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  3. Law in Context

Since 1970, the Law in Context series has been at the forefront of a movement to broaden the study of law. The series is a vehicle for the publication of innovative monographs and texts that treat law and legal phenomena critically in their cultural, social, political, technological, environmental and economic contexts. A contextual approach involves treating legal subjects broadly, using materials from other humanities and social sciences, and from any other discipline that helps to explain the operation in practice of the particular legal field or legal phenomena under investigation. It is intended that this orientation is at once more stimulating and more revealing than the bare exposition of legal rules. The series includes original research monographs, coursebooks and textbooks that foreground contextual approaches and methods. The series includes and welcomes books on the study of law in all its contexts, including domestic legal systems, European and international law, transnational and global legal processes, and comparative law.

  • General Editors: Kenneth Armstrong, University of Cambridge, Maksymilian Del Mar, Queen Mary University of London, Sally Sheldon, University of Bristol

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112 results in Law in Context

Page 1 of 6

Rethinking Criminal Justice
  • Punishment, Abolition and Moral Psychology
  • Alan Norrie
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • For 200 years, the penal equation 'crime plus blame equals punishment' has led to painful repetition: more prisons, violence, damaged lives, a never-ending 'crime problem'. The retributive theory of punishment is central to this; yet fully developed philosophically, it becomes something fundamentally different. A moral psychology of violation distinguishes retributivism's primitive and mature forms. It explains both punishment's necessary failure and how guilt, forgiveness and reconciliation are possible. 'Atonement' means both punitive 'payback' and being morally 'at one' with self and others. Such reconciliation for the offender, victim and wider society takes us from punishment to its abolition. Grounding responses to violation in moral psychology, mature retributivism finds its roots in natural human powers. Speaking to scholars of law, philosophy and criminology, Alan Norrie shows how a psychologically developed moral philosophy guides critical thinking towards abolishing crime and punishment.

The Authoritarian Commons
  • Neighborhood Democratization in Urban China
  • Shitong Qiao
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2024
    Print publication:
    09 January 2025
  • Based on six-year fieldwork across China including over 200 in-depth interviews, this book provides an ethnographic account of how hundreds of millions of Chinese homeowners practice democracy in and beyond their condominium complexes. Using interviews, survey data, and a comprehensive examination of laws, policies and judicial decisions, this book also examines how the party-state in China responds to the risks and benefits brought by neighborhood democratization. Moreover, this book provides a framework to analyze different approaches to the authoritarian dilemma facing neighborhood democratization which may increase the regime's legitimacy and expose it to the challenge of independent organizations at the same time. Lastly, this book identifies conditions under which neighborhood democratization can succeed.

An Introduction to Law and Regulation
  • Text and Materials
  • 2nd edition
  • Karen Yeung, Sofia Ranchordás
  • Published online:
    22 November 2024
    Print publication:
    28 November 2024
  • Contemporary life relies on regulation. The quality and safety of the water we drink, the food we eat, and the social media applications we use are all governed by multiple regulatory regimes. Although rooted in law, regulation is a multidisciplinary endeavour. Debates about regulation, particularly in the face of rapid change and the emergence of new 'risks', are now commonplace. Despite extensive scholarship, regulation is often poorly understood, even by policy-makers, with unintended and even disastrous consequences. This book offers a critical introduction to core theories, concepts, methods, tools, and techniques of regulation, including regulatory policy, instruments, enforcement, compliance, accountability and legitimacy. Weaving extracts from texts drawn from many disciplines with accessible commentary, it introduces this important field to students, scholars, and practitioners in a scholarly yet accessible and engaging manner with discussion questions and additional readings for those seeking to deepen their knowledge.

An Introduction to German Law and Legal Culture
  • Text and Materials
  • Russell A. Miller
  • Published online:
    13 November 2024
    Print publication:
    17 October 2024
  • An Introduction to German Law and Legal Culture offers students, comparative law scholars, and practitioners an insightful and innovative survey of the German legal system. While recognizing the significant influence of the Civil Law tradition in the German legal culture, the book also considers other legal traditions – Common Law, Socialist Law, Islamic Law, Adversarial Law, European Law – that are woven into the varied and colorful fabric of the German legal culture. The book provides an informed yet accessible introduction to the foundations of German law as well as to the theory and doctrine of some of the most relevant fields of law: Private Law, Constitutional Law, Administrative Law, Criminal Law, Procedural Law, and European Law. It is an engaging and pluralistic portrayal of one of the world's most interesting, important, and frequently modelled legal systems.

