own leaders' human rights violations in light of American interventions. This book presents snapshots of human rights being appropriated, promoted, claimed, reclaimed and contested within and between the American and Middle Eastern contexts. The inquiry has three facets: first, it explores intersections between human rights norms and power as they unfold in the era. Second, it lays out the layers of the era's American and Middle Eastern encounter on the human rights plane. Finally, it draws out the era's key lessons for moving the human rights project forward.

The Invention of the Passport
  • Surveillance, Citizenship and the State
  • John Torpey
  • Published online:
    24 August 2009
    Print publication:
    13 November 1999
  • In order to distinguish between those who may and may not enter or leave, states everywhere have developed extensive systems of identification, central to which is the passport. This innovative book argues that documents such as passports, internal passports and related mechanisms have been crucial in making distinctions between citizens and non-citizens. It examines how the concept of citizenship has been used to delineate rights and penalties regarding property, liberty, taxes and welfare. It focuses on the US and Western Europe, moving from revolutionary France to the Napoleonic era, the American Civil War, the British industrial revolution, pre-World War I Italy, the reign of Germany's Third Reich and beyond. This innovative study combines theory and empirical data in questioning how and why states have established the exclusive right to authorize and regulate the movement of people.

Judicial Review and Bureaucratic Impact
  • International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives
  • Edited by Marc Hertogh, Simon Halliday
  • Published online:
    29 July 2009
    Print publication:
    19 August 2004
  • How effective are the courts in controlling bureaucracies? What impact does judicial review have on the agencies which are targeted by its rulings? For the first time, this book brings together the insights of two intellectual disciplines which have hitherto explored these questions separately: political science and law/socio-legal studies. Leading international scholars from both fields present new research which focuses on the relationship between judicial review and bureaucratic behaviour. Individual contributors discuss fundamental conceptual and methodological issues, in addition to presenting a number of empirical case studies from various parts of the world: the United States, Canada, Australia, Israel, and the United Kingdom. This volume constitutes a landmark text offering an international, interdisciplinary and empirical perspective on judicial review's impact on bureaucracies. It will significantly advance the research agenda concerning judicial review and its relationship to social change.

Legal Reform and Administrative Detention Powers in China
  • Sarah Biddulph
  • Published online:
    27 July 2009
    Print publication:
    20 December 2007
  • Using a conceptual framework, this 2007 book examines the processes of legal reform in post-socialist countries such as China. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of the 'field', the increasingly complex and contested processes of legal reform are analysed in relation to police powers. The impact of China's post-1978 legal reforms on police powers is examined through a detailed analysis of three administrative detention powers: detention for education of prostitutes; coercive drug rehabilitation; and re-education through labour. The debate surrounding the abolition in 1996 of detention for investigation (also known as shelter and investigation) is also considered. Despite over 20 years of legal reform, police powers remain poorly defined by law and subject to minimal legal constraint. They continue to be seriously and systematically abused. However, there has been both systematic and occasionally dramatic reform of these powers. This book considers the processes which have made these legal changes possible.

Law and Nature
  • David Delaney
  • Published online:
    22 July 2009
    Print publication:
    13 October 2003
  • This interdisciplinary study explores the relationship between conceptions of nature and (largely American) legal thought and practice. It focuses on the politics and pragmatics of nature talk as expressed in both extra-legal disputes and their transformation and translation into forms of legal discourse (tort, property, contract, administrative law, criminal law and constitutional law). Delaney begins by considering the pragmatics of nature in connection with the very idea of law and the practice of American legal theorization. He then traces a set of specific political-legal disputes and arguments. The set consists of a series of contexts and cases organized around a conventional distinction between 'external' and 'internal nature': forces of nature, endangered species, animal experiments, bestiality, reproductive technologies, genetic screening, biological defenses in criminal cases, and involuntary medication of inmates. He demonstrates throughout that nearly any construal of 'nature' entails an interpretation of what it is to be (distinctively) human.

Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social
  • Making Persons and Things
  • Edited by Alain Pottage, Martha Mundy
  • Published online:
    12 July 2009
    Print publication:
    24 June 2004
  • This collection of interdisciplinary essays explores how persons and things - the central elements of the social - are fabricated by legal rituals and institutions. The contributors, legal and anthropological theorists alike, focus on a set of specific institutional and ethnographic contexts, and some unexpected and thought-provoking analogies emerge from this intellectual encounter between law and anthropology. For example, contemporary anxieties about the legal status of the biotechnological body seem to resonate with the questions addressed by ancient Roman law in its treatment of dead bodies. The analogy between copyright and the transmission of intangible designs in Melanesia suddenly makes western images of authorship seem quite unfamiliar. A comparison between law and laboratory science presents the production of legal artefacts in new light. These studies are of particular relevance at a time when law, faced with the inventiveness of biotechnology, finds it increasingly difficult to draw the line between persons and things.

