This paper compares two judgments of constitutional courts (French and German) assessing the constitutionality of statutes concerning veil-wearing and focuses on the underlying conceptions of ‘living together’. This means that what is actually compared is the self-understanding of the respective majority in the two societies as stated in the decisions. This is done by disassembling the concept of ‘living together’ into three elements: the notion of the individual, the meaning of belonging to the national community and the space accorded to religion in public. Each section of this paper examines one of these elements as they are entailed in the judgments and positions them critically within the respective legal cultural and historical contexts. The main aim of this paper is methodological in nature and is namely to show how comparative legal cultural studies can avoid essentialisation and rather highlight the complexity of every cultural context.

While access to civil-law institutions has been a traditional area of socio-legal research, access to administrative justice still constitutes an underresearched field. In the field of administrative law, public ombuds institutions represent an important pathway to resolve disputes without invoking a court. To date, we have little knowledge about who uses these ombuds institutions and which factors facilitate access to the ombuds. In this paper, on the basis of our survey among users of the Austrian Ombudsman Board (n = 8,274), we explore the effects of institutional design on the user population. The findings suggest that the two outreach measures – regular consultation days and a weekly TV broadcast – contribute to reducing existing inequalities with regard to users’ sociodemographic characteristics.

World War II genocide in Germany, the Rwanda genocide in the early 1990s and the Darfur genocide today are visceral reminders of the devastation and senselessness in the breakdown of human order, a poignant but sad insight into the nature of man and politics. Yet the international community, and by extension the United Nations (UN), have shown a remarkable reluctance to address rape and other forms of gender violence perpetrated during militarised conflicts. Given the psychological toll and devastating effect of rape and the growing number of conflicts, this effort does not speak well to the UN’s commitment to problems that destabilise international peace. It does however raise concerns in the minds of those who see the UN as cherrypicking which conflicts to address while sidestepping others until it is too late. With a view to the Allies’ response to genocide during World War II, this article argues that the realist analytical framework of world politics provides the most plausible basis for explaining variations in international response in militarised conflicts such as Rwanda and Darfur. We present testable hypotheses to conclude that while rape in itself may not be the sole trigger for interventions, states with unstable regimes or sovereign capacity whose government has been deposed are more likely to be the object for interventions or held accountable than those with otherwise stable governments who benefit from the support of a hegemonic power. To victims of crimes of rape caught in militarised conflicts, and to whom justice may come only after a perpetrator regime has been deposed, the conclusion that the decision to intervene is predicated more on political might than justice is disquieting.

Drawing primarily from qualitative interviews conducted between 2017 and 2018, this empirical study tells a granular story of how legal actors mobilised during the Lawyers’ Movement in Pakistan (2007–2009) from the perspective of lawyer-leaders who organised, steered and sustained support for the Movement through rapidly shifting political conditions. By underscoring the contribution of lawyer-leaders in empowering judges, the article seeks both to displace uncritical assumptions and arguments about courts as the nucleus of legal mobilisation in Pakistan, and to highlight the crucial role of political parties in the restoration of the judiciary against the backdrop of disintegrating lawyer-judge coalitions. Given Pakistan’s political context of a ‘hybrid regime’, the article reflects on the unsuitability of the ‘legal complex’ theory of ‘political liberalism’ for analysing and understanding the Movement, and locates it instead in the literature on legal mobilisation in authoritarian regimes.

Formality and informality in housing is a continuum, rather than an either/or proposition, with many examples along the continuum. This paper focuses on three examples of housing solutions – Barbados tenantries, Mexican ejidos and Saint Lucia family land – which are situated at the fulcrum of the continuum, at the point where it tips from formality to informality, and attempts to unravel their formal and informal elements. While the starting hypothesis was that each is informal from a public law point of view but formal from a private law one, closer examination suggests that their private law aspects are more nuanced than first appeared.

This paper examines the rise of algorithmic systems – that is, systems of data-driven governance (and social-credit-type) systems – in the form of ratings systems of business respecting human rights responsibilities. The specific context is rating or algorithmic systems emerging around national efforts to combat human trafficking through so-called Modern Slavery and Supply Chain Due Diligence legal. Section 2 provides a brief contextualisation of the problems and challenges of managing compliance with emerging law and norms against forced labour and, in its most extreme forms, modern slavery. Section 3 examines the landscape of such algorithmic private legal systems as it has developed to date in the context of forced labour ratings systems. There is a focus on the connection between the power to impose the normative basis of data analytics and the increasingly tightly woven-in connection between principal actors in this endeavour.

