Journal of Law and Society最新文献

Over the last decade, there has been an increase in civil compensation claims for sexual violence in the United Kingdom (UK). Given that trauma-informed approaches have been called for in relation to legal responses to sexual violence, we put forward seven key principles of trauma-informed lawyering in this context and draw on interviews with UK-based civil lawyers who represented sexual violence survivors to explore the extent to which trauma-informed work is taking place. While we found that our sample of lawyers typically had a very good knowledge of sexual violence and the trauma that it can cause, there was less certainty about how to accommodate the impacts in practice. Moreover, there was a tendency to prioritize individual healing and medicalize a form of social injustice. We conclude by emphasizing the need for legal training and education on a trauma-informed approach that accounts for the social and political dimensions of sexual violence and trauma.

Young people seeking asylum face many different forms of violence, including violent crime, yet their illegalization, as well as their experiences of police contact and border violence, often lead to reporting of crime not being perceived as a safe or viable option. But what are the experiences of those who, in spite of their fears, do attempt to engage with law by reporting crime? Drawing on in-depth interviews with Omid, Hussein, and Akram – three young men who have sought refuge in Sweden – this article examines their attempts to mobilize law as victims of crime at the intersection of restrictive migration controls and welfare exclusions. I argue that the legal consciousness of young people in this situation is shaped by the same legal structures that create the underlying conditions for their victimization as well as by other people's perceptions of how law operates in relation to their legal status. Relationships of trust, friendship, and support can aid engagement with the criminal justice system, yet such engagement often results in re-victimization instead of protection and a lack of meaningful remedies, reinforcing feelings of disenchantment with law.

Colombia's Atrato River and Amazon region were declared legal entities by Colombian judges in 2016 and 2018 respectively. This set the stage for a new era of environmental litigation in Colombia, in which a number of natural entities have been granted this status. In both contrasting cases, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) brought dramatic environmental harms to court through the special acción de tutela procedure, but did not claim a new ecocentric legal status for nature. This article asks how rights were collectively mobilized in the Atrato and Amazon cases and led to ecocentric judgments. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in 2020 with members of NGOs and grassroots organizations involved in these two cases, revealing the emergence of grievance collectives. Through the analysis of these qualitative data, we argue for a perspective that considers the interdependence of legal mobilization and the collective as a social relationship. Collective support led to the choice of an unconventional process. However, this supported the litigation collectives and resulted in ecocentric judgments that generated challenges for the associated collectives in the post-litigation phase. Thus, the analysis of legal mobilization and social relations in the collectives as interdependent improves the understanding of the shortcuts and detours through which complex conflicts have been presented in cases of environmental litigation, and helps to strengthen the scope and concepts of collective legal mobilization.

This article considers the regulation of menopause-related discrimination in the workplace. Many menopausal women experience profound workplace inequalities, often connected with the intersection of ageism and sexism. The United Kingdom Parliament's Women and Equalities Committee (WEC) recently recommended that the government consult about a new protected characteristic, ‘menopause’, and that Section 14 of the Equality Act 2010 (EqA) on dual discrimination be brought into force. The government has rejected these recommendations, asserting that menopausal women are sufficiently protected under the EqA's existing provision. This article presents an alternative perspective, arguing that there is insufficient legal protection from menopause discrimination, with it fitting poorly within age, sex, and/or disability discrimination, and there being no facility for intersectional claims. The WEC is correct: Section 14 should be implemented, ‘menopause’ should be a protected characteristic, and, beyond that, the EqA needs wider reform to provide greater protections from discrimination, beyond inflexible identity categories that fail to allow for complex intersecting structural oppressions.

On this, the occasion of its 50^th anniversary, we employ a quantitative analysis of the Journal of Law and Society (JLS) to chart empirically the evolution of socio-legal studies in the United Kingdom (UK). By tracing the influence(s) of the JLS upon the development of UK socio-legal research, not only do we demonstrate a new mode of exploring knowledge production in the field of socio-legal studies, but we also illustrate how computational methods can augment hermeneutical approaches to mapping socio-legal trends. Through (a blend of) three different analytical approaches – descriptive analyses of bibliographic metadata, text-linguistic analyses of a corpus of full-text articles, and network analyses of citation graphs – we generate comparative information about the JLS since its inception in 1974. We then employ this data to interrogate the JLS’ own narratives; using predictions, ambitions, and statements of intent made by Editor-in-Chief Phil Thomas published either within or regarding the JLS, we present a map of the journal's role within, impact upon, and enduring contribution to UK socio-legal studies. Finally, we discuss our results and propose future directions of the field.

This article is a contribution to the occasional series dealing with a major book that has influenced the author. Previous contributors include Stewart Macaulay, John Griffith, William Twining, Carol Harlow, Geoffrey Bindman, Harry Arthurs, André-Jean Arnaud, Alan Hunt, Michael Adler, Lawrence O. Gostin, John P. Heinz, Roger Brownsword, Roger Cotterrell, Nicola Lacey, Carol J. Greenhouse, David Garland, Peter Fitzpatrick, David Nelken, Lynn Mather, and Terence C. Halliday.