The English homelessness scheme has been lauded as being one of the most progressive in the world for offering an individually legally enforceable right to housing to those people who meet the statutory criteria. Its definition of homelessness is also liberal by comparison with many other countries within Europe and beyond, extending significantly beyond the stereotypical rooflessness experienced by rough sleepers. Nevertheless, the scheme is highly selective and targeted, and assesses homelessness through a test of relative need, rather than enshrining a minimally acceptable standard of housing. It thereby creates a category of the marginally housed whose housing needs are assessed as insufficiently poor to be officially categorised as homeless, yet who are living in severely inadequate housing. To reduce the uncertainty and contingency of the current test, the paper proposes the adoption of a new test of habitability.

Since 2012, judges and prosecutors in Benin have repeatedly protested against political interference and demanded compliance with their statutorily guaranteed independence. In 2014 and 2017, magistrates demonstrated in their judicial robes in the streets, protesting against the government's bill to deprive them of their right to strike and other freedoms. Benin has been described as a ‘success story of democracy’ (Stroh and Never, 2006, p. 1) and even as a ‘model democracy’ (cf. Kohnert, 1996, p. 78; Magnusson, 2001, p. 211; Bierschenk, 2009) since its peaceful transition to democratic conditions and its participation in a national conference in 1990/91. So why were magistrates in Benin demonstrating in the streets for the first time in the history of their profession? Based on fieldwork in Benin in 2009 and 2015 and archival research in 2017 in France, my paper analyses the change in the style of interactions between parts of the executive and parts of the judiciary in the history of the profession – a change from political negotiation to confrontation. Through their strikes and industrial action, magistrates fought for judicial independence; yet, at the same time they constructed legality and strengthened democracy because their actions emphasised the rule of law. My paper also considers the specifics of their strikes in the context of other striking civil servants. When magistrates, as bureaucrats, become politically active, it marks a transformation in their self-conception, as they are usually reserved and withdraw themselves from political and public spheres.

Across scholarship and legal practice, family law is widely recognised as a subject that is inextricable from the social and cultural forces that shape our understanding of how families work and how they are positioned within society. This paper argues that it is now time to build upon this by integrating an explicit awareness of political context into how we teach family law. This is because teachers of family law are now faced with an urgent challenge: the encroachment of neoliberal governance into all corners of family justice. Neoliberal ideas are far from new, but they are increasingly shaping dominant ideas about what family law is for, who should be entitled to use it and, even in some circumstances, questioning the very legitimacy of family law or legal processes as means for supporting families experiencing breakdown. In response to this challenge, this paper advocates the importance of guiding students to look beyond family law doctrine in order to consider how political initiatives, trends and debates have the power to shape the procedures and processes through which family disputes are resolved. It will argue that drawing this contextual awareness into family law studies is crucially important to ensure that the future development of family law as both a scholarly discipline and an area of practice is centred on the needs and lived experiences of families who need it.

In A Liberal Theory of Property (2021), Hanoch Dagan makes an important, thought-provoking contribution to property theory – one that unifies divergent, and at time apparently dichotomous, strands of thought in property theory and revives rich dormant ideas. Dagan persuasively centres property's justification and design on the value of autonomy and on the basic need for reciprocal recognition of the individual right to self-determination. He does so without excluding the relevance and significance of other property values, both public and private. The theory deepens existing debates within property scholarship about values such as freedom and personhood, and provides a wide-reaching analysis of how autonomy functions as property's telos. That telos is used to justify structural pluralism in property law and to delimit owners’ rights. In this way, for Dagan, property's justification determines the nature and ambit of private authority over resources.

This paper proposes an integrating interpretation of the term ‘place of safety’ in the International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue, 1979, grounded in international human rights and refugee law. It argues that the exposure to harm as a consequence of the conditions under which sea migrants endure irregular journeys raises vulnerability concerns and the need to search for mechanisms of redress. It further claims that sea migrants are marginalised by states’ refusal to allow their disembarkation on land. It also argues that a narrow interpretation of the term ‘place of safety’ risks perpetuating, if not exacerbating, situations of vulnerability and marginalisation among sea migrants. Key themes addressed in this contribution are vulnerability and marginalisation of sea migrants, vulnerability reasoning in the interpretation process and the scope for a more integrating reading of the term ‘place of safety’ that is responsive to the specific needs among sea migrants.

The need to engage students in thinking about the politics of law, especially in a time of escalating climate and other crises, is increasingly urgent. In this paper, we discuss a series of place-based teaching strategies designed to foster critical legal thinking, but also hope and a sense of agency. Inspired by a range of scholars – Bruno Latour, Doreen Massey, Henry Giroux and J.K. Gibson-Graham – we use context in an effort to cultivate what Giroux calls ‘educated hope’. Our starting point is what the law does (and also what law does not do and what it could do), not what the law is. Instead of taking a field of law and then using examples to illustrate how it works in context, we discuss three courses that start with the context of a particular place. Our courses cover a range of laws that work together to shape that place, spanning multiple fields, and emphasise their peopled and place-based specificity. After discussing teaching and assessment strategies that we have found productive, we reflect on implications beyond our courses, and the potential for broader place-based legal pedagogies.