Studies exploring the link between the representation of judges, photography and mass media tend to focus on the appearance of cameras in courtrooms and the reproduction of the resulting photographs in the press at the beginning of the twentieth century. But more than fifty years separate these developments from the birth of photography in the late 1830s. This study examines a previously unexplored encounter between the English judiciary and photography that began in the 1860s. The pictures where known as ‘carte de visite’. They were the first type of photographic image capable of being mass produced. It is a form of photography that, for a period of almost twenty years, attracted a frenzy of interest. Drawing upon a number of archives, including the library of Lincoln's Inn, London's National Portrait Gallery and my own personal collection this paper has two objectives. The first is to examine the carte portraits of senior members of the judiciary that were produced during that time. What appears within the frame of this new form of judicial portraiture? Of particular interest is the impact the chemical and technological developments that come together in carte photographs had on what appears within the frame of portraits. The second objective is to examine the manner in which they were displayed. This engages a commonplace of scholarship on portraiture; the location and mode of display shape the meaning of what lies within the frame of the picture. Carte portraits were produced with a particular display in mind: the album. They were to be viewed not in isolation, but as part of an assemblage of portraits. Few albums survive. Those that do offer a rare opportunity to examine the way carte portraits of judges were used and the meanings they generated through their display. Three albums containing carte portraits of judges will be considered.

There is a deep, if invisible conflict between our consumer culture and our democratic ideals. It is the result of social processes that, in the last half century, have profoundly transformed how we live and who we are. This paper explores the underpinnings of the condition that many identify as ‘late’ or ‘post’ modernity. Rather than focusing on the intellectual transformations wrought by the Enlightenment, it takes up Charles Taylor’s dialectical account of the relation between the social developments of modernity and changes in social understandings. It then considers the nature and import of our contemporary practices and conditions, their relation to the ‘postmodern’, and their implications both at home and abroad for the ability to sustain meaningful democracies under conditions of globalisation.

understanding law-making requires coming to grips with cognitive schemas, practical wisdom of agents involved in the production of law, as agents may interpret or apply the law according to socially accepted mental schemas developed as a result of socialisation in families, schools, universities and other social settings or in the course of exchange in professional settings. a case study on the conduct of officials of the european commission seeks to illustrate this point. this looks at tacit understandings regulating the conduct of officials of the european commission, engaging in the production of a legal proposal or in the implementation of a legal measure. such interaction may be successful, or less successful, depending on how contentious a legal file is, but is underlined by certain understandings, particular norms of conduct, as to how things are get done. in uncovering shared understandings, the article looks at modes of co-operation in working parties and shared files, promotion procedures, mobility, and how reputation is valued and acquired. the thesis advanced is of important cognitive schema, anthropological category of praxis, regulating the law-making process inside the european commission is compromise.

In its 2005 Household Survey, Statistics South Africa counted 143,167 children living in child-headed households. The increased numbers of such households is usually ascribed to the death of parents from AIDS, and researchers expect them to increase further in the future. Similar household formations are also found in other Southern African countries such as Zimbabwe, Botswana, Uganda, Lesotho and Tanzania. Although the research indicates that children living in child-headed households usually experience emotional trauma, poverty and problems with accessing education, health care and social welfare grants, the consensus amongst children’s advocates and academics is that placing all such children in institutions, foster homes or adoption is not currently a viable or an optimal solution. The existence of child-headed households and the urgent need to assist children living in them exposes the inadequacy of several common law legal concepts and paradigms. This paper explores some practical and conceptual arguments for assigning family status to child-headed households and for awarding legal capacity to the minors who head these households.

Several noted legal scholars, most prominently Richard Posner, have applied the economic analysis of law to the debate over same-sex marriage. In this note, I argue that the economic approach to law is ill-equipped to deal with the issues of principle, dignity and rights that are at the core of the debate, regardless of the position taken on the issue. Other scholars, such as Darren Bush, acknowledge the shortcomings of the economic approach, such as the importance of the assumptions on which cost-benefit analysis is made, but they do not appreciate that this is symptomatic of the economic approach as a whole, not merely the application of it by some scholars in some cases. My contention is that the economic approach to law is appropriate regarding issues of policy, where trade-offs are essential and necessary, but not regarding issues of principle, with which trade-offs are not so easily made.

