This article explores a primary source of legal studies, case-law, as a form of narrative in the context of indigenous land rights, and considers how this narrative negotiates pre-colonial land claims in a post-colonial context. Its case-study is the South Pacific island country of Vanuatu, a small-island, least-developed, nation-state, where laws introduced under Anglo–French colonial administration are still retained and sit uneasily alongside the customary forms of land tenure which govern ninety percent of all land in the islands. The article looks at the traditional and changing role of narrative presented as evidence by claimants and their witnesses against a context of rapid social and economic change, and asks whether the metamorphosis of narrative signals the future survival or imminent demise of customary indigenous land rights and what that might mean for these island people faced by the pressures of development.

This article examines the ways the business community – here operationalised through Business Improvement Associations (BIAs) – thinks about and makes sense of the Law and the legal system, its legal consciousness, in other words. I suggest that the way BIAs think about and make sense of the Law is best described as ambivalent, ranging from reverence to disenchantment: on the one hand, the Law is (like) God, but on the other, the Law is also a source of angst, frustration, hopelessness and powerlessness. Drawing on the analytical framework of legal consciousness, I suggest, provides a good platform from which to explore whether the ‘haves’ come out ahead, and what coming out ahead might mean and look like to them. Equally, the ambivalence towards law shows that the ways the ‘haves’ make sense of the Law might not always be that antithetical to the way the ‘have-nots’ make sense of the Law.

Is there a stable set of practices or assumptions surrounding dignity, and would these necessarily denote a single foundation sustaining that stability? Two contemporary debates offer contrasting approaches to these questions. In the first, two jurists, who share agreement over the appearances of dignity in post-1945 jurisprudence, disagree as to whether these appearances form an emerging ius commune or a contingent set of conceptions. The second, comparative, debate explores the functional consequences of dignity’s aristocratic resonances. One position posits a continuing relationship between dignity and aristocratic nobility; the other, a functional division between dignity-within-aristocracy and dignity-within-democracy. This article insists that clarification of these debates depends upon a distinction between the epistemology and ontology of dignity, and, further, a distinction between dignity’s genealogy and its grammar. It concludes that a complex genealogical inheritance is at the heart of much disagreement, and that attention to dignity’s use clarifies its deficiencies and its continuing appeal.

While spatial justice could be the most radical offspring of law’s recent spatial turn, it remains instead a geographically informed version of social justice. The majority of the existing literature on the subject has made some politically facile assumptions about space, justice and law, thereby subsuming the potentially radical into the banal. In this article, I suggest that the concept of spatial justice is the most promising platform on which to redefine, not only the connection between law and geography, but more importantly, the conceptual foundations of both law and space. More concretely, the article attempts two things: first, a radical understanding of legal spatiality. Space is not just another parameter for law, a background against which law takes place, or a process that the law needs to take into consideration. Space is intertwined with normative production in ways that law often fails to acknowledge, and part of this article is a re-articulation of the connection. Second, to suggest a conception of spatial justice that derives from a spatial law. Such a conception cannot rely on given concepts of distributive or social justice. Instead, the concept of spatial justice put forth here is informed by post-structural, feminist, post-ecological and other radical understandings of emplacement and justice, as well as arguably the most spatial of philosophical discourses, that of Deleuze–Guattari and the prescribed possibilities of space as manifold.

Bountiful, British Columbia is Canada’s only openly polygamous community. Public discussions about Bountiful suggest that the only form of marriage practised there is polygamous, and that this is usually harmful to women and children. This article suggests that this monolithic representation of marriage in Bountiful misses the conjugal pluralism that exists in this community. Part I sets out the typical portrayal of marriage in Bountiful offered by Canadian public and political discussions. Part II contrasts this portrayal with five stories about marriage in Bountiful that the author observed or was told about while conducting field research. These stories indicate that conjugal heterogeneity is both existent and accepted in Bountiful. They also suggest that, in becoming and being a wife in Bountiful, women can experience varying degrees of choice and agency. All of this is relevant to exploring how a fuller recognition of the conjugal diversity and choices that may exist in a place like Bountiful might affect formal juridical approaches to polygamy.

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.

Traditional scholarship has approached Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics mostly as a system of positive ethics. Less attention has been paid to the work’s meta-ethics – the claims Aristotle makes about what any system of positive ethics must say or do in order to count as an ethical theory. In this article, Book One of the Nicomachean Ethics is read not simply as an introduction to Aristotle’s system of positive ethics, but as a statement of distinct meta-ethical principles, which can be evaluated independently of any view that might be taken of his positive ethics. Insofar as Aristotle inscribes his legal theory within his ethical theory, those principles stand as a meta-ethics of law. Under Aristotle’s legal meta-ethics, law necessarily presupposes: (1) a concept of the ‘good’; (2) purpose; (3) dialectics; (4) objectivist ethics; (5) a best constitution; (6) a positive ethics; and (7) a concept of the ‘human’.

In this paper an attempt is made to analyse the complex relationship between law, territory and movement. Beginning with a quick overview of the notion of property, the paper suggests that this legal notion represents a way of imagining the practice of inhabiting the planet. Dwelling and travelling are explored as two alternative and complementary ways of inhabiting, and a closer inspection is paid to the moments when they confront each other both ideologically and practically. A territorial question is identified at the core of law, namely the issue of the movement of bodies in space (or motility), together with the control of such movements. From this perspective, movement is not simply one among the many objects over which law exerts control, rather law itself is a territorial endeavour, a movement that acts upon other movements.

