Law & Policy最新文献

In many western countries the Covid crisis has evolved from a public health crisis toward an economic crisis. Spain was no exception. Crises are always key moments in the reconfiguration of the role of the state, as this takes on new domains and functions. Conceiving state's role as a triad helps us understanding its functioning. From the initial stage, state work has been intense in order to mitigate its effects. But the Spanish particularity is the specific articulation of state apparatuses. As in previous crises, Spain has deployed a significant activity to police the public order. The policing of public spaces was tailored to ensure the economic apparatuses remain unchallenged. A new mode of regulation has been established to allow an enhanced regime of capital accumulation through different financial instruments. Despite the frequent neglect of ideological state apparatuses, this paper exposes how relevant they are in moments of impasse to produce a new moral economy reassuring the hegemonic project of the elites.

Courts, particularly those with the power of constitutional review, engage in supplementary lawmaking. Like other policymakers, judges seek the proper interpretation and implementation of their decisions. Research on the United States of America (U.S.) Supreme Court indicates that it strategically alters its language to obtain better compliance, but little is known about whether international courts do the same. We test the generalizability of these findings by examining the opinion-writing tactics of another powerful court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), in a highly salient policy area, citizenship rights. Like the U.S. High Court, the CJEU must guide judges in interpreting constitutional law. In the European Union (EU) context, this entails directing Member State judges through the preliminary reference procedure, a form of indirect supranational judicial review. We expect that the CJEU will carefully craft the language of its opinions to obtain the cooperation of national judges in this area of law. Our findings indicate that, like the U.S. Supreme Court, the CJEU strategically alters its words in anticipation of this key audience's reactions to its decisions, and that the court's strategies may undermine EU citizens' rights in the long term.

This manuscript uses data drawn from case studies of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Michigan from 2000 to 2006 in order to examine how different states responded to mounting problems caused by mass incarceration. Lawmakers and penal administrators inherited correctional systems that had at least doubled in size over the previous decade and faced budgetary problems, overcrowded conditions, and federal litigation. When economic pressures and the 2001 recession destabilized state budgets, state officials responded differently to these crises. While legislators remained committed to the carceral ethos that had driven prison expansion, some governors and penal administrators charged with managing state corrections systems began to consider new responses that moved away from prison expansion. As we show, executives and penal administrators in some states successfully implemented reforms by making changes to back-end correctional processes. Their successes highlight the importance of autonomy from external pressures that allowed some administrators to respond to mounting problems in ways that reduced their state's reliance on imprisonment. These administrators deployed their correctional expertise to pursue policies that minimized political backlash. States lacking the necessary institutional structures and sufficient external pressures largely sustained the penal status quo.

Joining a critical literature on carceral citizenship in the United States, this article represents one of the first academic efforts to ascertain the ideas of people with criminal records about “collateral consequences,” which are the civil restrictions often facing people with records. In 32 extended interviews with people visiting a reentry organization in New York City, a majority argued that people with conviction backgrounds should be eligible to vote and serve on juries, and most said they would like to be able to participate themselves. Interviewees did express intensely skeptical ideas, particularly about the police and employers, but this was a limited or bounded cynicism. Distrust and antagonism toward specific institutions existed alongside a strongly-stated desire to engage in civic activity.

This article critically considers the UK Government's insidious attempts to control the narrative around COVID-19 deaths through using the interrelated strategies of “talk and ‘silence’ in order to socially construct a definitive ‘truth’” around the virus. The article traces how these strategies worked in practice and the shift which took place from numerous press briefings and Parliamentary debates to an ominous silence around the number of deaths, in particular. At the same time, as the article illustrates, the government's truth has not prevailed. Their twin strategy has been contested and resisted by grassroots organizations and radical lawyers who have demanded that Ministers should take responsibility for the tens of thousands of preventable deaths which have occurred. Rather than government talk and silence prevailing, it is the voices of the haunted relatives of the dead, demanding accountability, which are creating an alternative narrative.