Lawyers and Regulation
  • The Politics of the Administrative Process
  • Patrick Schmidt
  • Published online:
    11 July 2009
    Print publication:
    08 June 2005
  • This book is a close study of lawyers who practise occupational safety and health law in the United States, using detailed interview and survey data to explore the roles that lawyers have as representatives of companies, unions, and OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration). Placed in the context of evolving understandings of regulatory politics as a problem of public-private interaction and negotiation, the book argues that lawyers adapt to multiple roles in what prove to be highly complex settings. The core chapters examine stages of the administrative process where various groups attempt to shape the immediate outcomes and the development of OSHA law. These stages include administrative rulemaking, post-rulemaking litigation of government standards, regulatory enforcement, and compliance counseling by lawyers.

The Ritual of Rights in Japan
  • Law, Society, and Health Policy
  • Eric A. Feldman
  • Published online:
    08 July 2009
    Print publication:
    30 March 2000
  • The Ritual of Rights in Japan challenges the conventional wisdom that the assertion of rights is fundamentally incompatible with Japanese legal, political and social norms. It discusses the creation of a Japanese translation of the word 'rights', Kenri; examines the historical record for words and concepts similar to 'rights'; and highlights the move towards recognising patients' rights in the 1960s and 1970s. Two policy studies are central to the book. One concentrates on Japan's 1989 AIDS Prevention Act, and the other examines the protracted controversy over whether brain death should become a legal definition of death. Rejecting conventional accounts that recourse to rights is less important to resolving disputes than other cultural forms,The Ritual of Rights in Japan uses these contemporary cases to argue that the invocation of rights is a critical aspect of how conflicts are articulated and resolved.

Law and Society in Vietnam
  • The Transition from Socialism in Comparative Perspective
  • Mark Sidel
  • Published online:
    07 July 2009
    Print publication:
    21 February 2008
  • This book is a unique analysis of the struggle to build a rule of law in one of the world's most dynamic and vibrant nations - a socialist state that is seeking to build a market economy while struggling to pursue an ethos of social equality and opportunity. It addresses constitutional change, the assertion of constitutional claims by citizens, the formation of a strong civil society and non-profit sector, the emergence of economic law and the battles over who is benefited by the economic regulation, labor law and the protection of migrant and export labor, the rise of lawyers and public interest law, and other key topics. Alongside other countries, comparisons are made to parallel developments in another transforming socialist state, the People's Republic of China.

Law and Globalization from Below
  • Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality
  • Edited by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, César A. Rodríguez-Garavito
  • Published online:
    07 July 2009
    Print publication:
    08 September 2005
  • This book is an unprecedented attempt to analyze the role of the law in the global movement for social justice. Case studies in the book are written by leading scholars from both the global South and the global North, and combine empirical research on the ground with innovative sociolegal theory to shed new light on a wide array of topics. Among the issues examined are the role of law and politics in the World Social Forum; the struggle of the anti-sweatshop movement for the protection of international labour rights; and the challenge to neoliberal globalization and liberal human rights raised by grassroots movements in India and indigenous peoples around the world. These and other cases, the editors argue, signal the emergence of a subaltern cosmopolitan law and politics that calls for new social and legal theories capable of capturing the potential and tensions of counter-hegemonic globalization.

Immigrants at the Margins
  • Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe
  • Kitty Calavita
  • Published online:
    04 July 2009
    Print publication:
    17 February 2005
  • Spain and Italy have recently become countries of large-scale immigration. This provocative book explores immigration law and the immigrant experience in these southern European nations, and exposes the tension between the temporary and contingent legal status of most immigrants, and the government emphasis on integration. This book reveals that while law and the rhetoric of policymakers stress the urgency of integration, not only are they failing in that effort, but law itself plays a role in that failure. In addressing this paradox, the author combines theoretical insights and extensive data from myriad sources collected over more than a decade to demonstrate the connections among immigrants' role as cheap labor - carefully inscribed in law - and their social exclusion, criminalization, and racialization. Extrapolating from this economics of alterité, this book engages more general questions of citizenship, belonging, race and community in this global era.

Justice and Reconciliation in Post-Apartheid South Africa
  • Edited by François du Bois, Antje du Bois-Pedain
  • Published online:
    01 July 2009
    Print publication:
    08 January 2009
  • Justice and Reconciliation in Post-Apartheid South Africa assesses the transitional processes under way since the early 1990s to create a stable and just society. Change in South Africa is often credited to the efforts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), but the work of this institution forms but a facet of a much broader picture. This book looks at the steps which accompanied and followed the TRC's activities, such as land restitution, institutional reforms and social and cultural initiatives. Thematically, it interlinks the TRC's concerns over truth and reconciliation with an analysis of the concepts of justice, accountability, harm and reconciliation and with competing perceptions of what these notions entail in the South African context. Bringing together international and South African scholars whose work has focused on these themes, the contributions provide a cohesive and inspiring analysis of South Africa's response to its unjust past.

Page 7 of 7