Journal of Law and Society最新文献

Looking comparatively, the nature and extent of the accused's participation differ across jurisdictions, depending in part on how the roles and responsibilities of other legal actors are shared out. In France, the direct judicial questioning of the defendant ensures multiple opportunities for participation, yet it also compels a response, making silence almost impossible to maintain. Addressed directly and unshielded by legal representation, the accused is vulnerable to inadvertent self-incrimination. In England and Wales, the defence lawyer is expected to ensure the defendant's decisions and participation are informed and voluntary and that due process protections are assured. In practice, lawyers become complicit in the marginalisation of the accused in court proceedings and their inexorable processing towards a guilty plea. Looking forwards, it is the voices of suspects and defendants that are often missing from research as well as trials. This can pose ethical and access challenges for researchers, to which participatory or co-produced approaches may offer creative solutions.

Legal pluralism and decolonisation are global academic discourses and activist practices that emerge and intersect differently in different locations. In this paper, I draw upon and amplify some of the critical points made in Bharat Malkani's article with specific reference to the intersection of legal pluralism and decolonising practices in what is now known as Australia. Any analysis of legal pluralism in Australia needs to be accompanied by the acknowledgement of the chronological, ontological and ethical priority of the (already-plural) First Laws that are embedded in land–people relationships. The much more recently arrived Euro-colonial state-based law is dislocated from its heritage and place of origin in the northern hemisphere. Decolonising in this context means centring First Nations laws and, for those of us who inhabit a colonial positionality, it means developing a reflectiveness about our colonial genealogy as well as a much stronger understanding of place and more-than-human beings.

This article is written as a response to Flora Renz's ‘Gender (de)certification and the home: A new focus for feminist legal scholarship’? Renz's paper offers a thought-provoking critique of the contemporary role of gender categories within the home. This response is inspired by Renz's proposition that feminist legal scholarship has neglected the home as a site of gendered dynamics in regard to gender categories, and further that gender functions subtly and invisibly in the home. Drawing on a feminist legal analysis, this response offers an alternative premise that gender categories in the home operate explicitly and visibly, with material and ideological consequences for systemic inequalities.

The Journal of Law and Society (JLS) is nationally and internationally recognised for its ground-breaking contribution to shaping understandings of the relationship between law and society. We relished the opportunity to come together to reflect upon ‘participation’ and its relationship to criminal justice as part of the JLS 50th anniversary celebrations. In this paper, we examine the concept of participation from both a ‘socio’ and ‘legal’ standpoint, highlighting the intersection between the two, and explore the ways in which the theme of participation has been approached by existing JLS contributors. We do this by discussing the themes of doctrinal approaches to effective participation, access to justice, legitimacy, and procedural justice; and conclude by considering avenues for future research.

The paper comments on a presentation by Barbara Hughes-Moore at the occasion of a seminar series to celebrate the founding of the Journal of Law and Society. It draws on the metaphor ‘the law is dead’, ‘the law is alive’ used by Hughes-Moore, which reminds of Eugen Ehrlich's thoughts, the ubiquity of law and the place of socio-legal studies at or close to the heart of jurisprudence in the United Kingdom. Barbara Hughes-Moore speaks of the ‘gothic’ qualities of law. Law can be two things at once. The double-coding of communications forms a major insight into Niklas Luhmann's sociological systems theory. Law is many things and has become too complex to be fathomed as an entity. This has consequences for legal scholarship and may favour the socio-legal approach championed by the Journal of Law and Society.

The dominant decolonial approach in Adivasi studies and South Asian socio-legal studies is broadly and primarily rooted in a critical study of the British colonial rule, epistemologies, laws and institutions, as they are considered to be the roots of social, cultural, religious, legal and political challenges faced by post-colonial India. Therefore, in common vocabulary, the decolonial or decolonisation approach is synonymous with identifying and dismantling the legacies of colonial rule and epistemologies. This paper highlights the limitations of the dominant decolonial approach in relation to post-colonial discourses vis-à-vis categories of caste and tribe. I argue that the classification of social groups into caste and tribe has more to do with Brahmanical epistemology than colonial epistemology. Subsequently, drawing upon Adivasi oral narratives from the field, this paper argues that there is a need to look beyond the prevailing decolonial approach and consider a decolonial–debrahmanical approach to address the decolonial challenges in post-colonial India.

Artificial intelligence (AI) hiring systems (AHSs) are used by employers every day to screen and shortlist job candidates. Despite this, substantial gaps exist in our understanding of the real – as opposed to theoretical – risks of discrimination when these systems are deployed. This article reports on findings from qualitative empirical research investigating the use of AHSs by Australian employers. It demonstrates that the way in which these systems are operated in practice creates serious risks of algorithm-facilitated discrimination. This may arise from the data, the use of proxies, the system's implementation, new structural barriers, a failure to provide reasonable adjustments, or the facilitation of intentional discrimination. These findings are significant, make an original contribution to an emerging field of research, and are relevant in any jurisdiction where an AHS is in use. There is a lot at stake when such discrimination occurs; as one research participant acknowledged, a ‘job application is literally a person's attempt to change their life with a new job’.