Vaccination involves the encounter of nonhuman biological matter and human bodies, recalibrating our susceptibility to illness and death. This boundary-crossing act has been caught in conflicting webs of moral significance, including the normalizing frameworks of public health governance and its corresponding forms of resistance. Such tensions and dynamics were a feature of smallpox vaccination - the first modern, systematic state-driven project to build population immunity. Focusing on smallpox vaccination in the British-ruled Straits Settlements (Singapore, Penang, and Malacca) between 1868 and 1926, we examine the recurrent features of contentions over vaccination from the tentative beginnings of the 1868 Vaccination Ordinance to the systematic extension of vaccination in the 20th century. Engaging science and technology studies of nonhuman agency and social theories on security, we argue that such contentions demonstrate the limits of a power formation we call governing through contagion (GTC). GTC centralizes law and other technologies to normalize public health measures that combat contagious diseases, while dysconnecting populations by its strategies of control. Our history of smallpox vaccination reveals: (i) GTC relies on the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman actors in protecting populations against viral threats; law is essential but does not necessarily drive vaccination or other strategies of control and (ii) resistance to GTC, in which law plays an integral role, reinforces inequalities and differentiated treatment, what we term endemic inter/dysconnectedness.

In contemporary society, sumptuary laws regulate contested markets by delegating enforcement responsibilities to the private sector. This can decouple the intention behind policies from the practices to implement them. When state interests do not align concerning the legality of a market, can policy and practice recouple, and if so, how? This article reports on a case study of commercial cannabis in the United States to answer this question. Interviews with 56 cannabis industry stakeholders in California, Arizona, and Texas reveal that policy and practice recoupled through a patterned process that I call sumptuary administration. In each state, regulators drew on a unique set of schemas, or “framework of accountability,” that prioritized a subset of cannabis market participants during the policy-making process. This resulted in missing or ambiguous sumptuary laws. To address business challenges that were tethered to this regulatory environment, cannabis businesses drew on similar schemas to identify appropriate practices. I show how grounding practices in these frameworks legitimized the preferences of the cannabis industry in the eyes of state authorities and influenced specific program policy revisions. Sumptuary administration represents a novel mechanism for understanding the social construction of legality in markets that are regulated under fragmented governance.

Under China's "dynamic zero" COVID-19 policy, Shenzhen required its residents to present a negative nucleic acid testing result within 24 or 48 h to access most public spaces and transit until most recently. The uneven accessibility to testing services could render certain groups vulnerable to mobility disadvantage (e.g., denied access to public transport). Using data of nucleic acid testing services and residents' positioning points, I created a cartogram to capture the spatial distribution of people's activities and that of testing services in Shenzhen. The cartogram indicates that the nucleic acid testing services were spatially concentrated in a way inconsistent with the distribution of people's daily activities. Several girds exhibit high presence of activities but low or no provision of testing services that were necessary for residents to accessing public spaces and transport. The cartogram casts light to potential consequence of regular nucleic acid testing on mobility equality.

How does regulation change in authoritarian polities that tightly control public discourse and social mobilization? Socio-legal theories assume that regulation changes through intersubjective dialogical exchanges that persuade regulators to alter how they perceive social problems and the appropriate regulatory responses. Although this framework captures regulatory change in transparent dialogical spaces, it misses much of the regulatory story in the opaque discursive processes that order authoritarian polities. This article turns to sociological institutional theory—a non-dialogical theory to understand regulatory change in Vietnam's authoritarian polity. It investigates how commercial regulation in Vietnam has responded to an emerging mixed-market economy, at the same time the state has suppressed public dialogical challenges to socialist ideology. It concludes that regulatory change occurs when regulators respond to economic and social crises and layer new ideational components onto old programmatic ideas, converting them to new uses.

Governmental responses to the COVID-19 global pandemic have generated numerous constitutionals, policy, legal, and political-economic debates. Scholarly engagements with the sociolegal and policy consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have been dominated by discussion on the role of emergency powers, the suspension of individual civil liberties, the suspension of economic rules in order to guarantee economic survival, and social regulation of public spaces and of workplaces. This paper aims to explore how a critical sociolegal scholarship can contribute to a more sophisticated understanding of the role of law in creating the unequal conditions that propitiated the COVID-19 pandemic and that might enable further crises. This introduction offers a roadmap for theorizing the limits of law, the operationalization of emergency powers and the different policies implemented by global south and north countries in response to the pandemic. This introduction is structured as follow: (1) provides a general overview of the law and society tradition and its engagement with the COVID-19 pandemic; (2) engages with three key consequences of the pandemic, labor, and the lockdown; colonial implications; and the limits of law; (3) introduces the papers in this special issue; (4) sketches a proposal for the critical sociolegal scholarship of law and crises.