Non-conviction-based (NCB) asset forfeiture is a relatively recent addition to law enforcement's armoury in the fight against organised crime in the UK. It allows for criminal assets to be forfeited to the State even in the absence of criminal conviction, the stated objective being to undermine the profit incentive of criminal activity. Until now, NCB asset forfeiture has principally been critiqued from a criminological point of view, specifically concerning the Packer models and the civil/criminal dichotomy – aside from this, however, it remains rather underdeveloped theoretically. This paper addresses this lack of legal theoretical engagement with NCB asset forfeiture by providing an initial contribution from a systems-theoretical perspective. This contribution makes use of systems theory's unique insights to critique the perceived ‘failure of law’ that gave rise to the NCB approach, and challenges the legitimacy of that approach in terms of procedural rights.

In this paper we explore one type of commons – town and village greens – which are an important feature of the rural and, increasingly, the urban, English landscape. Greens are an ancient form of commons, but they are increasingly recognised as having contemporary significance, particularly because of their potential to act as a reservoir for natural resources and their enjoyment. They are, in other words, emerging out of a ‘feudal box’. We focus on the fact that town and village greens are recognised in law by their association with a group of people defined by their physical proximity to the land which is to be registered. Although this does not in itself constitute a community, the law requires for the registration of land as a town or village green a certain degree of organisation and self-selection and this has in the past fostered both a sense of subjective belief in ‘belonging’, as well as exclusion (the rights of local people being potentially ‘diluted’ by the use of the land by those from outside the locality). As well as helping to produce and recognise community and community identity, then, commons may simultaneously produce the conditions for disassociation and exclusion. In this context, we consider how law defines and upholds notions of locality, and also the ways in which an increasingly powerful environmental discourse might be seen to challenge the primacy given to locality as a way of defining and creating greens and, more generally, the practical effects of this on how decisions are made about preserving these spaces as ‘common’. We consider the scope of the public trust doctrine as providing an example of how law is capable of accommodating ideas of shared nature and natural resources, in this case providing a form of public ownership over natural resources. Whilst our analysis is rooted firmly in the law relating to town and village greens in England and Wales, this body of law displays certain important features more broadly applicable to a range of other types of common land, and raises more general issues about how law supports certain interests in land, often to the exclusion of others.

While migration is a policy field that is fairly state-centric, the prominent role of the EU in the development of international migration law and policy has been acknowledged, to some extent, by the international community. This paper scrutinises the EU's role and impact during the preparatory and inter-governmental talks leading to the adoption of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM). A central question is the degree to which the EU influenced negotiations and their outcome; and how the international community received the EU's external action in this matter. Next to mapping the EU's substantive input shaping the process, the EU's internal machinery to formulate its position and the challenges faced within the bloc are also explored. The GCM process also illustrates the willingness of the international community – or the lack of it – to elevate European standards to the global level in the highly complex and politicised domain of migration.

The Hartian tradition of jurisprudence utilises linguistic philosophy to examine legal communications, most particularly those made by judges, and seeks to reach conclusions about the commitment of legal actors towards legal systems, the part played by morality, and what aspects of law involve the exercise of discretion. But this approach fails to take account of the nature of communication within modern society. If one approaches these issues through the application of communication theory, applying Niklas Luhmann’s concept of redundancy, our understanding alters radically. Systems theory explains how and why the communication resources available to legal actors are both limited and system specific. Whilst one can accept that actors use communications to achieve particular legal operations, one cannot attribute the meaning of these communications to their intentions, motivations or commitments. This conclusion and reasons for it change our understanding of long-standing and unresolved jurisprudential debates about the nature of judicial discourse.

The protection of Geographical Indications (GIs) is often conceived as a way to preserve cultural creativity embedded in a specific place. But can GIs be understood as a mode of cultural creativity in their own right? This paper tries to answer this question through a case-study which compares three specific GIs for wines in three different countries (Australia, Italy and Canada). By using an interpretative analysis based on narratives, the paper highlights how GIs are the protagonist of legal narratives in terms of cultural creativity and, at one and the same time, something extrinsic and intrinsic to a given social and productive environment, contributing to defining that same notion of place.

Ever since Evo Morales Ayma became Bolivia's first indigenous president in 2006 and the promulgation of a human-rights-enhancing Constitution (2009) thereafter, indigenous peoples’ rights were gradually recognised. Yet, with the increasing demand for natural resources, indigenous communities have been adversely affected by the state's neo-extractivist policies. While global indigenous rights norms protect their fundamental rights, legal-implementation processes in the country's lowlands reveal dilemmas in terms of the value of laws in practice as well as its reinterpretation on the ground. Namely, in the communities, different positions and camps have emerged in terms of the role and functions of participatory rights. Despite the potential of the latter in strengthening collective-rights regimes and self-determination, community leaders, advisers and other members report how such processes fracture and weaken decision-making mechanisms and human rights claims.