Inducing Intimacy
  • Deception, Consent and the Law
  • Chloë Kennedy
  • Published online:
    26 October 2024
    Print publication:
    07 November 2024
  • Kennedy presents a new way of evaluating the regulation of deceptively induced intimacy, that is, sex and sexual/romantic relationships, on the basis of an innovative genealogy of legal responses to this conduct. This book traces the development of a range of civil and criminal laws across c. 250 years, showing how using deception to induce intimacy has been legally understood, compensated and punished. It offers an original interpretation of the form and function of these laws by situating them in their social and cultural contexts. It argues that prevailing notions of what makes intimacy valuable, including the role it plays in self-construction, have shaped and constrained the laws' operation. It shows how deceptively induced sex has come to be treated more seriously while the opposite is true of deceptively induced relationships and concludes by presenting a new framework for deciding whether and when deceptively induced intimacy should be regulated by law today.

The Reasonable Person
  • A Legal Biography
  • Valentin Jeutner
  • Published online:
    30 May 2024
    Print publication:
    06 June 2024
  • Jeutner argues that the reasonable person is, at heart, an empathetic perspective-taking device, by tracing the standard of the reasonable person across time, legal fields and countries. Beginning with a review of imaginary legal figures in the legal systems of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, the book explains why the common law's reasonable person emerged amidst the British industrialisation under the influence of Scottish Enlightenment thinking. Following the figure into colonial courts, onto battlefields and into self-driving cars, the book contends that the reasonable person invites judges, jury-members, and lawyers to take another person's perspective when assessing their own or another person's conduct. The perspective of another is taken by means of empathy, by feeling what others might feel in a particular situation. Thus construed, the figure of the reasonable person can help us make more accurate judgments in a diverse world.

Ways of Remembering
  • Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India
  • Volume 1
  • Oishik Sircar
  • Published online:
    30 April 2024
    Print publication:
    04 July 2024
  • Ways of Remembering tells a story about the relationship between secular law and religious violence by studying the memorialisation of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom—postcolonial India's most litigated and mediatized event of anti-Muslim mass violence. By reading judgments and films on the pogrom through a novel interpretive framework, the book argues that the shared narrative of law and cinema engenders ways of remembering the pogrom in which the rationality of secular law offers a resolution to the irrationality of religious violence. In the public's collective memory, the force of this rationality simultaneously condemns and normalises violence against Muslims while exonerating secular law from its role in enabling the pogrom, thus keeping the violent (legal) order against India's Muslim citizens intact. The book contends that in foregrounding law's aesthetic dimensions we see the discursive ways in which secular law organizes violence and presents itself as the panacea for that very violence.

Fortin's Children's Rights and the Developing Law
  • 4th edition
  • Rachel E. Taylor
  • Published online:
    08 February 2024
    Print publication:
    29 February 2024
  • The notion that children constitute an important group of rights holders has gained increasing acceptance both domestically and internationally. Nevertheless, this rhetorical commitment to children's rights is not necessarily realised in practice. Now in its fourth edition, Fortin's Children's Rights and the Developing Law explores the extent to which law and policy in England promotes or undermines the rights of children. Fully revised and updated, this textbook uses current research on child development and welfare to reflect on the extent to which the law fulfils children's rights in a wide range of areas, including medical law, education and child poverty. These developments are measured again the domestic law and the UK's international obligations under, for example, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Caring for Cultural Heritage
  • An Integrated Approach to Legal and Ethical Initiatives in the United Kingdom
  • Charlotte Woodhead
  • Published online:
    09 November 2023
    Print publication:
    23 November 2023
  • This book explores how cultural heritage and its care are translated in UK law and non-law instruments. It analyses how communities of care look after cultural heritage because they care about it. These communities include the international and national community, national and local governments, courts, professional bodies, institutions such as museums as well as community groups. 'Care' refers to the varied ways in which communities engage with cultural heritage to maintain it, sustain relationships about it and with it, use it and provide access to it, with a view to passing it on to future generations. The book also assesses how far these nested practices of care assist communities of care in providing respectful, empathetic and dialogical care to navigate harm to cultural heritage. It will be of interest to scholars of cultural heritage studies across disciplines, including law, sociology and anthropology, as well as policymakers and practitioners in cultural heritage management.

Brexit, Union, and Disunion
  • The Evolution of British Constitutional Unsettlement
  • Sionaidh Douglas-Scott
  • Published online:
    26 October 2023
    Print publication:
    09 November 2023
  • This book provides a critical analysis of Brexit, placing it in the broader context of the historical development of the British Constitution and earlier disputes as to the meaning of statehood, sovereignty, and territorial boundaries. Some of the greatest challenges posed by the UK's withdrawal from the EU are those it places on the British Constitution, which is already 'unsettled' and under strain. This book investigates this impact, but also uniquely locates Brexit in the broader context of historically significant British 'acts of union or disunion' – such as the loss of former US colonies and British Empire, and the place of Scotland and Ireland in the Union. These precedents help us understand how a British constitutional identity has been shaped or dismantled by legal concepts of union or sovereignty.

