Journal of Law and Society最新文献

The use of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to analyse the structure of legal texts is a fast-growing field. While much attention has been devoted to the use of these techniques to predict case outcomes, they have the potential to contribute more broadly to research into the nature of legal reasoning and its relationship to social and economic change. In this article, we use recently developed NLP and ML methods to test the claim that judicial language is systematically shaped by economic shocks deriving from the business cycle and by long-term trends in the economy associated with technological change and industrial transition. Focusing on cases decided under the Anglo-Welsh poor law between the 1690s and 1830s, we show that the terminology used to describe the right to poor relief shifted over time according to economic conditions. We explore the implications of our results for the poor law, the theory of legal evolution, and socio-legal research methods.

Application forms – the most mundane of documents – are often the compulsory interface between an individual and the state. From social security and immigration, to health and social care, application forms are ubiquitous across almost all areas of government bureaucracy. However, socio-legal research on administrative justice tends to examine these forms from the perspective of front-line decision makers, instead of form fillers. Drawing on a survey experiment with 655 recipients of Universal Credit (a means-tested social security benefit) in the United Kingdom, we demonstrate how the inclusion of space for personal narrative in a local welfare application form – the ability to set out one's circumstances in full – significantly increases perceptions of procedural fairness. Our findings demonstrate how seemingly small changes to form design can have a considerable impact on the perceived fairness of an application process and the importance of grounding administrative justice research in the experiences of people who regularly interact with the administrative processes of the state.

This article examines the ‘sovereign citizen’ and ‘freemen on the land’ movements and the operation of ‘pseudolaw’. Against a predominant judicial, governmental, and academic approach that portrays sovereign citizen beliefs as ‘irrational’ and ‘nonsensical’, I argue that such beliefs should be understood in terms of conflicts within the socio-historical production of ‘legitimate’ knowledge across the public sphere and popular culture. Conspiratorial sovereign citizen beliefs articulate, albeit very problematically, social concerns and suspicions in relation to transnational economic, political, and legal power. Further, such beliefs should be understood within the context of the rise to prominence and contemporary normalization of neoliberal, authoritarian populism, and a discourse of ‘inverted oppression’. Through this, a range of anti-egalitarian, ethno-nationalist, and racist beliefs are hidden behind and justified via a conspiratorial worldview that uses a supposedly ‘neutral’ pseudolegal rhetoric to defend individual liberty against a perceived social reality constituted by ongoing and extreme oppression.

Most scholarship on human mobility in the context of COVID-19 border restrictions is either doctrinal or focuses on health and wellbeing. This article adds to the limited research on COVID-19 border restrictions’ socio-political implications by uniquely investigating how these laws and policies affected experiences and conceptualizations of citizenship. I take Australia as a case study because it implemented some of the world's strictest COVID-19 border laws. This qualitative, interview-based study brings the citizenship and legal consciousness literatures into conversation and makes contributions to both fields. The article extends theories exploring the sentimental and existential aspects of citizenship by examining loss of citizenship as a sensation as opposed to a legal reality. The study also provides new angles on debates about ‘legal alienation’ as a distinct form of legal consciousness.

Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey's recent auto-critique invited legal consciousness scholars to develop their analyses of legal hegemony in the context of collective sites of legality construction and the contestation of the hegemony of state law. Trade unions provide a particularly apposite group and institutional site to study such processes. From a Marxist perspective, recent labour law scholarship has argued that union engagement with law reproduces liberal legal hegemony by depoliticizing domination and disciplining the individual and collective consciousness of workers and unions. First, we argue that critical legal consciousness research (cLCR) can nuance this Marxist perspective via its insights about polyvocality and legal pluralism. Second, we argue that cLCR relating to the relationship between counter-hegemonic projects and hegemony could be enriched by elements of the Marxist critique of labour law, albeit one that is committed to viewing theory as productive of hypotheses, rather than certainties, that should always be empirically investigated.

Distinct from a criminal justice investigation, which focuses on the retrospective attribution of responsibility and the imposition of punishment on a perpetrator of abuse, domestic homicide reviews (DHRs) involve a contextual exploration of the circumstances in which the death occurred, with a view to learning lessons that can facilitate improved safeguarding, agency engagement, and support provision. In this article, we report on an analysis of reviews completed in England and Wales in cases of domestic abuse-related suicide, and interviews with professionals and bereaved family members. We highlight challenges faced in relation to facilitating voice and participation, encouraging critical reflection and accountability, and ensuring implementation and prevention. With the DHR regime under review in England and Wales, and a focus on its applicability to deaths by suicide, we reflect on lessons that might be learned from other processes where efforts to cultivate a ‘just’ rather than a ‘blame’ culture have also been made.