Journal of Law and Society最新文献

Asylum seekers arriving in Belgium are confronted with increasing legal restrictions and criminalizing discourse. As a result, many individuals must rethink their migration projects. How do asylum seekers rationalize intrusive regulations and maintain faith in the legitimacy of the law despite experiencing setbacks? Drawing on qualitative data from interviews with 17 asylum seekers in Belgium and participant observation in a reception centre, this article demonstrates how, despite negative experiences with the law, asylum seekers continue to associate legality with promises of protection, fair treatment, and recognition. Even when the law falls short of these ideals, they employ cognitive frameworks to uphold the legitimacy of the legal system. By shedding light on the cognitive strategies that asylum seekers use to reconcile negative experiences with their normative expectations regarding legality, the article demonstrates how legal hegemony is reinforced by the perspective of the group that it disadvantages the most.

Mentally ill defendants are regularly sentenced to death in Texas, the leading executioner in the United States. In this article, I explore the reasons for this phenomenon by analysing the arguments developed by prosecuting attorneys in capital punishment trials involving defendants who advance insanity or diminished capacity claims but are, nonetheless, sentenced to death. Based on the analysis of 27 trial transcripts spanning the past 100 years, I argue that one of the reasons for the phenomenon is that Texan prosecutors use anti-intellectual arguments that, by appealing to jurors’ scepticism of psychiatric expertise and populist approach to mental illness, discredit the mental disability evidence presented by the defence, encouraging the imposition of death sentences. Finally, I identify three cultural traits that help to explain why these anti-intellectual sentiments are so pronounced in Texan proceedings and why they seem to correlate with the regular imposition of death sentences.

This article rejects the traditional dichotomy between rationality and feeling in law and legal practice. Drawing on law and emotion scholarship, it uses a qualitative research project involving clients, lawyers, and advisers to question the standardized view that emotion has no place in legal casework. It argues that interpersonal factors – such as trust and reassurance, adviser commitment, emotional support, empathy and sympathy, and emotional accessibility – have an instrumental impact on legal work. It develops this argument further by comparing the relational elements of telephone-only and in-person lawyer–client interaction. It considers how these modes of delivery differ at an interpersonal level and explores the possible implications for clients, lawyers, and legal practice of any emotional dissimilarities between telephone-only and face-to-face services. This analysis concludes that the potential for greater emotional engagement as a result of in-person contact may have significant advantages for clients with more complex needs and/or cases.

The focus of this paper is to challenge the boundary demarcation between socio-legal and critical legal studies. Through identifying and interrogating similarities and divergences, this paper argues that it would be more productive to work along the permeated border between the two, towards a critical socio-legal scholarship. This article will argue how critically, socially and interdisciplinary engaged scholarship challenges separations and divisions, which motivates agency and participation needed for a progressive approach to researching law and legal cultures.

This reflection is a response to an intervention by Barbara Hughes-Moore about the impact of the humanities on scholarship about law published by the Journal of Law and Society during its 50 years of operation. Barbara's resort to the gothic imagination in her survey is firmly planted within the cultural turn in the wider domain of the social sciences. From this point of departure, my focus is more specific: to consider the impact of the visual turn on the work published in the journal.

This contribution celebrates the 25th anniversary of the publication in this journal of an era-defining debate between Roger Cotterrell and David Nelken. It reads the debate as the product of the communicative turn in legal theory, the absorbing and productive nature of which many of us – including the present author – are in danger of forgetting as our work tilts towards today's turns of choice. At the same time, the critical distance afforded by the turn away from communication makes visible underlying commitments and patterns that were less apparent a generation ago.

In this paper, I provide reflections on the continuing value of the Cotterrell–Nelken debate within law and society research. Specifically, I pick up on two discussion points that animate this debate. First, the debate quintessentially probes the identity of the discipline of the sociology of law. In this regard, it is very much concerned about how the boundaries of a discipline are formed. I reflect on how this issue continues to persist across law and society research, as questions on the boundary formation and dissolution of different concepts and categories are ubiquitous and an animating feature of the field. Second, I reflect on how lurking behind the questions raised by the debate are political considerations that structure legal and socio-legal analysis. The Cotterrell–Nelken debate raises vexing questions on what law is and what law ought to be, without clearly resolving them. Indeed, any resolution seems futile and instead points to the political choices that underpin different understandings of the law and its relationship to other social scientific fields. Across law and society research, vexing questions about the nature and function of law within specific settings may relate to political choices that receive inadequate scholarly attention. Law and society research would thus benefit from an agenda that places the politics underlying different legal discourses into plain view.

These brief comments revisit my side of the argument in the so-called Cotterell–Nelken debate in the light of responses from two younger scholars. I suggest that the debate presupposed a considerable level of shared commitment to studying sociology's relationship to law, together with some disagreement about what was required for sociology of law to be truly reflexive about the limits of its own intellectual resources.

Amongst the valuable points made by the commentators on our debate is the idea that Cotterell's concern was more to understand the role of the various participants who make and use law, whereas Nelken was more interested in exploring how discourses reproduce themselves. Going forward, I suggest that there is considerable scope for bringing these concerns together through empirical research into the various ways legal institutors and procedures embrace or reject ‘scientific’ forms of expertise, including those generated by the social sciences.

Flora Renz's paper ‘Gender (de)certification and the home: A new focus for feminist legal scholarship?’ draws attention to instances in which the question of gender (de)certification is relevant to the private sphere. This response to Renz's paper reflects on the fact that gender categories remain highly salient in the ‘private’ realm of family law, despite the formal gender neutralisation or decertification found in legislation and judicial decisions in this field. It goes on to problematise the public/private distinction itself and to highlight the rich vein of feminist scholarship which has argued that the ‘private’ functions as a zone in which non-state normativities often flourish unexamined to the detriment of women. Rather than unquestioning acceptance and/or ideological deployment of the gender and public/private binaries, it argues for a more nuanced understanding of both and of the interrelationships between them.

This short article reviews research on the sociology of labour law and the economy, highlighting, in the final paragraph, research of that nature that has been published in this journal. As a supplement to Sabine Frerichs’ more general reconstruction, in this issue, of how different generations of socio-legal thinking have dealt with matters of law, economy and society, it briefly sketches the theorising and analysis of the economy in labour law scholarship, from the beginning of the 20th century until today.