This paper follows collegiality, demonstrating how, as a central value of medically trained coroners, it can shape the content of death investigations and certificates. Drawing on ethnographic evidence from a 16-month-long study of the Office of the Chief Coroner (OCC) of Ontario, Canada, I argue that collegiality is an instrument of trust that both affords investigators tremendous access to information, and severely limits the flow of that information into the public domain that the OCC serves. The paper focuses on in-care death investigations, which are those where the OCC's medically qualified coroners find themselves investigating the quality of care delivered by professional colleagues. I show how professional expertise, experience and collegial values often combine to see instances of poor or even incompetent care dealt with privately (rather than publicly) or referred up the medical (rather than public safety) hierarchy. The burden of my argument is that collegial deference to the autonomy and skills of other physicians tends to see coroners expurgate the death certificates they produce. These expurgations obscure competence issues from public view and reduce the accuracy of the certificates. I close with a discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of medically qualified death investigators, as well as potential adjustments to improve the accuracy of in-care death investigations and certifications.

In this paper, we adopt an experimentalist approach to determining the content of international human rights for assessing national mandatory work programmes for recipients of social assistance (MWPs). This approach implies going back and forth between law and experience in order to determine the better way to secure human rights in an ever-changing environment. After having identified six criteria for evaluating MWPs in the soft case-law of international bodies, we confront this emerging international human rights framework with an empirical study on MWP practices in the Netherlands. This confrontation reveals that specific aspects of the capability for voice of working welfare recipients are absent in the human rights framework and that the framework is not gender-neutral. Including these aspects, we construct an experimentalist human-rights-based instrument that is suitable for evaluating national MWPs.

This issue of the journal includes the first article to be published in an exciting new section entitled ‘Law in other contexts’. This section is dedicated to making available specially commissioned reports of socio-legal research in places where English is not the first language. In this way the journal hopes to bring attention to work which may not be easily accessible to those without knowledge of the relevant language (and culture). It is also hoped that this may – eventually – make some contribution to putting into question the Anglo- American hegemony over how this academic field is constituted, which questions are considered important to ask, and which methods are thought appropriate for studying them. Articles will be included regularly in issues of the journal as they become available. Potential authors from a variety of jurisdictions have already been contacted (and others will be contacted in the future).

QUALIS is a research project that studies ‘the other side of courts’ by looking at the working conditions of judicial professions in Portugal and their impacts on the profession, health, family and personal life. The objective of this article is to provide an overview of the results obtained, based mainly on the interviews and the online questionnaire administered to the Portuguese judicial professions (judges, public prosecutors and court clerks). The questionnaire was sent to all professionals (more than 10,000) working in the courts and had a good response rate; the interviews were conducted among the three judicial professions. The article focuses on three main dimensions of working conditions, namely physical environment, working time and work intensity, and work/social environment of professionals working at first instance courts. It will make then a further analysis of their impacts in the health and well-being and in the work-family conflict of the judicial professionals.

Ferrari's book is a welcome addition to the still limited literature on the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) experience which, unlike any other specific response to a disease, played an important role in reshaping modern governance and consolidating key assumptions about the world around us. The ‘mad cow’ crisis began in 1986 when the unfathomable bovine brain disease was identified, but was then reignited with the shocking discovery a decade later that it could pass, and had passed, to humans despite the controls put in place. Scientific confirmation in 1996 that there was a human form of BSE led to political panic and further undermined the then exhausted Conservative Party rule. The retrospective lessons of the experience went far beyond agriculture. The problem was perceived to be one of openness and independence: perhaps government was too dependent upon lobbies and financial interests such as agriculture and, whilst utilising scientific advice, did not allow their independent voice to have influence. Less widely recognised, but even more importantly, the political lesson of the BSE experience was to henceforth tend to avoid being seen to downplay risk, based on the retrospective view that the danger could, and should, have been announced before it was scientifically confirmed. Better to overestimate even apparently limited risks than be caught again committing the now cardinal sin of downplaying them, or simply remaining silent. This is not so much a new-found principle of risk aversion as a variation on an age-old political truism of, above all, making sure that the next crisis is ‘not on my watch’.