It is now well established that algorithms are transforming our economy, institutions, social relations and ultimately our society. This paper explores the question – what is the role of law in the algorithmic society? We draw on the law-jobs theory of Karl Llewellyn and on William's Twining refinement of Llewellyn's work through the perspective of a thin functionalism to have a better understanding of what law does in this new context. We highlight the emergence of an algorithmic law, as law performs jobs such as the disposition of trouble-cases, the preventive channelling and reorientation of conduct and expectations, and the allocation of authority in the face of algorithmic systems. We conclude that the law-jobs theory remains relevant to understanding the role of law in the algorithmic society, but it is also challenged by how algorithms redefine who does or should do what law-jobs, and how they are done.

Aiming to ensure a responsive and socially relevant approach to court cases, judiciaries have initiated innovative projects, such as problem-solving community courts, over the last three decades. In this socio-legal case study, I analyse the legal transplantation of a community court from the US to the Netherlands. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic field work (interviews, observations and file research), the study shows that, during the transplantation process, the goal of serving the neighbourhood receded into the background, while the goal of solving the problems of defendants gained even more prominence than it already had at the inception of the court. The conditions that have played a role in the path that the court has carved out to legitimise its activities differ from its American counterparts. The adjustments signify important internal legal cultural differences and illustrates how the implementation process is formed by opinions about the proper role of judges.

By ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2018, Ireland has undertaken inter alia the obligation to implement ‘an inclusive education system at all levels and lifelong learning’, as required by Article 24. However, concerns have been repeatedly expressed about the practice of inclusive education in Ireland in terms of admission policies, funding, school choice and reduced timetabling. This paper investigates whether, and to what extent, the current approach to special educational needs (SEN) in Ireland complies with the aim of ensuring an inclusive educational system in which children with disabilities are valued and empowered. Ireland is an interesting case-study due to its history of marginalisation of children with disabilities and its relatively recent engagement with the concept of inclusive education. By using a socio-legal approach, drawing on qualitative interviews with key stakeholders in education combined with a legal analysis of relevant primary and secondary sources, it examines the current practices relating to the education of children with disabilities in Ireland.

Since the 1990s, human trafficking has become the battleground for competing discourses on human rights and penality. While rights solutions are generally presented as in opposition to crime-control measures, in the context of anti-trafficking interventions, rights-based initiatives and criminal governance are often linked together both discursively and in practice. Drawing on the findings of Discourse Analysis of 120 texts about trafficking, this paper explores how dominant discourses and alternative voices construct the relationship between human rights and penality. It is contended that penality is framed as a crucial tenet of human rights. Dominant discourses (the ‘law enforcement’ and the ‘victims first’ discourses) link human rights to state coercive action, seen as a necessary component of their effectiveness. Alternative voices (the ‘incompatibility’ and the ‘transformative justice’ discourses) reject the appropriateness of penal intervention, but they end up preserving what they denounce.

The Independent Review of the Mental Health Act 1983 found that people’s experiences and self-knowledge were mislabelled as a ‘lack of insight’. Insight, a psychiatric concept, is defined as an ability to recognise one’s mental illness, awareness of one’s symptoms and compliance with treatment. Across different jurisdictions, legal scholars have raised concerns about the influence of insight on legal provisions for psychiatric care and mental capacity assessments, given its prevalent use in psychiatry and its absence from statutory criteria. However, outside of these findings, little is known about people’s lived experiences of ‘insight’ and the law. This article draws on narrative and photo-elicitation interviews with psychiatric survivors to argue that insight is an extra-legislative proxy for regulating involuntary detention and other coercion masked as consent. Finally, this article draws on the capabilities approach to deliver a justice argument for creating real opportunities to provide informed consent in mental health settings.

Launched in April 2018, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations' Smart Cities Network (ASCN) initiative raises important issues regarding the tensions between achieving smart city objectives on the one hand and protection of human rights on the other. The aim of this paper is to explore these tensions using a Knowledge Commons Framework analysis. I first analyse the three key pillars of the ASCN pilot city knowledge commons – knowledge resources, community attributes and governance ‘rules in use’ – using human rights criteria. I the apply the lessons of this analysis to two fundamental aspects of human experience in smart city contexts – mobility through transport systems and access to essential services through energy supply.

This article argues that the colonial government in India was shaped by changes in property law, race relations and other institutional interests that accompanied the political and economic restructuring of the colonial state. Therefore, the development of constitutionalism was the outcome of an interplay between institutional and professional interests and larger socio-economic and political forces. Against the backdrop of empire, constitutionalism in British India was defined by a specific form of allocation of powers between the executive (which also exercised legislative powers) and the high courts. The structure that developed as a result was a strong executive government, particularly in its exercise of power in local districts with formal judicial scrutiny introduced after 1861. The relationship between the executive and the judiciary in localities generated a series of conflicts and tensions, which were exacerbated by the expansion of the bureaucracy, the legal profession and gradual inclusion of Indians in the upper strata of governance. Taken together, these factors led to the development of a hybrid model of separation of powers in the Indian subcontinent, which seems to have stood the test of time in post-colonial countries of South Asia despite political elites having invested considerable resources on constitutional reform.

