Journal of Law and Society最新文献

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.

In this article, we use the concept of epistemic othering to describe the subjectivation of people who experience debt problems in the legislative drafting process, and argue that the evidence-based policy paradigm, together with its participatory dimension, produce a potentially harmful subject position for people who are considered vulnerable and irrational. By analysing the preparatory material of Finnish interest rate cap laws, we explore what is constructed as rational and possible in the legislative process, and how these modalities frame the use of expert knowledge. We argue that what is considered rational is constructed in terms of market logic, and what is construed as possible is heavily framed by law-as-knowledge. Together, market logic and law-as-knowledge form the preconditions for the use of expert knowledge. Ultimately, the way in which these three types of knowledge interact contributes to the epistemic othering of people who experience debt problems.

This Special Supplement of the Journal of Law and Society builds on the success of the Special Supplement Societal Constitutions in Transnational Legal Regimes, which was published in 2018 and focused on non-political societal constitutions and their transnationalization and globalization. This current volume revisits political constitutions and their recent societal evolution and transnationalization. It explores the societal evolution of political constitutions beyond the traditional semantics and structures of state and national institutions and imaginaries.

Individual contributions use interdisciplinary and socio-legal methods to examine political constitutions and constitutionalism in supranational, transnational, and international constellations. They focus on methodological modifications in constitutional theory as much as reconceptualizations of its classic concepts, especially polity, identity, citizenship, and the public sphere and its reason, deliberation, and mobilization.

Relations between transnational polities and legal networks are examined in individual articles to highlight the role of non-political constitutional regimes in political institutions and constitutional settlements. Classic notions of republicanism, democracy, legitimacy, sovereignty, freedom as non-domination, and social justice are analysed beyond nation states because the impact of their transnationalization on practical politics cannot be underestimated as the current critical state of the European Union (EU) illustrates in the most persuasive way.

Public and private constitutional regimes, conflict of laws, and the relationship between political and economic constitutions are discussed in both general theoretical and specific international, European, and national contexts. The EU's political legitimacy depends on a strengthening of market governance and economic constitutionalism. Nevertheless, the societal strength of its economic constitution is matched by the weakness of its political legitimacy. The common market was originally expected to facilitate the common good of a transnational European polity, yet this political benefit of the EU's economic constitution has been significantly questioned in recent decades.

The transnationalism of current political constitutions is also discussed in the context of plurinational statehood and its regional and sub-national political, administrative, and cultural units. The EU's transnational democratic failings are not only consequences of the democratic deficit at the EU level but, much more importantly, of a democratic disconnect at the member state level. The urgent need for democratic reconnection, therefore, applies to the relationship between the EU and its member states as much as between constitutional bodies of national politics and sub-national institutions.

The volume opens with Richard Bellamy's article ‘Political Constitutionalism and Populism’. Using the metho