Journal of Law and Society最新文献

Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey's recent auto-critique invited legal consciousness scholars to develop their analyses of legal hegemony in the context of collective sites of legality construction and the contestation of the hegemony of state law. Trade unions provide a particularly apposite group and institutional site to study such processes. From a Marxist perspective, recent labour law scholarship has argued that union engagement with law reproduces liberal legal hegemony by depoliticizing domination and disciplining the individual and collective consciousness of workers and unions. First, we argue that critical legal consciousness research (cLCR) can nuance this Marxist perspective via its insights about polyvocality and legal pluralism. Second, we argue that cLCR relating to the relationship between counter-hegemonic projects and hegemony could be enriched by elements of the Marxist critique of labour law, albeit one that is committed to viewing theory as productive of hypotheses, rather than certainties, that should always be empirically investigated.

In this article, we argue for the relevance of studying the association between objects and people as co-constituting legality in everyday life rather than solely focusing either on people or on ‘icons’. Indeed, we go further and argue that scholarship is in danger of producing an impoverished version of legal consciousness if it fails to look beyond the human actors, the people in society. Studying objects and associations, and their role in the making of legalities, is enriched by engaging with the insights of legal consciousness, and its close attention to the way in which everyday forms of engagement with legal orders are co-constitutive of legality. We illustrate through two different case studies how associations between objects and people (in a homeless shelter for young people and among herbalists) mediate and shape legal consciousness.

How does legal consciousness matter for compliance? Thus far, this issue has been addressed by two bodies of literature that each focus on one side of the equation but do not speak to each other. Legal consciousness studies analyse how people understand the law but focus less on their compliance with the law. Conversely, most legitimacy studies focus on people's compliance with the law but do not analyse their perceptions of the law. This article draws on the findings from an online survey among Dutch welfare clients to empirically bridge both literatures. I look not only at clients’ own (first-order) legal consciousness, but also at their second-order legal consciousness: clients’ assessment of welfare officials’ beliefs about the law. I argue that the connection between legal consciousness and legal compliance is not a unitary phenomenon, but must be situated in relation to particular laws and social hierarchies.

Why do legal professionals mention their sons when discussing a new consent-based rape law? Drawing on feminist legal studies and sociology of emotions, this article investigates a discourse of male fear of rape accusations among Swedish legal professionals and how defence lawyers strategically employ it. The analysis shows that a male fear defence is deployed to evoke a specific kind of sympathy termed ‘himpathy’ among judges. The male fear discourse serves as a himpathy resource to problematize the implications of the new rape law and to explain irrational behaviour from men accused of rape, instilling doubts about the complainant's credibility, suggesting false accusations, and creating an imagined ‘ruined’ future for the accused man if convicted, including his and his relatives’ shame over the rapist stigma. The findings highlight the role of background emotions in legal practice concerning rape and how the law remains ‘himpathetic’ despite radical consent-based rape legislation.

Traditional liberal democratic theories of protest can readily account for protest violence against others or their property, and are quick to denounce and criminalize such actions. However, protests that involve self-harm are harder to frame; they neither engage the harm principle, nor threaten a sovereign state of ostensible peace. Under liberal legalism, capacitous and consenting protesters should not have their rights of expression interfered with in such cases. However, in England and Wales, legal responses to self-harming violence nevertheless emerge, not necessarily within a public order framework, but through a risk-averse, medicalized lens. Co-authored by a legal academic and a practising psychiatrist, this article argues that mental health practitioners, the police, and the courts engage in a ‘paternalistic pivot’ in self-harming protest cases, which undermines human rights protections that are ordinarily afforded to protesters who are not causing a threat to others or their property.

This article builds on Paige Sweet's conceptualization of ‘worthy survivors’ in the United States context and adds a consideration of judicial discretion to define who were considered worthy survivors of domestic violence in the eyes of the Beijing courts in 2021 and 2022. After analysing judges’ decisions in civil judgments and civil orders, the article concludes that worthy survivors were those who described how their abusers challenged legal authorities or disturbed public order, submitted multiple external documents with a clear description of the domestic violence, or mentioned children as direct survivors of physical child abuse committed in public. By contrast, survivors with limited capacity for civil conduct (generally due to schizophrenia) were marginalized and treated as ‘unworthy’. This article contributes to our understanding by addressing how crafting stories in line with mainstream ideology in the specific society helped survivors to achieve institutional recognition.

In this article, I take issue with settled claims that the organizational features of the corporation make it the most effective enabler of growth under capitalism – an assumption that has focused various growth-critical narratives on mechanisms to regulate corporate growth. I argue that such narratives are flawed because, far from always blindly amplifying growth, the corporate form often operationalizes degrowth to protect capital. This argument is theoretically grounded in Marx's analysis of the particularities of growth under capitalism, and a law-in-context analysis of how companies operationalize degrowth to protect capital/shareholder interests, utilizing the examples of takeovers and share repurchases. The article shows that narratives seeking to both protect the environment and deliver human flourishing need to be contextualized within an understanding of the specifics of growth under capitalism and the function of corporate law architecture.

Every day, officers working at international airports investigate potential risks to state safety and security. But how do they decide who they can trust, and also ensure that the broader public trusts them to conduct this work? This article explores these questions through an examination of the reality television show Border Security: Australia's Front Line. Through critical discourse analysis of a collection of 108 televised airport encounters, we explore the aspects of communication, behaviour, and identity made salient in officers’ evaluations of passengers’ credibility and critically examine the assumptions underlying them. Further, we consider how power and role divisions are implicated in the construction of passenger and officer credibility, both within border encounters and in discourses about them. Our analysis makes a novel contribution to the literature on credibility assessments in intercultural communication, demonstrating how an institutional and social ‘culture of disbelief’ is constructed vis-à-vis certain groups through seemingly banal border work.

The world's imagination was caught by the 1998 arrest in London of General Augusto Pinochet on charges of egregious human rights crimes and the 16-month battle to extradite him to Madrid. For the first time, a former head of state had, while travelling abroad, been arrested on such charges, with his claim to immunity being rejected by a national court. The case's notoriety increased when Lord Hoffman, a judge when it first came before the Law Lords, did not publicly disclose his links with Amnesty International, an intervenor in the proceedings. Pinochet's release on health grounds compounded the controversy. This article reveals hidden histories behind the Pinochet case, advancing our understanding of its progression and wider significance. It illuminates the relationship between law and politics, the role of personal views and judicial creativity in the UK's top court, the ways in which law operates in practice, and its promises and limitations.