When people do not approach a formal court of law to settle their disputes, and cannot enter into out-of-court settlements either, what do they do? I find that people install court-like processes which mimetically follow the court procedures, executing the settlement as if the decision were rendered officially. By examining such practices in the case of divorce-related disputes in India, I advance a theory of legal apparitions, a phenomenon in which cosmetic mimicry of legal processes creates a new form of extra-legal resolution. This is likely to prevail in societies where access to justice is hindered due to socio-institutional factors and customary forms of adjudication are not possible (sometimes because of state law’s design). This idea can be used to explain a range of practices observed in South Asian societies, where people’s imagination of, and interaction with, legal apparatuses creates new forms of institutions.

This paper examines the rise of algorithmic systems – that is, systems of data-driven governance (and social-credit-type) systems – in the form of ratings systems of business respecting human rights responsibilities. The specific context is rating or algorithmic systems emerging around national efforts to combat human trafficking through so-called Modern Slavery and Supply Chain Due Diligence legal. Section 2 provides a brief contextualisation of the problems and challenges of managing compliance with emerging law and norms against forced labour and, in its most extreme forms, modern slavery. Section 3 examines the landscape of such algorithmic private legal systems as it has developed to date in the context of forced labour ratings systems. There is a focus on the connection between the power to impose the normative basis of data analytics and the increasingly tightly woven-in connection between principal actors in this endeavour.

We deploy a novel and radical approach to vulnerability theory to investigate Scotland's response to asylum seekers’ vulnerability during the COVID-19 pandemic and test Scotland's self-affirmation as a hospitable country. Our ethical vulnerability analysis enhances Fineman's vulnerability analysis by denationalising the vulnerable subject and locating her within our ‘uneven globalised world’. We further enrich this fuller version of vulnerability analysis with insights from Levinas's and Derrida's radical vulnerability theory and ethics of hospitality. We demonstrate how our ethical vulnerability analysis enables us to subvert the hostile premise of migration laws and policies, and thus fundamentally redefine relationships between guests and hosts so that the host is compelled to respond to the Other's vulnerability. We argue that this hospitable impulse yields a generous and absolute commitment to progressive social welfare provision for asylum seekers, which brings Scotland closer to fulfilling its aspirations to be a hospitable host by welcoming the Other.

Intermediaries are communication experts who facilitate communication between individuals with communication needs and the criminal justice system. In executing the role, intermediaries interact with police, lawyers, judges and other criminal justice professionals. But is the intermediary a professional in its own right? This article argues that a more useful question to ask is whether intermediaries engage in what Andrew Abbott terms ‘professional work’. It reveals how the role tussles for legitimate control over its work tasks through the staking of ‘jurisdictional claims’. Intermediaries do so through the performance of ‘boundary work’ which involves the construction and negotiating of boundaries that mediate interaction. This article presents findings from thirty-one in-depth, semi-structured interviews with intermediaries and judges in England and Wales and Northern Ireland. It concludes that the future of the intermediary role and its work depends largely on the type of ‘jurisdictional settlement’ which its practitioners seek to carve out.

Different organisations recently published reports identifying the challenges and potential solutions to ensure privacy in blockchain platforms. The proposed solutions frequently emphasise the role of privacy-compliance technologies to be incorporated into the blockchain design. Often, these solutions imply a techno-regulatory approach, ignoring that the level of privacy implemented in a blockchain involves legal and policy choices, disregarding the need to implement human participation and contestability in these platforms. Against this backdrop, this paper proposes to examine how privacy-compliance technologies can incorporate human participation and contestability: first, resorting to the interdisciplinary literature to examine how technological design could balance privacy with human oversight; second, discussing the challenges to ensure ex post contestability for aggrieved data subjects; third, examining the difficulties in identifying liable parties in a blockchain platform. The current disregard of the social and human element risks undermining the role of privacy-compliance technologies in the blockchain.

As law graduates wield significant influence in public life, law schools’ responsibility for cultivating students’ civic capacities and dispositions remains an important but often neglected project. Taking up this project, this article traces a thread of deliberative democratic aspirations within legal education scholarship and explores the potential of participation within law schools’ own political processes for realising these ideals. To do so, it examines law students’ experiences of an experiment with deliberative democracy’s leading institutional innovation – the deliberative mini-public – and demonstrates the ways in which participation fostered deliberative capacities, a more collective orientation, and increased confidence. Ultimately, the article illustrates the mutually reinforcing nature of civic and legal education, affirms law schools’ broader role within society and offers both theoretical and practical insights into the place of democratic innovation within the law school.

