Journal of Law and Society最新文献

The ‘free enterprise’ system is a normative cornerstone of many Latin American political constitutions and a formative principle of neoliberal legality. However, the way in which this economic model shapes the legal field and conceptions of the rule of law remains understudied. Though lawyers, judges, and legal experts have played an important role in the legal buttressing of the free enterprise model, this article explores the shaping of neoliberal legality from the periphery of the juridical system. We argue that the rise of neoliberal legality in Latin America owes much to the legal imaginary crafted by business associations. In line with this, we examine the ‘norm entrepreneurship’ undertaken since the 1940s by an organization barely noted in mainstream histories of neoliberalism: the Inter-American Council for Commerce and Production (IACCP). Drawing on the concept of social constitutionalism and archival work, we investigate the IACCP's role in the struggle to give business activities social legitimacy and establish free enterprise as a socio-legal norm and a source of public law.

This article considers the use of human rights law as a resource for urban governance by African cities, thereby supplementing the growing literature on ‘human rights cities’ that has thus far focused on the experiences of cities in the Global North. It considers the motivations for and impact of human rights city initiatives, before taking a closer look at reported instances of rights invocation in and by African cities and pointing to factors that explain the seemingly limited traction of human rights law for urban local governments on the continent. The article shows that incomplete and politically contested devolution arrangements across African constitutional systems have combined with pressures pertaining to the domestic enforceability of socio-economic rights to structure a somewhat cautious and fraught, but nevertheless promising, relationship between local governments in African cities and human rights law.

This article analyses practices of pandemic time making that surrounded the imposition and communication of laws restricting daily life in parts of the United Kingdom in spring 2020. With colleagues, we commissioned a Mass Observation Project directive in summer 2020, asking contributors about their everyday experience of time during the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyse how legal temporalities emerge across 228 responses. Initially, law making seemed belated, missing the disruptive temporalities of the pandemic. Once they arrived, pandemic rules were sudden, changeable, and confusing. Mass Observation writers forged clusters of improvised practices – tactics of anticipation – to cope with these unsettling temporalities. Meanwhile, the Hansard Society, the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments, and legal commentators argued that ‘fast-track’ pandemic law making was error ridden, putting the public at risk of unwitting criminal liability. Attentive to ‘polyrhythmic’ temporalities operating across fields of experience and action, our study underlines the contradictory qualities of apparently resonant constructions of legal time.

Why do Chinese citizens file administrative lawsuits despite low expectations of winning or the possibility of political retaliation from suing the government? Drawn from the author's fieldwork interviews in 2019 with ordinary citizens who had had disputes with their administrators, this article argues that Chinese citizens’ desire to have their voices heard trumps these obstacles. That is, through lawsuits, people want to face their administrators and make their case. An administrative trial provides an opportunity for citizens to voice their discontent in the physical presence of administrators, unlike other dispute resolution methods available in China. Administrative litigants value this rare chance, even though the rulings are unlikely to be in their favour. By treating an administrative trial as a stage for citizens to stand up for themselves against the government, this article contributes to our understanding of political expressions under authoritarianism.

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, and Lynn Mather.

Violence, and the threat of violence, is a pervasive feature of women's lives. From high-profile threats in politics to everyday harms such as domestic abuse, violence, threat, and intimidation control women's behaviour and silence their voices. Yet in many cases the pernicious and harmful effect of threat is not captured by the law. Drawing on the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and empirical research undertaken in Northern Ireland, this article analyses the ways in which both objective and ‘incorporated’ social structures generate invisible forces of fear and threat that the law does not see, but that women feel and structure their lives around. The article develops the novel conceptual tool of ‘invisible threats’ to capture threat as harm, to show the relation between threat and gendered (in)securities, and to challenge institutions of the law to respond better to invisible threats as perceived and articulated by women.