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.

An incredibly disturbing trend has surfaced recently in local American politics: cities are forbidding citizens from feeding homeless people. My focus is on how this has been created in tandem with shifts in public discourse. Although I recognise the similarities between the new ordinances and previous anti-homeless laws, I want to point to something new that is happening in the legal treatment of street people. City governments, somewhat dependent on the non-profit sector to give material aid while government services are cut, are now vigorously targeting charities/citizens. I will argue that this trend relates to a shift in the framing of the homeless issue – more specifically, a shift in the very definition of the homeless.

This paper develops the idea of transgenerational association. It addresses intrapersonal distributions of wellbeing over time. It develops the notion of temporal distributions between generations, and posits that it is possible to overcome the problems that obstruct ethical individualism. It argues that corporate personality allows us to compare distributions between generations to distributions between the stages of one person.

This article is about how law constructs its own truths through touch. Whilst there has been an impressive body of work on how the visual paradigm permeates law, less has been written about the other senses and their connected clusters of knowledge, specifically the haptic – or touch-related – paradigm. One of the aims of the article, therefore, is to bring touch to sociolegal theory. Another aim, however, is to trace some ways in which encounters, dispositions, feelings and contact – all forms of touch in themselves – shape law’s objects and parameters. The case-studies in this article all raise the question of how touch constitutes the proper function of criminal regulation in relation to embodied encounters – the nude body in public, the alternative sexual space.

From its foundation in 1948 and until the 1990s, the State of Israel lacked a formal Bill of Rights. Although the Declaration of Independence had promised a constitution, a series of obstacles prevented its adoption. In the intervening years, several attempts to anchor a Bill of Rights in a Basic Law met with failure.

In 1992, the Knesset adopted two Basic Laws dealing with human rights. The Supreme Court used these laws as a platform for creating a full-fledged Bill of Rights, and Israeli scholars helped to expedite this process. And yet, despite extensive academic discussion of these developments, the dearth of legal literature remains conspicuous on one question: How did it happen? How is it that after forty-four years of failures and parliamentary paralysis, the Knesset suddenly voted in favour of anchoring a Bill of Rights in Basic Laws?

In this article, I examine four possible explanations. The first attributes these developments to the successful exploitation of a constitutional moment that reflected a severe erosion of public trust in politics. The second pins success on the tactics adopted by the proponents of the law. Instead of insisting on the adoption of a complete Bill of Rights, they split it into small sections and worked to enact only the consensual ones. According to the third thesis, the adoption of these laws was enabled by their proponents’ failure to expose the full import of this move, thereby lulling their traditional opponents into a false sense of security. According to the fourth explanation, success resulted from two major shifts in Israeli politics. The first was the Labor Party’s loss of hegemony and the ensuing uncertainty regarding the identity of future coalitions, and the second was the strengthening of sectorial elements that threatened the dominance of the secular bourgeoisie. The first shift weakened the coalition’s inherent resistance to the constitutionalization of the political system, and the second neutralized the institutional interest of Knesset members representing the old elites against the constitutional project.

Finally, my conclusion points out that these explanations are not mutually exclusive, and all the elements they consider joined together to bring about the ‘constitutional revolution’, as it came to be known.

This paper was delivered as a plenary lecture, designed to respond to the one-day special conference focus upon links between socio-legal studies and the humanities.1 The paper focuses in particular upon the relationship between law and the humanities. It may be argued that the role of empirically sourced socio-legal research is well accepted, given its tangible utility in terms of producing hard data which can inform and transform policy perspectives. However, scholarly speculation about the relationship between law and the humanities ranges from the indulgent to the hostile. In particular, legal scholars aligning themselves as ‘black letter’ commentators express strong opinions about such links, suggesting that scholarship purporting to establish links between the two fields is essentially spurious, bearing in mind the purposive role of law as a problem-solving mechanism. The paper sets out to challenge such assertions, indicating the natural connections between the two fields and the philosophical necessity of continued interaction, given the fact that certain aspects of human experience and nature cannot be plumbed by doctrine or empiricism or even by combinations of the two. Law must be understood to stand at the nexus of human experience, in a relationship of integrity, where the word is understood to mean both morally principled and culturally integrated. In particular, the development of human qualities, of character and moral sensibility informing normative values – and, ultimately, engagement with the world of law – is a process of subtle cultural as well as psychological significance, and may benefit from interrogation deriving from the wider fields of human discourse.