The momentous changes that have affected European cities over the last two centuries have had profound consequences for the configuration of urban space. Urban planning and architecture, torn between the dialectically opposed forces of permanence and change, particularly in building practices and the use of urban space, have had an important influence on the material construction of cities. The outcome was a strong focus on the individual architectural artefact and, at the same time, the spread of a process of atopical fragmentation of urban space and the gradual loss of status of contact space. The latter suffered a process of deterioration due to disaffection and abandonment of the practice and a rapid shift of interest towards space decontextualised and standardised by the networks. The recent experiences of Barcelona and Berlin have been a reaction to this impoverishment of the meaning of the city, drawing on the heuristic contribution of the Italian school of urban analysis to recover the constituent elements of urban space and the conventions that have determined the appearance of European cities and are part of the tacit understanding of their inhabitants.

Historically, sex services premises in New South Wales, Australia were regarded and regulated as illegal and disorderly entities; they were policed as outlaws. The Disorderly Houses Amendment Act 1995 [NSW] bestowed legal status, providing an opportunity to regulate sex services premises as legal subjects. Despite these reforms, in many areas brothels continue to be regulated more restrictively than other businesses. I argue that this is because, for many, brothels continue to be perceived as outlaws. They are regarded as inherently unlawful, disorderly, and hence warranting and requiring exclusion from the community. I argue that this conception of brothels as outlaws is constructed and reinforced through regulation. In contrast, some local councils and Land and Environment Court decisions have taken up the opportunity to regard and regulate sex services premises as legal subjects or citizens. The conception of sex services premises as citizen imports an existing legal framework, with associated accountabilities, rights and responsibilities. This shift in conception results in people viewing sex services premises differently, experiencing them differently and regulating them differently.

The development of an integrated critical psychological jurisprudence (PJ) continues to elude researchers in theoretical and applied contexts. Indeed, the radical potential of a synthetic PJ that furthers the political aims of social change, collective good and citizen justice has yet to be sufficiently problematised or systematically reviewed in the extant literature. This article begins to address this deficiency. First, the social philosophy that informs and underscores radicalised PJ is described. This includes commentary on its underlying symbolic, linguistic, material and cultural footing. Second, several well-rehearsed theoretical strains of critical PJ are summarily presented. These strains consist of anarchism, critical legal studies, feminist jurisprudence and complex systems science. Third, a conceptual integration is undertaken that links radicalised PJ’s grounding in social philosophy with its established theoretical variants. This synthesis demonstrates the probing political project of critical PJ, especially as a humanising strategy of resistance and an evolving struggle for justice. This is a political project that seeks to de/reconstruct the images (aesthetic), narratives (epistemology), embodiments (ethic) and reproductions (ontology) at the core of its nascent critique.

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.

The promulgation of the Turkish Civil Code of 1926, a nuanced translation of the Swiss Civil Code of 1907, has long been celebrated as an exceptionally thoroughgoing instance of ‘legal transplantation’. Despite their pervasiveness, such assessments cloud appreciation of the multifarious power dynamics at work in the Code’s preparation and implementation, especially the mechanisms through which it was made to serve Kemalist ideology’s twofold agenda of ‘modernising’ socio-legal relations while retaining – and, in certain instances, augmenting – those ‘traditional’ practices which early republican legislators and administrators found to be of especial value for their ‘nation-building’ project. The chief objective of this study is to reveal the inadequacies of the Turkish Civil Code’s standard characterisation as a ‘success story’ in comparative legal scholarship. Specifically, I demonstrate that the 1926 Code is best understood as the product of a deeply gendered tension between Kemalism’s dedication to a state-driven programme of national ‘modernisation’ and elements of the ‘tradition’ this programme was crafted for the sake of mobilising, radicalising and transforming.

This paper is written by a geographer and discusses the importance of ‘thinking space relationally’ in, and for, the social sciences. According to its advocates, relational thinking insists on an open-ended, mobile, networked and actor-centred geographic becoming. I position relational space within the lineage of philosophical approaches to space, drawing on examples taken mainly from human geography. Following this, the paper highlights some silences and limits, namely factors that constrain, structure and connect space. I acknowledge relationality but insist on the connected, sometimes inertial, and always context-specific nature of spatiality. The paper then considers the normative implications of this for politics, thinking first about regions, and then about policy.

In 2001, the Legal Services Commission (LSC) introduced a new pilot, the Family Advice and Information Network (FAInS), which recognised that family law clients typically face a cluster of legal and non-legal issues. Family lawyers involved in FAInS were encouraged to address a client’s legal problems, and then refer the client to other services for assistance with non-legal issues. In this way, family law clients were to be offered a holistic service, with the lawyer acting as a ‘case manager’ who helped match services to their client’s individual needs. This article presents data drawn from an evaluation of FAInS, and shows that lawyers did not regularly refer their clients to other services, with referrals largely being limited to mediation. We conclude that family lawyers are not necessarily the most appropriate gatekeepers, and propose a number of alternatives for providing a multi-agency approach to resolving family law issues.

‘[T]he other is the phantasm of historiography, the object that it seeks, honors and buries. A labor of separation concerning this uncanny and fascinating proximity is effected…Alphonse Dupront has said, “The sole historical quest for ‘meaning’ remains indeed a quest for the Other, but however contradictory it may be, this project aims at ‘understanding’ and, through ‘meaning’ at hiding the alterity of this foreigner; or, in what amounts to the same thing, it aims at calming the dead who still haunt the present, and at offering them scriptural tombs”.’ (De Certeau, 1998, p. 2)