Journal of Law and Society最新文献

Jury science is fraught with difficulty. Since legal and institutional hurdles render it all but impossible to study live criminal jury deliberation, researchers make use of various indirect methods to evaluate jury performance. However, each of these methods is open to methodological criticism and, strikingly, some of the highest-profile jury research programmes in recent years have reached opposing conclusions. Uncertainty about jury performance is an obstacle for legal reform; ongoing debate about the ‘justice gap’ for complainants of sexual offences has rendered these problems acute. This article proposes a way to advance the debate.

This article applies the concept of profilicity to the emergence of online harms legislation. Grounded in social systems theory, profilicity designates a mode of self-presentation prevalent in social media environments, though discernible in the growing number of situations where personal identity is mediated via a profile intended to be publicly observed. Profilicity is distinctly different to ‘sincere’ and ‘authentic’ modes of self-presentation, though they survive alongside it. The concept productively reframes what is at stake in the regulation of ‘harmful’ content on platform-based communications, exemplified in the Online Safety Act 2023, which is subject to extensive criticism for invading privacy and mandating the censorship of lawful speech – values that evolved in relation to authenticity and autonomy. Profilicity engages law first via the identity techniques that law presupposes and second via the design decisions that it now regulates.

This article studies China's cross-border impact on the legal profession, and develops the concept of the Sinophone lawyer to capture the inter-jurisdictional transformation. Using Hong Kong as a case study, the article identifies a process of ‘Sinophonication’ brought about by Chinese capital; that is, lawyers and law firms have critically changed the language in which they practise. The fact that the Chinese language is multilingual and polyphonic further assigns different values to different aspects of linguistic proficiency and different levels of the legal profession. For law firm partners, the ability to speak Mandarin and Mandarin cultural literacy are now indispensable. For associates, the ability to read and write simplified Chinese is essential. A lower level of paralegals has been created, attracting native speakers from Mandarin-speaking jurisdictions to serve as associates at a lower salary and with less career security. The article draws on qualitative interviews with solicitors, barristers, and foreign lawyers in Hong Kong, and quantitative data from Hong Kong Lawyer (1996–2016) and the annual reports of the Law Society of Hong Kong (1994–2016).

Drawing on data from two empirical projects concerned with local authority enforcement of standards in the private rented sector, this article argues that there are signs of greater use of formal enforcement approaches, and that these approaches are increasingly ‘hardline’. This finding runs counter to the existing scholarship on regulatory enforcement, which emphasizes securing compliance over formal enforcement. Securing compliance is also integral to the regulatory guidance in this sphere of activity. Further, in the context of cuts to local authority funding and greater local authority demand for private rented stock to meet household needs, the shift to hardline approaches requires explanation. Drawing on Keith Hawkins’ and Peter Manning's theory of legal decision making, which emphasizes consideration of the surround, the field, and the frame, the authors explain how changes to the field, in particular, have encouraged this shift.

This article scrutinizes the strategic legal and political actions taken by gender-critical feminist (GCF) scholars and activists aimed at curtailing protections afforded under existing equality law and criminal justice policies that safeguard transgender individuals against discrimination and victimization. Two prominent legal judgments are critically reviewed to highlight the phenomenon of crowdfunded litigation and to exemplify the ways in which the law can be (mis)used to shape public perceptions of trans identities and, consequently, how this impacts trans individuals’ full and equal participation in society. The subsequent analysis examines how the previous and current governments’ support of the GCF movement has led to newly proposed, and recently enacted, legislation and policies restricting trans rights and legal protections. The article concludes by reflecting on how these coordinated legal interventions detrimentally affect the emotional, physical, and social well-being of trans individuals, while simultaneously contributing to a broader political narrative aimed at dismantling protections against discrimination and victimization for all marginalized groups.

It has been an interesting feature of the response to the COVID pandemic that human rights scholars have produced comparatively little in the way of rigorous intellectual engagement with the various policies adopted around the world to stop or contain viral spread during the 2020–2021 period. It is as though events were of such an unprecedented, and at times even surreal, nature that scholars did not know quite what to make of them. Were lockdowns, vaccine passports, and the other restrictions on liberty given effect during that period consonant with human rights law – whether in spirit or in doctrine – or not? The result was a discombobulation that was itself highly revealing, in that it exposed a very old problem that sits at the bedrock of human rights law itself: the lack of clear conceptual grounds for the existence of human rights in the first place.

In this respect, Costas Douzinas’ States of Exception: Human Rights, Biopolitics, Utopia makes for emblematic, if frustrating, reading. It is one of the few book-length treatments of the post-pandemic state of human rights by a prominent theorist that actually seeks to engage with the events of that period in a sustained way. However, the result is confusion and, at times, a frankly indefensible lack of clarity and even (one uses this word with great caution in an academic book review) sloppiness.1 This in turn holds up for critical reflection, and exposes to interrogation, the old cliché that there seems to be rough agreement that human rights should exist, ‘on condition no one asks us why’.2 We do not have a clear idea about what human rights are really for, and as a consequence, at a moment of crisis, we flounder. The value of States of Exception is chiefly in revealing this basic problem – though, as we shall see, it raises some other important questions along the way.

The book defies easy summary; its author indeed more or less confesses to its disorganized quality in his introduction, attributing it to ‘media pressure’ and the ‘special conditions’ of the pandemic (p. 13). It is a peculiarly broken-backed text. In the first half, we find ourselves given tantalizing glimpses of a Foucauldian reading of the pandemic response, tying it together with the immigration and economic crises of the 2010s, which never fully materializes; in the second half, we discover ourselves in a sweeping series of ‘critical reflections on human rights’ that lacks a common thread. But I take a passage appearing towards the book's end (p. 235) to encapsulate its message in microcosm. In the course of a single paragraph, Douzinas tells us: ‘We can conclude that the demand for rights expresses certain types of individual need, lack or injury, and, at the same time, the intimacy of other-dependent subjectivity.’ However, he continues, ‘[t]he law cannot meet this demand’. The result is that ‘[w]e must criticise rights for their limitations, exclusions and sidelining of social justice’. At