This paper considers experiences of penal and voluntary-sector interventions in the lives of young people labelled as ‘troubled’ or ‘at risk’ of criminal behaviour. Drawing on data from a case-study conducted in the north of England, this paper focuses on the narratives of young people ‘on the margins’ of society who were involved with a range of community-based interventions, specifically youth clubs, a support group and a mandatory youth justice course. We consider how young people experience and respond to stigmatising elements prevalent in the structured interventions and everyday interactions with the institutions and agencies intended to support them. We argue that ‘promotive’ relationships between young people and the adults working with them enable young people to challenge risk-based identities and navigate the barriers they face.

In this paper, we begin reflecting on how ‘futures literacy’ – recently championed by UNESCO as a vital skill that allows people to better understand the role of the future in what they see and do – might be developed in environmental law pedagogy. Law and legal analysis tend to be absent from futures scholarship and we discuss various ways of engaging with environmental law as an important but underexplored site and means of future-making. We consider our shared teaching of an undergraduate module in which students examine historical legislation for what it says about past ideas of the environment's future and the action within the law necessary to safeguard it; and contemporary texts, including science fiction and poetry, imagining a future for the environment on and through which law operates. Futures literacy, we argue, is at its richest when ‘historical futures’ and ‘future futures’ are read together, or alongside one another.

Traditional approaches to teaching EU law can seem almost deliberately alienating; there is a lot of incomprehensible stodge that students are told they ‘just have to get through’ before they can really begin. So courses start with memorising technical terminology, institutional facts and then some principles that, without context, can just seem like more jargon. By the time they move on to case-law and legislation, the idea that these things are useful domestic tools has long since vanished. Instead, a contextual approach mitigates a trio of risks that have beset traditional EU law teaching – the risks of excessive positivism, excessive abstraction and excessive black-letter lawyering. Context requires critical engagement with, rather than simple absorption of, law; it makes the law accessible and applicable; and it involves socio-legal and interdisciplinary methods and materials. It is, of course, risky in different ways – but we should have a greater appetite for risks related not to cognitive stagnation, but to intellectual challenge.

Prisoners have long been recognised as a disenfranchised group. This paper positions non-religious prisoners as further excluded from pastoral care. While chaplaincies aim to serve prisoners of all faiths and none, this paper suggests a hierarchy of access in which the benefits of chaplaincy are more available to some prisoners than others. Shortcomings in secular care mean that non-religious offenders are often the only group unable to connect with like-minded people and it is argued that they are disadvantaged as a result. The paper also explores the challenges for pastoral carers seeking to support inmates equally. It considers the barriers on both sides of the care relationship, specifically the disincentives to chaplaincy engagement faced by prisoners of no faith and the obstacles encountered by the Non-Religious Pastoral Support Network in accessing service users and delivering care. Finally, recommendations are made to narrow the gaps between religious and non-religious prisoners.

The problem of women's access to self-defence has been internationally recognised. This paper presents original empirical data on women's use of self-defence in practice alongside critical feminist analysis of the requirements of self-defence under Scots law. The empirical findings confirm that women are rarely successful with self-defence at trial level and the doctrinal analysis further demonstrates that self-defence does not adequately reflect women's experience of violence, especially sexual violence, and instead continues to reflect male experiences of (public) violence. It is intended that this research will form part of a larger developing evidence base, the type of which has been called for (Fitz-Gibbon and Vannier, 2017) and can be used to support reform in this area. As such, it represents a significant contribution to socio-legal work that has considered the issue of women's access to criminal defences.

This paper interrogates the depoliticising effects of a seemingly neutral regulatory drive at the heart of the World Health Organization (WHO)'s promotion of traditional medicine. Emerging at WHO in the late 1960s against a political backdrop of decolonisation and pan-Africanism, traditional medicine has continued to be promoted in subsequent decades, culminating in the latest global Traditional Medicine Strategy (2014 to 2023). Yet WHO's promotion and acceptance of traditional medicine have also become increasingly conditional upon its standardisation and regulation – something that appears fundamentally at odds with traditional medicine's heterogeneity. Drawing on insights from critical law and science and technology studies, we suggest that such a process at WHO has done more than simply disqualify the toxic and the dangerous. Rather, it has implicitly and explicitly marginalised and excluded those aspects of traditional medicine that deviate from scientific, biomedical ways of seeing, knowing and organising.