This article examines how the adoption of children under Hindu law in India is regarded by British private international law and immigration law. Through an analysis of case-law, it focuses particularly on how British judges regard the legitimacy of exclusion by the British immigration control system of children who have been adopted under a ‘foreign’ legal system which essentially permits private adoption arrangements. Examining the background to the regime of Indian Hindu law adoptions (which applies to Sikhs as well as Hindus), and the private international law and immigration rules which apply to such adoptees in the UK, the article finds some evidence in the judicial decisions of a more activist, human-rights-based, plurality-conscious position being taken. However, tracking the case-law further, the article concludes that such activism has not been followed through in more recent decisions leaving the conflictual position between transnational adopters and British legal systems largely unresolved.

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.

During the 1790s, Mary Hays was one of the most influential radical novelists and polemicists in England. She counted amongst her closest friends and mentors the likes of Joseph Johnson, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. During this tumultuous final decade of the century, she published two novels, The Memoirs of Emma Courtney and The Victim of Prejudice. Both were controversial in the extreme, attracting the opprobrium of conservative critics. What caused such consternation was not merely their vivid description of the myriad political and social injustices suffered by her female compatriots, but the role of the law in perpetuating such injustices. For much of the last two hundred years Hays has been a largely forgotten figure, her novels occasioning rare interest amongst literary critics and historians, rarer interest still amongst jurists. The purpose of this article is to address this neglect, and to recommend Hays as one of the most intriguing and urgent prophets of modern literary and jurisprudential feminism.

The principal aim of gender mainstreaming is to achieve gender equality by implementing gender as a central component at all levels within the UN system. Previous work has focused on gender mainstreaming as an abstract concept, whereas this paper empirically examines efforts to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325) and by doing so evaluates the process of mainstreaming. This paper suggests that gender mainstreaming has limited potential to achieve gender empowerment and equality. A lack of benchmarks and targets within UNSCR 1325 undermines the Security Council’s commitment to women’s experiences of armed conflict. Gender mainstreaming has largely not been implemented at a macro-level (within the UN), although at a micro-level, civil society organisations have made some attempts to use UNSCR 1325 to achieve gender empowerment. Ultimately, however, UNSCR 1325 is not radical enough to be used as a transformative gender mainstreaming tool.

Whilst international law has traditionally been dominated by states, non-state actors today have an increasing influence on many spheres of international life. This paper argues that non-state actors, in particular business interest non-governmental organisations (BINGOs), not only participate actively within those inter-governmental regimes which have been created by states, but they are also able to establish their own private regimes on particular issues in which they have an interest. The global regulation of oil pollution liability and compensation is used as an example to show how inter-governmental and private regimes can overlap and interact with one another. Such interplay poses several challenges for the way in which we understand traditional state-centred international law-making. At the same time, private regimes themselves raise their own questions of legitimacy and effectiveness.

This paper argues that law and society are disconnected in practice, and that this is attributable, in part, to law’s disconnection from the arts and humanities in our schemes of formal education. When we draw out the legal yarn from its cultural fabric, we find that it is remarkably thin. It is especially inadequate to describe the complexity of human interconnection, and even lacks a language to express such commonplace connections as unmarried romantic cohabitation and non-profit clubs. To understand human interconnection and the law’s connection to society, we must read the law ‘in context’ – as being one fabric, one textile, with other literatures – and we must read with an appropriate ethic. To that end, this paper reads the law in the context of Dickens’s Bleak House, which has been called ‘a novel of connections’, and Forster’s Howards End, which exhorts us to ‘connect the prose and the passion’.

Since the 1990s, a number of anti-corruption conventions have been adopted due to pressure from international financial institutions, donor countries and governments of major industrialised nations. One of these conventions is the Anti-corruption Protocol adopted by the Southern African Development Community. This article examines this Convention against the backdrop of the principal–agent–client (PAC) model which influences much of the current anti-corruption measures ranging from legal and civil service reform through to privatisation of the public sector. In focusing on the efforts to fight and prevent corruption through legal and public sector reform, this paper highlights the limitations of externally imposed solutions largely driven by donors. Using Tanzania, a country that has seen extensive technical input from donor agencies in reforming the law and bureaucratic structures, as an illustration, this article argues that the limited success of such donor-driven anti-corruption strategies is attributable to a number of reasons ranging from reform policies of donors and paternalistic attitudes to political shifts and antipathy towards external demands for reforms that are fuelled by the colonial past. This paper recommends that for a recipient country to take ownership of the anti-corruption strategies it is important to tailor the PAC model to the cultural, social and political context of the recipient country so that the solutions are seen as an indigenous initiative, thus enabling sustainable change in attitudes and behaviour.