This article presents an empirical study of Jewish and Muslim women who go through divorce in Canada, drawing on a ‘left law and economics’ methodology. Religious law and family law have long been considered outside the market and, as a result, are more rarely accounted for in the law and economics literature. According to dominant narratives, religious family law is experienced by women either as an exceptional form of oppression or as a form of spiritual religious identity. In this article, I apply a ‘left law and economics’ approach to deconstruct these notions. On the basis of my socio-legal fieldwork with Jewish and Muslim women in three Canadian cities, I identify the background formal and informal legal rules, social norms and distributional practices that help produce asymmetric bargaining locations for women. I employ the economic language of costs/benefits to illustrate the ways in which religious parties bargain strategically upon divorce, although these market claims are surprisingly underrecognised by the legal system. Such empirical knowledge helps disenchant the idea that religious law is systematically used as punishing forces that make women worse off economically or morally inferior. It also allows for a distributive analysis which reveals how husbands and wives negotiate economic resources, desires and day-to-day decisions in all kinds of fair and unfair ways, flying in the face of conventional narratives surrounding women and religion.

This paper explores the role played by the International Labour Organization (ILO) in the consultations and stocktaking during 2017 and the negotiations during 2018 leading up to the adoption of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM). It examines selected parts of the text of the GCM, with particular reference to the ILO's mandate of securing social justice and decent work, as well as the protection of migrant workers and governance of labour migration. The final part of the paper looks ahead to the ILO's role in the implementation of the GCM, with specific reference to the Arab states region, where migration for employment is significant and the governance challenges, particularly in relation to the protection of low-wage and low-skilled workers, are especially acute.

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.

This paper identifies and engages with the social bodies emerging by virtue of the social turn in the life sciences and recent embodied approaches to social justice. Across these diverse domains, bodies are being narrated as shaped by and dependent on their environments. To explore this potentially important and productive convergence, we bring Martha Fineman's vulnerability theory into conversation with neuroscience and environmental epigenetics. We foreground significant intersecting concerns and argue that vulnerability theory – and other embodied models of social justice – is strengthened by taking embodiment seriously, including attending to the social turn in the life sciences. This can enhance the potential traction of these progressive theories. These in turn provide an alternative theoretical framework to the neoliberal lens through which neuroscience and epigenetics have hitherto been translated into policy and practice. We nevertheless acknowledge the potential limitations and dangers of the current biopolitical landscape.

This paper introduces a symposium on socio-legal studies and the humanities, justifying the originality of a dedicated special issue on this topic. The paper identifies and critically examines themes and problems in the literature before introducing the articles in the symposium and, finally, discussing areas for future research.

This paper uses legal consciousness to discuss the influence of Portuguese culture on women's perceptions of and reactions to domestic violence. It is based on an in-depth small-scale study of Portuguese women living in England, and proposes that culture is central in shaping their behaviour, regardless of whether they experienced violence or not. The cultural characteristics that influence women the most are analysed here under the themes of ‘familism’, ‘shame and community pressure’ and ‘acculturation’. These do not operate all at the same level and their influence can change according to structural and individual circumstances. As such, the paper suggests that immigrant women's perceptions of and reactions to domestic violence can only be fully understood by articulating national culture with other structural and individual variables; this will enable a multilayered and situated understanding of women's legality that avoids a simplistic attribution of their behaviour to national or ethnic provenance.

Drawing on ethnographic research across two street-level bureaucratic institutions in Istanbul, Turkey in the late 2010s, this paper traces the causes and implications of the politicisation of bureaucrats in the context of authoritarianisation. It argues that politicisation of bureaucrats cannot solely be taken as a reflection of the erosion of bureaucratic autonomy and capacity but must be explored further to reveal how bureaucrats cope with authoritarian pressure as well socio-legal destabilisations to preserve their institutional ethos. To this aim, I demonstrate how bureaucrats get politicised in response to authoritarian policies and, in turn, labour to uphold the rule of law despite politico-legal risks. The paper particularly focuses on how bureaucrats weave political solidarity and circulate anti-government discourses and how they use their knowledge of the legal-regulatory repertoire and archives to deter and ‘correct’ unlawful practices through their everyday work. The paper generates insights into the fashionings of political subjectivities and agency by bureaucrats through their labouring in the face of authoritarian interventions, legal disruptions and the increasing interactions with the citizenry. In doing this, my objective is to shed light on the everyday workings of authoritarian state and to get a better picture of the way the law is ‘made real’ (Latour, 2002) across mundane encounters between bureaucrats and the citizenry.

This paper undertakes a sceptical analysis of the significance for the protection of migrants’ rights represented by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 2030 and the UN Global Compact for Migration (GCM). Despite the positive view taken by many of these frameworks, I argue that, taken together, the SDGs and the GCM represent an acknowledgement of the failure of the international system of human rights protection to deal effectively with the protection of migrants’ rights. With particular reference to the UN Migrant Workers Convention, I argue that adoption of the GCM underscores a decisive shift from the realm of binding international law to soft law for the purposes of dealing with migrants’ rights. While acknowledging some of the signal benefits of this new regime, I highlight some of the many signs suggesting that these twin international developments do not guarantee progress on the road to the protection of migrants’ rights.

