This paper draws from the wrongful convictions of women to interrogate the limits of dominant conceptions of wrongful conviction. Most North American innocence projects turn on a conception of demonstrable factual innocence. The paper argues that this focus is problematic as a matter of criminal law principle and presents particular difficulties for women. The paper identifies that family violence forms the primary context for both the conviction of women for violent crimes, and for women's wrongful convictions. Taking two key examples of family violence – child homicide and intimate partner violence – we illustrate that the prevailing focus on demonstrable factual innocence fits awkwardly with identified wrongful convictions in these areas, and argue that this focus may deflect attention from unidentified miscarriages of justice. We suggest that focusing on factual innocence undermines the criminal justice system's proper focus on state responsibilities, including the responsibility to protect women and children from harm, and the asymmetric burden of proof that applies in criminal cases.

The largely unfettered realm of hardware and software code offers limitless possibilities in expanding the use and influence of information and communication technologies. As transcendent technologies they are unrestrained by the divergent equivalence of human categories of difference such as gender, race and class, or conceptual binary oppositions such as good/evil, happy/sad, freedom/oppression. Whilst a material grounding in earlier forms of embodied social experience remains an essential precondition of interaction with virtual systems, it is suggested that the virtual world is in the process of transforming the real world or, at least, subordinating it as slave to the machine world. This shift has fostered an imbalance of power between human and the posthuman, and consequently the epoch of the machine is often alleged to be both modern miracle and monster. Just as at a human level, rational thought processes restrain ideas which are unruly and require control, ICT advancements have proliferated to the point where these technologies also need to be classified, constrained where necessary, and diluted into the real world in real time. In this current climate of endless technological transformation, along with the growth of mass surveillance technologies together with the expansion of regulatory state powers, it is clear that any further innovations cannot be left to market forces without first considering the groundwork for the development of an appropriate monitoring mechanism. Before an appropriate set of regulatory mechanisms can be explicated, it is first necessary to consider the nature of the evolving transgressive human–machine relationship and the possible implications for humanity in the modern hypermediated world.

This paper proposes ‘inventive interventionism’ as a regulatory approach to incorporate substantive outcomes, stakeholder empowerment, effective disclosure and a global multi-stakeholder and multidimensional view of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and social disclosure. Inventive interventionism also applies new paradigms of regulation that recognise CSR as one of the proximate engineers of efficient public governance and ultimate sources of socio-economic development. The paper adopts a transnational and comparative approach to regulatory CSR and situates the voluntary and prescriptive approaches in the wider regulation debate. It draws on reflexive law, responsive regulation, institutional and other theories to demonstrate that existing CSR regulations in several jurisdictions are not representative of the law's multidimensional and multidirectional nature. Inventive interventionism reflects a functional approach to the law–CSR dialectic relationship and contributes to the development of an analytical framework for CSR and reforming its national and global regulatory environment.

The legal consciousness of citizens receiving the law has been extensively explored but little attention has been paid to the legal consciousness of individuals applying the law. This paper draws on interviews with forty government officials in the Refugee Review Tribunal of Australia to address this concern, analysing how government bureaucrats think about law. In doing so, it identifies a series of underlying ideals informing the officials’ legal identification narratives. It presents a heuristic that positions bureaucratic legal identification in relation to broader moral ideals, demonstrating that as government officials’ identification with law increases so too does their idealisation of intellect and information processing. Conversely, as the officials’ identification with law decreases, their idealisation of experience and truth verification increases. These findings provide new insights into how law works in government, revealing bureaucratic legal identification as structured according to broader moral values, and thereby unearthing legal consciousness’ latent metacognitive dimension.

This paper explicates the relation between vagrancy and public disorder, a relation constituted by a dialecticism that is at once (dis)continuous and (dis)connected. This relationship is important not only to appreciate the place of public disorder vis-à-vis contemporary urban public space and social life, but historical vagrancy as well. The paper examines the refashioning of vagrancy, paying attention to the semantic legal reformatting of its constitution and how this process permits the regulation of essentially the same historical problems and concerns by translating them into legally sound language, visible in the shift from vagrancy to public disorder. This shift was necessary not simply to preserve the vestiges of vagrancy, now conspicuous in public disorder, but for the preservation of the images of, and imaginations about, Law, including its claims to justice. Loosely taking its cue from the visual culture movement which pays homage to the place of images in the ordering of the social world, the paper invokes (and, then, conflates) the concepts of image and imagination and explicates the manner in which the images of, and imaginations about, Law spearheaded the transmutation of the legal category of vagrancy by re-imagining the vagrant, a re-imagining which itself was the product not just of the Law's imagination, but, imaginations about the Law as well. The paper concludes by locating the place of the image and imagination to propounding a narrative of, and about, Law.

The issue of women serving as judges has been a contentious one in Egyptian society for nearly eight decades. While other Muslim majority countries started appointing women judges as early as the 1950s and 1960s, it was not until 2003 that the Egyptian government announced the appointment of its first ever female judge. Despite the approval of Egypt's religious scholars, her appointment was fiercely contested, among both the general public and the legal profession. In this paper we explore the question of why the appointment of women as judges provokes so much controversy in Egyptian society, and in the judiciary in particular. We show that the debate reveals a preoccupation with the proper place of women in society. With both traditionally educated religious scholars and people lacking formal religious training justifying their point of view by resorting to religious argumentation, the debate is also a clear example of the fragmentation of religious authority in Islam.

Attributing a great deal of attention to global and local knowledge, this paper is focused on law and society scholarship that has been published by Israelis, both Jewish and Arab-Palestinians. It attempts to unveil and to map some of the major issues that have characterised the scholarly debates and intellectual discourse, primarily critical questions on law and political power, the nation-state, legal rights discourse and equality. More specifically, the paper analyses socio-legal research on various local issues, such as multiculturalism and national rifts on the backdrop of the 1967 military occupation alongside the emergence of a neoliberal capitalist economy. The protracted Arab-Palestinian–Israeli conflict and the fragmentation of the political partisan map in Israel have incited more emphasis on the place of the Israeli Supreme Court, primarily sitting as a High Court of Justice, in public life as an important regulatory institution. This focus on the judicial power of the Court has resulted in an even more frantic controversy on whether the Court has become too engaged in political affairs. In all the law and society debates, local concepts and global knowledge have been intertwined. Hence, the paper enables scholars around the world to closely examine law and society scholarship on the convergence of local and global knowledge.