Grievance Formation, Rights and Remedies
  • Involuntary Sterilisation and Castration in the Nordics, 1930s–2020s
  • Daniela Alaattinoğlu
  • Published online:
    18 August 2023
    Print publication:
    24 August 2023
  • In the last century, the treatment of victims of involuntary sterilisation and castration in Nordic countries has varied drastically from state-to-state, across time and victim groups. Considering why this is the case, Daniela Alaattinoğlu investigates how laws and practices of involuntary, surgical sterilisation and castration have been established, abolished and remedied in three Nordic states: Sweden, Norway and Finland. Employing a vast range of primary and secondary sources, Alaattinoğlu traces the national and international developments of the last 100 years. Developing the concept of grievance formation, the book explores why some states have claimed public responsibility while others have not, and why some victim groups have mobilised while others have remained silent. Through this pioneering analysis, Alaattinoğlu illuminates issues of human and constitutional rights, the evolution of the welfare state and state responsibility in both a national and global context.

The Making Sense of Politics, Media, and Law
  • Rhetorical Performance as Invention, Creation, Production
  • Gary Watt
  • Published online:
    06 April 2023
    Print publication:
    13 April 2023
  • From Trump's 'make America great again' to Johnson's 'build back better', performative politicians use The Making Sense to persuade their public audiences. Law 'makers' do it too: A courtroom trial is a 'truth factory' in which facts are not found but forged. The 'court of popular opinion' is another such factory, though its processes are often flawed and its products faulty. Where courts of law aim to make civil peace, 'trial by Twitter' makes civil strife. Even in 'mainstream' media, journalists make news for public consumption, so that all news is to an extent 'fake news'. In a world of making, how can we separate craft from craftiness? With insights from disciplines including law, politics, rhetoric, media studies, psychology, sociology, marketing, and performance studies, The Making Sense of Politics, Media, and Law offers a constructive way to approach controversies from transgender identity to cancel culture. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Regulating the Sea
  • A Socio-Legal Analysis of English Marine Protected Areas
  • Margherita Pieraccini
  • Published online:
    15 December 2022
    Print publication:
    22 December 2022
  • This book is the first ever written on English marine conservation regulation from a socio-legal perspective. The monograph presents an in-depth analysis of key aspects of Marine Protected Areas regulation in England, offering the reader access to an under-investigated field. Such regulatory mapping is complemented by an interdisciplinary treatment of the subject exploring the relationship between people and marine parks through central themes in environmental social sciences and regulatory theory, namely space, rationalisation, democracy and adaptation. Thus, the book is of interest to environmental lawyers and regulatory scholars but also to human geographers, environmental sociologists and political scientists. As the book provides critical reflections on current legal and regulatory structures, it contains valuable insights for policymakers and regulators. The book has a strong methodological basis drawing on in-depth desk-based research, complemented by primary qualitative research, conducted over a number of years.

Transitional Justice for Foxes
  • Conflict, Pluralism and the Politics of Compromise
  • Frank Haldemann
  • Published online:
    24 November 2022
    Print publication:
    08 December 2022
  • There is a memorable line by ancient Greek poet Archilochus: 'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.' Drawing on this metaphor made popular by Isaiah Berlin, this book sets out to 'think like a fox' about transitional justice in an intellectual environment largely dominated by hedgehogs. Critical of the unitary 'hedgehog-like' vision underlying mainstream discourse, this book proposes a pluralist reading of the field. It asks: What would it mean for transitional justice to constructively deal with conflicts of values and interests in societies grappling with a violent past? And what would it imply to make meaningful room for diversity, to see 'the many' rather than just 'the one'?

Principles of Enterprise Law
  • The Economic Constitution and Human Rights
  • Ewan McGaughey
  • Published online:
    12 November 2022
    Print publication:
    01 September 2022
  • Major enterprises shape our lives in countless ways: big tech and 'surveillance media' that affect democratic debate, algorithms that influence online shopping, transport to work and home, energy and agriculture corporations that drive climate damage, and public services that provide our education, health, water, and housing. The twentieth century experienced swings between private and public ownership, between capitalism and socialism, without any settled, principled outcome, and without settling major questions of how enterprises should be financed, governed and the rights we have in them. This book's main question is 'are there principles of enterprise law', and, if they are missing, 'what principles of enterprise law should there be'? Principles of Enterprise Law gives a functional account of the 'general' enterprise laws of companies, investment, labour, competition and insolvency, before moving into specific enterprises, from universities to the military. It is an original guide to our economic constitution and human rights.