This essay seeks to shed some light on the portrayal of law and lawyers on television. Whilst it focuses principally on the British experience, it is written in the wake of American television’s extensive output and comments on these products. It indicates where the impetus for this work has come from and examines the changes in the portrayal of small screen lawyers. It notes the scholarship carried out in the United States and seeks to build on this pioneering work. It assesses the schemes used by the analysts of American TV law and notes their limited applicability to the British context. It constructs a typology of TV law programmes based on the development of distinctive styles of programming. This typology covers legal procedurals, legal dramas, legal comedies and legal reality shows. It notes the potential for analysis of the development of TV law programmes to shed light on areas such as the globalisation of culture and debates on legal education as well as on the nature and image of the legal profession and its socio-political function. It suggests that this process of mapping out the domain of small screen legal justice requires to be supplemented by detailed readings of the wealth of material which is revealed in the overview of the British experience and complemented by studies in other jurisdictions. It concludes that there seems to be a paradox at the heart of lawyer programmes. The dominant ethos of the vast majority of the material has been essentially reflective rather than refractive. The protagonists have been anti-establishment whilst the underlying trope has been the attainment of justice through the vehicle of the heroic lawyer.

This article sets out a sociological reconstruction of the constitution of the European Union (EU). Utilising a methodology derived from historical-functionalist sociology, it explains the distinctive court-led, judicial form of this constitution within a wide comparative-sociological framework, and it cites earlier examples of judicialised constitutions to elucidate the adaptive functions performed by judicial actors in the EU constitution. The article proposes a new method for analysing constitutions in general and that of the EU in particular, and it offers an encompassing sociological perspective for addressing the increasing preponderance of judicial institutions in contemporary democratic polity building.

The study of law and emotion is now established as a distinct field of study in its own right. In this respect, legal studies has shared in a wider ‘affective turn’ that has involved twenty-first-century social science in a new concern to explain the contribution of emotional feelings to human thought, motivation and behaviour. This development has been accompanied by a pronounced debate over how emotion should be rendered accountable within a rational frame of analysis. On the one hand, it is possible to portray this as being sustained by a movement to make us more emotionally literate and more sensitive to the ways people act and think through feeling. On the other hand, it might be interpreted as being rooted in a concern to make matters of emotion more amenable to rational discipline and the sanction of reason. In this paper, I contend that, where a focus is brought to the experience of ‘compassion’, the volume is raised on these conflicts of interpretation. I further argue that opposing and contested points of view on the experience and value of ‘compassion’ provide us with valuable insights into the wider dynamics of social and cultural change that have inspired the ‘affective turn’. These arguments are developed with reference to the social theories of Max Weber and Norbert Elias. Moreover, in taking note of Hannah Arendt's thinking on the cultural politics of compassion, I attend not so much to how the controversy of compassion might be resolved, but rather to its potential to awaken critical humanitarian concern. Compassion is hereby celebrated as an inherently ‘unstable emotion’ that brings debate to the condition and bounds of human care and social justice.

The spread of COVID-19 has seen a contest over health governance and sovereignty in Global South states, with a focus on two radically distinct modes: (1) indicators and metrics and (2) securitisation. Indicators have been a vehicle for the government of states through the external imposition and internal self-application of standards and benchmarks. Securitisation refers to the calling-into-being of emergencies in the face of existential threats to the nation. This paper contextualises both historically with reference to the trajectory of Global South states in the decades after decolonisation, which saw the rise and decline of Third-World solidarity and its replacement by neoliberalism and global governance mechanisms in health, as in other sectors. The interaction between these modes and their relative prominence during COVID-19 is studied through a brief case-study of developments in Kenya during the early months of the pandemic. The paper closes with suggestions for further research and a reflection on parallel trends within Global North states.

This paper examines the potential use and limits of Zweigert and Kötz's classical functional approach in comparative law for an empirical socio-legal research project. The project involves a comparison of the formal labour laws and informal norms and institutions which regulate restaurant work in the cities of Melbourne, Australia, and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The paper argues that the functional approach is a necessary but incomplete method for overcoming the many issues of comparability between the two research sites; the method requires both extension of its analytical steps and explicit explanation of its limitations.

This paper will evaluate the obstacles faced by victim-survivors of historical abuse, particularly victim-survivors of forced labour in Magdalene Laundries in Ireland and the stolen wages of Australian Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, in a post-colonial transitional justice framework. First, the paper identifies challenges in contextualising comparative interdisciplinary historical research in terms of transitional justice. Second, the paper considers the economic contribution of unpaid labour in the Australian and Irish contexts and, third, goes on to examine the historical denial of rights and redress in both settings. The paper then evaluates the different challenges in responding to legacies of historical abuse, especially unpaid wages in both states. A final section concludes with the argument that redress provided in both instances represents a form of paternalism perpetuating the colonial approach to governance, rather than the provision of the legal rights of citizens, and that this paternalism has specific implications for women who continue to be marginalised by contemporary regimes.