Journal of Law and Society最新文献

The proliferation of autonomous and semi-autonomous systems (AS) poses important and pressing regulatory challenges. Underpinning these is the recognition that many different stakeholders will need to trust systems to ensure their effective adoption and implementation. However, research on stakeholder perspectives is lacking, and assessing trustworthiness is difficult due to ‘responsibility gaps’ where it is unclear where responsibility for harms arising from AS ought to lie. Bridging these gaps is important because holding one another responsible is how social trust is maintained, and trust is vital to unlocking the promise that AS hold. This article considers how the concept of answerability could provide a useful framework for boosting the trustworthiness of AS. We present findings from a series of stakeholder interviews identifying what answers different stakeholders need to trust AS in health, finance, and government applications, and consider the implications of our research for current proposals for regulating AS in the United Kingdom and the European Union.

This article offers co-production as a new methodology for relational approaches to legal consciousness studies that allows for deeper analysis of and engagement with the everyday experience of law. We argue that the inherent relationality of co-production has the potential to both expose and change legal consciousness. As an approach that equalizes status in the co-production of knowledge, social structures and hierarchies are reproduced in real time, allowing the relational networks through which legal consciousness is formed to emerge. We demonstrate both the possibility and the value of this approach through a discussion of early findings from a co-produced project focused on accessible legal information for disabled people with cognitive impairments. Our emerging data show that disabled people's experience as ‘outsiders’ in their communities, and the barriers to justice that they encounter through being not believed or information being given in inaccessible formats, creates uncertainty and distrust of the utility of legal professionals as routes for resolution – even as they express a desire for formal legal process. These data also show that engaging with co-production work can increase the legal confidence of people from marginalized groups.

Between 2015 and 2023, authoritarian backsliding triggered significant changes in the Polish judiciary, prompting some judges to adopt a new approach in their interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights, both on and off bench, taking a more explicit stance as individual applicants against the Polish government in the European Court of Human Rights. This article employs the paradigm of relational legal consciousness, attributing this embrace of human rights law to judges’ interactions and relationships with various actors, including judicial associations, lawyers, human rights activists, and civil society. Furthermore, the article extends the concept of relationality in legal consciousness to encompass the intricate interplay between law and politics as intertwined social relations and practices. The article's original contribution lies in theorizing judicial legal consciousness in relation to authoritarian backsliding and the resultant liminality of structures and strategies for action.

A focus on rights consciousness has become a mainstay of the socio-legal study of law in everyday life. Such research, much of it critical in orientation, generally uses people's sense of grievance as its starting point. The consequent risk is that we elide rights consciousness with a sense of injustice. This article argues that there is merit for critical studies of legal consciousness in keeping these two things separate, and that this represents a dimension of the critical approach to rights consciousness that is largely missing from the field. We present a study of rights consciousness in relation to the imposition of lockdown in the United Kingdom during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. We show that, despite regarding lockdown as a violation of basic rights, most people did not feel a sense of grievance. Furthermore, rights consciousness was influenced by a range of factors distinct from political orientation, most of which were within the sphere of governmental influence. In this way, governmental power was constitutive of the public's rights consciousness. Further exploration and assessment of when, where, and how this might occur should be part of the critical project of legal consciousness research.

Legal pluralism scholarship has argued that co-existing legal orders interact. Individuals draw on exogenous norms to strategically resist social and legal constraints. Integrating the concepts of ‘situated legal consciousness’ and ‘interlegality’, I explore how identities within intersecting legal orders influence legal consciousness. To this end, I draw on a case study of the plurality in marriage laws among British Muslim communities in England, where Islamic nikah ceremonies are not by themselves recognized as marriage. My analysis shows that marginalized individuals routinely rely on interlegality to make sense of their realities and choices. This engenders a ‘double vision’, as individuals perceive their identities, social arrangements, and the law through an integrated lens of intersecting laws. They resist the social locations to which they are relegated in plural legal orders and reposition themselves within these with the aid of a composite identity that allows them to see their lifeworlds through a double vision of the law.

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.