The 2002/14/EC Directive establishing a general framework for informing and consulting employees in the European Community allowed considerable flexibility in transposition and implementation. Viewing – in line with reflexive law theory – the Directive as a key tool in allowing EC law to become embedded in the national legal and industrial relations systems, the paper assesses its transposition and impact in Britain. The very flexibility of the Directive made it possible for the British social systems to respond in an innovative way to the changing forms of employee representation. But the relative weakness of the regulatory design of the transposing legislation with regard to the nature of the legal obligations, the enforcement mechanism and the degree to which legal resources could be utilised by trade unions constrained the re-configuration of labour law and its coupling to employee representation arrangements traditionally associated with the British industrial relations system.

This review essay draws on a recently edited handbook by Esin Örücü and David Nelken to reflect on the methodological concerns and challenges of comparative law and sociolegal research. It argues that the contextualisation of laws should be regarded as the indispensable methodological characteristic of all comparative studies of law that aspire to transcend the understanding of law as a body of rules and doctrine. It further argues that although the cultural perspective facilitates contextualisation of the law, a cultural understanding is neither a precondition for undertaking comparative legal research nor necessarily the correct approach under all circumstances; for certain aspects of law and legal behaviour need not be conceptualised in cultural terms. The essay concludes by proposing that the combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches could provide a meta-methodological framework within which specific comparative techniques can be employed. Such a framework will enable comparatists and sociolegal researchers to account for how law interacts with, and simultaneously manifests itself at, the macro-, micro- and the intermediary meso-levels of society over time.

This paper builds on a developing field of enquiry regarding the potency of film as an intervention into normative patterns in popular culture which are recognisable in a legal pluralist sense, and that relate to more standard legal analyses of constitutional development. The argument is developed that Steve McQueen in Hunger has made a film which marries a particular filmic formal device of lingering on highly aestheticised details of human behaviour with an overall filmic sensibility of refusing ‘politics’ in favour of ‘humanity’. The film demonstrates a resounding success, both in critical terms and in having the film accepted on its own terms of ‘humanity’. The suggestion in this paper is that the ongoing processes of ‘dealing with the past’ in Northern Ireland and other post-conflict societies may have something to learn from the marriage of idea and aesthetic form in Hunger.

The traditional tort system in medical malpractice is increasingly perceived as being incapable of addressing the mismatch between claims and negligent injuries. Tort reforms have been introduced in various developed countries in an attempt to bring about greater fairness and economic sustainability in the compensation of medical injuries and to reduce the overall rate of medical litigation. This paper reviews the key tort reforms that have been used in various countries, notably the US and the UK, and discusses the arguments that had been put forth by advocates and opponents of such reforms. The impact of these tort reforms, where studied and available, is also reviewed and discussed in the paper.

This is a review of Mark Tushnet’s Weak Courts, Strong Rights: Judicial Review and Social Welfare Rights in Comparative Constitutional Law. The review outlines the main arguments in the book and then moves to elaborate on two preconditions which are necessary for Tushnet’s project to succeed: the existence of a strong civil society and an institutional willingness to implement social welfare rights. In addition, this review seeks to situate the book within Tushnet’s broader constitutional theory project. In particular, the review attempts to reconcile this work with Tushnet’s 1999 Taking the Constitution Away from the Courts, a work that initially seems to be diametrically opposed to his new book.

In recent years, universal principles and, in turn, the universalistic discourse of human rights, have fallen under critical review by feminist scholars. This is part of a more general suspicion of a search for universalism and abstraction in law: feminist legal scholars have highlighted and critiqued the gendered dimension of such an approach.1 Particular concepts fundamental to political, legal and social theory such as justice,2 equality,3 freedom4 and rights5 have been under the spotlight to see if their structure leads to detrimental consequences for women. Criticisms of rights have taken a variety of forms with rights being seen as too individualistic, reinforcing existing power imbalances, failing to account for women’s experiences and focusing too much on the public sphere.

This essay is about portraits: judicial portraits. It offers a case study of the interface between law and visual culture. Its object of enquiry is a collection of pictures (painted and photographic), depicting the sixteen Chief Justices of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, Australia, from 1824 to the present day. The original paintings hang in the Banco Court, Sydney. The photographs and digital copies of all the images are on the Court’s website. Beginning with a brief review of socio-legal scholarship on the judiciary, the essay explores existing work on the visual image of the judge. In response to the limitations of that research, the paper turns to art historical scholarship to facilitate an analysis of the aesthetic and technological factors (the continuities and changes) that shape and generate the meaning of these judicial images. It explores the relevance of context upon meaning. The paper demonstrates a number of methodological approaches and reflects upon the contribution that a study of judicial pictures may make to socio-legal scholarship.