Images of oil-covered seabirds or radioactive fallout from nuclear disasters easily evoke concerns over the risks to personal integrity and environmental degradation. The energy-extraction industry, like others, is profit-driven – a competitive enterprise, with little regard for the social impact of its activities beyond corporate social responsibility (CSR) rhetoric. CSR is neither a precautionary measure nor a remedial framework. Outsider stakeholder influence from government is limited and CSR is written on companies’ terms. What emerges is a distortion between companies’ responsibility and accountability for breaches. We propose a hybrid form of accountability that incorporates public international law to ensure the state, as a guardian of society, plays a more definitive role. This will require more binding obligations on states and companies beyond the current soft-law principles, to curtail jurisdictional constraints and forum shopping of large corporations, through an international court of reparations to guarantee effective remedies for victims.

Through an ethnographic study of the immigration law system in Russia, and interviews with legal professionals and Central Asian migrants themselves, this paper asks: What are the lived experiences of the highly complex, though ambiguous immigration law regime of Russia? According to what ‘rules of the game’ does it operate? Are they specific to Russia only? This paper develops the concept of ‘the spiral effect of the law’ to capture the image of law, as formed through people's experiences of the legal system. Drawing on the comparative tool of analogy, this paper suggests that ‘the spiral effect of the law’ is perhaps not that different from the observable effects of immigration law in other major migration-receiving jurisdictions, namely the US, framed as ‘legal violence’ by Cecilia Menjívar and Leisy Abrego (2012).

This paper examines the coronial manual as a technique of occupying office in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The manual guided coroners in the performance of their duties, obligations and responsibilities. It was preoccupied with questions of technical knowledge, operational processes and administrative procedure. The language of office that characterised coronial treatises prior to the eighteenth century was gradually supplemented in the nineteenth century by the discourse of bureaucracy. This paper argues that the guidebook professionalised the office of coroner in Australia by setting out procedures, forms and rituals for assuming responsibility for the dead. It also provided advice to coroners for devoting themselves to a vocation in the public service. The paper thus traces historical shifts in the technology of the coronial manual in British colonies and examines how a bureaucratic logic of the coroner's office affected the way in which coroners pursued justice during the death investigation process.

Recent theorising about feminist judging has concentrated on appellate courts and their judgments. This paper develops a conceptualisation of feminist judging in lower, first instance courts, which are dominated by high case volume and limited time for each matter, with decisions given orally and ex tempore rather than in elaborated written judgments. Through careful accounts of the philosophy, goals and practices of conventional as well as newer, more engaged approaches to judging, the paper compares and contrasts feminist judging with other approaches to judging in the lower courts. This entails considering dimensions such as the judicial officer's orientation to substantive law and practice in court, concepts of fairness, ethical commitments, the view of the defendant, and judicial qualities and capacities.

Since the late nineteenth century, ideas about law, both Albanian and ‘other’, have played significant parts in the development of a sense of ‘Albanian-ness’ and remain central to the ongoing construction of the nation. In this paper, I examine how comparative thinking about ‘Albanian law’ in northern Albania and predominantly Albanian Kosovo has contributed to nation-building aims, with particular reference to comparative thinking around the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjin, an early-twentieth-century legal code rooted in northern-Albanian customary practices. I look at this from two perspectives: comparative thinking by the law-writer in the Kanun and comparative thinking by a contemporaneous writer about the Kanun. Through these perspectives, we gain a more nuanced understanding of the intellectual context of the Kanun’s production than is reflected in the existing literature, and a glimpse of its continued relevance today to ideas of nation.

The long history of suicide as a criminal offence still has a significant contemporary effect on how it is perceived, conceptualised and adjudged. This is particularly the case within countries where suicide is largely determined within a coronial system, such as Australia, the UK and the US. This paper details the outcomes of a study involving semi-structured interviews with coroners both in England and Australia, as well as observations at inquests. It focuses around the widely held contention that the suicide rates produced within these coronial systems are underestimations of anywhere between 15 to 50 per cent. The results of these interviews suggest that there are three main reasons for this systemic underestimation. The first reflects the legacy of suicide as a criminal offence, resulting in the highest standard of proof for findings of suicide in the UK, and a continuing stigma attached to families of the deceased. The second is the considerable pressure brought to bear upon coroners by the family of the deceased, who, because of that stigma, commonly agitate for any finding other than that of suicide. The third involves the rise of ‘therapeutic jurisprudence’, wherein coroners take on the responsibility of the emotional well-being of the grieving families, which in turn affects the likelihood of reaching a finding of suicide. The conclusions drawn by the paper are also twofold: first – with respect to the stigma of suicide – it will take a lot more than simple decriminalisation to change deeply held social perceptions within the community. Second, given that suicide prevention programmes and policies are based on such deeply questionable statistics, targeted changes to coronial legislation and practice would appear to be required.

Spain is one of the few countries in the EU where Islam has had a historical role in the social and cultural construction of its identity. However, its modern history is marked by acts of repudiation of non-Christian cultures. Opinion polls indicate that certain groups of immigrants from North Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe, but mainly Muslims, are considered to be incompatible with the popular conception of Spanish identity. The reason for this perception is related to the social construction of the immigrant as the ‘other to govern’ by political, academic and media discourses. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that immigration law also plays a fundamental role in this strategy of ‘orientalisation’, namely the attribution of certain qualities to immigrant groups (illegal, antisocial, criminal, inassimilable, terrorist), the aim of which is to legitimise the selective control of immigration. The Spanish immigration and citizenship regime contributes to the construction of otherness, and therefore to the political and legal (re)definition of what ‘being Spanish’ means.