Drawing primarily from qualitative interviews conducted between 2017 and 2018, this empirical study tells a granular story of how legal actors mobilised during the Lawyers’ Movement in Pakistan (2007–2009) from the perspective of lawyer-leaders who organised, steered and sustained support for the Movement through rapidly shifting political conditions. By underscoring the contribution of lawyer-leaders in empowering judges, the article seeks both to displace uncritical assumptions and arguments about courts as the nucleus of legal mobilisation in Pakistan, and to highlight the crucial role of political parties in the restoration of the judiciary against the backdrop of disintegrating lawyer-judge coalitions. Given Pakistan’s political context of a ‘hybrid regime’, the article reflects on the unsuitability of the ‘legal complex’ theory of ‘political liberalism’ for analysing and understanding the Movement, and locates it instead in the literature on legal mobilisation in authoritarian regimes.

We address a curious omission from both the literature on the law of charity and socio-legal studies – the effect of apparently extraneous factors, such as politics and ideology, as well as the searching for money on the charitable purposes and identities of the public who are to benefit from the charity. This is a curious omission because even the law accepts that the idea of public benefit in charity law is a sociological concept, albeit one that has developed a technical meaning. We argue that approaching charitable purposes and public benefit as sociological concepts enables us to appreciate the tensions that those external factors produce as they re-shape those purposes and refashion the public who are to benefit. We refer to these factors under the rubric of the shaping effects of money. We use a case-study of the Canal and River Trust (CRT) to develop this argument. The trust was set up by the government as a charity to manage and control 2,000 miles of inland waterways in England and Wales. We draw on interviews with households who live on boats and ‘continuously cruise’ those boats on the canals to illustrate how their interests have been marginalised as the CRT has re-shaped itself as a well-being charity.

In this article I apply Fineman’s vulnerability thesis to explore the ways in which vulnerability is constructed and mobilised in a criminal law context. Using a ‘failure-to-protect’ offence as a case study reveals contemporary constructs of vulnerability as both a problem to be solved and gendered. Constructing women as pathologically vulnerable allows the state and its institutions to downplay the situational vulnerability of women, evading responsibility for tackling VAWG. Responsibilising women to manage risks to children posed by male violence requires that women undertake ‘safety work’, rendering them vulnerable to both moral and legal sanction if not performed adequately. Replacing the autonomous subject with the relationally vulnerable subject generates new understandings of the ways entwining femininity and vulnerability shores up the (male-coded) autonomous legal subject. Moreover, reconceiving vulnerability as universal reveals the potential of the vulnerable subject for a more inclusive criminal subject who is both embedded and embodied.

Contemporary asylum laws challenge the narratives of migrants and legal professional teams. Struggles arise in requirements to tell the right story defined by legal norms while storytelling in everyday life relies on sociocultural norms. Professionals working with socially and legally vulnerable populations, as in education and asylum cases, can bridge that gap if we understand narrating as a relational process with credibility and coherence developing over time in terms of the clients’ experience and institutional expectations. This paper presents dynamic storytelling methodology to guide such a process, applied successfully with a Roma community seeking inclusion in public education and used to interpret two unsuccessful asylum cases. Drawing on those examples, we conclude by proposing a socio-legal framework for collaborative lawyering in research on clinical legal training. The goal is a narrative process based on legal actors’ awareness that truth acquisition is a human sense-making process framed by human rights norms.

Sri Lanka’s Constitution authorises the state to limit certain fundamental freedoms on the grounds of specific public interests. This article examines how this constitutional limitation regime has become vulnerable to majoritarian influence. It uses a case study approach, supplemented by key informant interviews, to delve into Sri Lanka’s constitutional practice with respect to limitations on fundamental freedoms such as the freedom of religion or belief, and the freedom of expression. The article illustrates how organs of the Sri Lankan state have equated notions of ‘public interest’ with the majority community’s conceptions of ‘security’, ‘order’, ‘health’ and ‘morals’. It argues that this practice reflects a cleavage between the moral legitimacy and the legal claimability of fundamental freedoms of minorities and satirists in Sri Lanka. It concludes that legal regimes designed to guarantee fundamental freedoms offer very little protection to minorities when the underlying politics driving the application of law is majoritarian.

In an era of global sanitary, economic and ecological crisis, beliefs in the predictive power of artificial intelligence (AI) progressively penetrate the legal and political spheres, in search of new ways to anticipate and govern the future. In this context, it is critical to understand the idiosyncratic nature of the interplay between governance and algorithmic logics of prediction. This contribution discusses how the association between governance and AI makes the future knowable in the present and shapes a programmatic way of formalising, justifying and deploying action in the here and now. We focus on three principles of institutional mobilisation in the face of uncertainty and indeterminacy: precaution, pre-emption and preparedness, each of which is affected by the use of AI relying on so-called ‘real-time predictions’. Drawing from risk theory and Science and Technology Studies, we argue that the current convergence between AI and governance is shaping a new sociotechnical imaginary, promoting a distinctive conception of life and of the future in the age of the Anthropocene.