Journal of Law and Society最新文献

This article analyses the interprofessional dynamics of communication production in the criminal justice system. Through 26 in-depth interviews, we investigate the production of media information on prosecutorial work in Chile, tracking the relationships between internal communication agents, prosecutors, and external legal journalists. Previous scholarship has shown the success of police organizations in defining the content of crime communication based on asymmetrical power relations with the media. By contrast, our study reveals that legal journalists can bypass attempts to control the flow of information from the prosecutorial office and impose extra-organizational goals. Lawyers regularly dismiss the work of journalists, particularly those working as strategic communication advisors with prosecutors, but the asymmetrical relationship between the criminal justice agency and the media plays in favour of external legal journalists. Our article considers several explanations for this configuration, including interprofessional values, transactional relationships between journalists and prosecutors, and local legal culture.

A case study was conducted at a regulatory enforcement agency in the Netherlands to explore whether it might be affected by goal displacement and, if so, to gain insight into the possible causes of the phenomenon. The results indicate three distinct types of goal displacement, each of which appears to substantially impair the effectiveness of the agency in a specific way. It is argued that the combination of multiple, consecutive budget cuts imposed on the agency and a strong culture of output management have played a key role in generating goal displacement. In more general terms, the study shows the potential usefulness of a goal displacement perspective in investigating the effectiveness of enforcement agencies.

What roles do lawyers play when their own subaltern communities are mobilizing for justice? Drawing on the case of anti-eviction mobilization on the island of Al-Warraq in Egypt, this article investigates the infrastructural roles of community lawyers in grassroots movements. As their profession transformed into an underpaid and undervalued occupation, masses of lawyers became precarious professionals living subaltern lives. Living among the poor with the elite knowledge of the law enabled community lawyers to forge new relations between the grassroots and the elites, the streets and the courtroom, and farmers and the national media. Drawing on an ethnography of the movement, I posit that community lawyers operate as social infrastructures: liminal subjects in uncertain times, capable of generating new possibilities and social relations. As social infrastructures within their communities, they shape the opportunities for action, facilitating new modes of resistance while blocking others.

Over the course of the past 40 years, neoliberalism has all but destroyed the institutions that once civilized labour markets. In the wake of that destruction, labour law reform is being driven in some jurisdictions by a new kind of right-wing populist politics. What does this hold in store for work relations? Our investigation of contemporary labour law begins with a brief look backwards to the pre- and post-war decades and to the ostensible depoliticization of the law under neoliberalism. We then consider the possible emergence of a distinctly right-wing populist approach to labour law in countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Poland, drawing comparisons with the German experience after neocorporatism. Finally, we take a normative turn and consider what steps ought to be taken by a government intent on addressing class inequalities and restoring the kind of rights that post-war democracies once conferred on workers understood to be industrial citizens.

The article examines epistemic emotions as part of the emotive-cognitive processes of prosecutors’ knowledge seeking and decision making in preliminary investigation and court proceedings. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and shadowing of prosecutors in Sweden, we show how emotions motivate and orient prosecutors’ inquiries and the fundamental role of the ‘certainty–doubt spiral’ for ‘doing objectivity’. In conclusion, we discuss the centrality of emotions for conscientious and well-considered decisions in legal work. The study contributes to the field of law and emotion by exploring the epistemic quality of emotions, notably the certainty–doubt spiral, in legal work.