Transnational Law
  • A Framework for Analysis
  • Michael W. Dowdle
  • Published online:
    12 November 2022
    Print publication:
    08 September 2022
  • Globalisation impacts every aspect of modern society and today's law graduates are expected to deal with complex legal problems that require knowledge and training that goes beyond domestic law. This textbook provides an overview of how law is becoming increasingly transnational, facilitating theoretical and practical engagement with transnational legal institutions and phenomena. It advances an analytic framework that will help students to understand what to look for when they encounter transnational legal institutions and practices, and what are the practical and normative implications of their findings. By considering both the theory and practice of transnational law and taking a discursive approach to the material, students are encouraged to arrive at their own conclusions. Adopting interdisciplinary techniques and using case studies from around the world, this book offers a holistic, balanced exploration of a new and emerging discipline.

The Abortion Act 1967
  • A Biography of a UK Law
  • Sally Sheldon, Gayle Davis, Jane O'Neill, Clare Parker
  • Published online:
    03 November 2022
    Print publication:
    17 November 2022
  • The Abortion Act 1967 may be the most contested law in UK history, sitting on a fault line between the shifting tectonic plates of a rapidly transforming society. While it has survived repeated calls for its reform, with its text barely altered for over five decades, women's experiences of accessing abortion services under it have evolved considerably. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews, this book explores how the Abortion Act was given meaning by a diverse cast of actors including women seeking access to services, doctors and service providers, campaigners, judges, lawyers, and policy makers. By adopting an innovative biographical approach to the law, the book shows that the Abortion Act is a 'living law'. Using this historically grounded socio-legal approach, this enlightening book demonstrates how the Abortion Act both shaped and was shaped by a constantly changing society.

Recentering the World
  • China and the Transformation of International Law
  • Ryan Martínez Mitchell
  • Published online:
    27 October 2022
    Print publication:
    03 November 2022
  • Recentering the World recovers a richly contextual, detailed history of Western-imposed legal structures in China, as well as engagements with international law by Chinese officials, jurists, and citizens. Beginning in the Late Qing era, it shows how international law functioned as a channel for power relations, techniques of economic domination, as well as novel forms of resistance. The book also radically diversifies traditionally Eurocentric accounts of modern international law's origins, demonstrating how, by the mid-twentieth century, Chinese jurists had made major contributions to international organizations and the UN system, the international judiciary, the laws of armed conflict, and more. Drawing on extensive archival research, this book is a valuable guide to China's often conflicted role in international law, its reception and contention of concepts of sovereignty, property, obligation, and autonomy, and its gradual move from the 'periphery' to a shared spot at the 'center' of global legal order.

Tax and Government in the 21st Century
  • Miranda Stewart
  • Published online:
    01 September 2022
    Print publication:
    08 September 2022
  • With an accessible style and clear structure, Miranda Stewart explains how taxation finances government in the twenty-first century, exploring tax law in its historical, economic, and social context. Today, democratic tax states face an array of challenges, including the changing nature of work, the digitalisation and globalisation of the economy, and rebuilding after the fiscal crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic. Stewart demonstrates the centrality of taxation for government budgets and explains key tax principles of equity, efficiency and administration. Presenting examples from a wide range of jurisdictions and international developments, Stewart shows how tax policy and law operate in our everyday lives, ranging from family and working life to taxing multinational enterprises in the global digital economy. Employing an interdisciplinary approach to the history and future of taxation law and policy, this is a valuable resource for legal scholars, practitioners and policy makers.

Vanishing Contract Law
  • Common Law in the Age of Contracts
  • Catherine Mitchell
  • Published online:
    25 August 2022
    Print publication:
    01 September 2022
  • English contract law provides the invisible framework that underpins and enables much contracting activity in society, yet the role of the law in policing many of our contracts now approaches vanishing point. The methods by which contracts come into existence, and notionally create binding obligations, have transformed over the past forty years. Consumers now enter into contracts through remote and automated processes on standard terms over which they have little control. This book explores the substantive weakening of the institution of contract law in a society heavily dependent on contracts. It considers significant areas of contracting activity that affect many people, but that escape serious and sustained legal scrutiny. An accessibly written and succinct account of contract law's past, present and future, it assesses the implications of a diminished contract law, and the possibilities, if any, for its revival.

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