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Founded in 1997, Cambridge Studies in Law and Society is a hub for leading scholarship in socio-legal studies. Located at the intersection of law, the humanities, and the social sciences, it publishes empirically innovative and theoretically sophisticated work on law's manifestations in everyday life: from discourses to practices, and from institutions to cultures. The series editors have longstanding expertise in the interdisciplinary study of law, and welcome contributions that place legal phenomena in national, comparative, or international perspective. Series authors come from a range of disciplines, including anthropology, history, law, literature, political science, and sociology.

  • Series Editors: Mark Fathi Massoud, University of California, Santa Cruz, Jens Meierhenrich, London School of Economics and Political Science, Rachel E. Stern, University of California, Berkeley

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141 results in Cambridge Studies in Law and Society

Page 3 of 8

Measuring Justice
  • Quantitative Accountability and the National Prosecuting Authority in South Africa
  • Johanna Mugler
  • Published online:
    22 June 2019
    Print publication:
    27 June 2019
  • Measuring Justice explores the ways in which South African court and managerial prosecutors deal with the quantification of social phenomena - such as justice, professional work or accountability - and address the radical simplifications of their inherent complexities, misrepresentations and editing as a consequence. While various studies show the concern of professionals about the damaging effects these quantitative forms of accountability have on the creativity, freedom and collaborative nature of expert systems, Mugler shows that the reactions and attitudes of these legal professionals differ substantially. Through careful scrutiny of the everyday work of prosecutors and how they reflect on the relationship between accountability, quantification and law, this book argues that actors who work daily with quantitative accountability measures develop a numerical reflexivity about the process.

The Legal Process and the Promise of Justice
  • Studies Inspired by the Work of Malcolm Feeley
  • Edited by Rosann Greenspan, Hadar Aviram, Jonathan Simon
  • Published online:
    18 April 2019
    Print publication:
    13 June 2019
  • Malcolm Feeley, one of the founding giants of the law and society field, is also one of its most exciting, diverse, and contemporary scholars. His works have examined criminal courts, prison reform, the legal profession, legal professionalism, and a variety of other important topics of enduring theoretical interest with a keen eye for the practical implications. In this volume, The Legal Process and the Promise of Justice, an eminent group of contemporary law and society scholars offer fresh and original analyzes of his work. They asses the legacy of Feeley's theoretical innovations, put his findings to the test of time, and provide provocative historical and international perspectives for his insights. This collection of original essays not only draws attention to Professor Feeley's seminal writings but also to the theories and ideas of others who, inspired by Feeley, have explored how courts and the legal process really work to provide a promise of justice.

Negotiating the Power of NGOs
  • Women's Legal Rights in South Africa
  • Reem Wael
  • Published online:
    01 April 2019
    Print publication:
    11 April 2019
  • This book focuses on the socio-political environment that allows for the impactful work of NGOs through their proximity to local communities. The book showcases how this space has helped South African women's rights NGOs to bring about crucial legal reforms, which are quite relevant to women's lived realities. Recognizing its limitations, the South African state encourages NGOs to work freely on the ground and with state institutions to ameliorate the conditions for women's rights. The outcome of this state-NGO dynamic can be seen in the numerous human rights gains achieved by NGOs in general, and by women's rights organizations specifically. In addition, vulnerable communities such as women living under customary law have a significantly better chance to access justice. The book then demonstrates the opposite scenario, using Egypt as a case study, where NGOs are viewed as a national threat, and consequently operate under restrictive rules.

Gift Exchange
  • The Transnational History of a Political Idea
  • Grégoire Mallard
  • Published online:
    25 March 2019
    Print publication:
    14 March 2019
  • Since Marcel Mauss published his foundational essay The Gift in 1925, many anthropologists and specialists of international relations have seen in the exchange of gifts, debts, loans, concessions or reparations the sources of international solidarity and international law. Still, Mauss's reflections were deeply tied to the context of interwar Europe and the French colonial expansion. Their normative dimension has been profoundly questioned after the age of decolonization. A century after Mauss, we may ask: what is the relevance of his ideas on gift exchanges and international solidarity? By tracing how Mauss's theoretical and normative ideas inspired prominent thinkers and government officials in France and Algeria, from Pierre Bourdieu to Mohammed Bedjaoui, Grégoire Mallard adds a building block to our comprehension of the role that anthropology, international law, and economics have played in shaping international economic governance from the age of European colonization to the latest European debt crisis. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Children as ‘Risk'
  • Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by Children and Young People
  • Anne-Marie McAlinden
  • Published online:
    20 September 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018
  • This book critically examines socio-political constructions of risk related to sexual offending behaviour by and among children and young people and charts the rise of harmful sexual or exploitative behaviour among peers, drawing on a range of theoretical frameworks and primary research. Discussion of these behaviours is exhibited against a backdrop of the premature cultural sexualisation of contemporary childhood, which challenges traditional conceptions of childhood, victimhood and gendered sexual identities more broadly. It examines the complexities of peer-based sexual behaviours in a range of settings, including within organisational contexts such as schools and care homes, within families and peer-based relationships, as well as online contexts including sexting and cyberbullying. It draws out the myriad legal, practical and policy challenges of negotiating the boundaries between normal/experimental, risky/problematic and harmful sexual behaviour, and in particular the demarcation between coercion and consent, both for professionals as well as children and young people themselves.

Law's Trials
  • The Performance of Legal Institutions in the US 'War on Terror'
  • Richard L. Abel
  • Published online:
    06 September 2018
    Print publication:
    09 August 2018
  • The US 'war on terror' has repeatedly violated fundamental rule of law values. When executive and legislature commit such egregious wrongs, courts represent the ultimate defense. Law's Trials: The Performance of Legal Institutions in the US 'War on Terror' offers the first comprehensive account of judicial performance during the sixteen years of the Bush and Obama administrations. Abel examines criminal prosecutions of alleged terrorists, courts martial of military personnel accused of law of war violations, military commission trials of 'high value detainees', habeas corpus petitions by Guantánamo detainees, civil damage actions by victims of both the 'war on terror' and terrorism, and civil liberties violations by government officials and Islamophobic campaigners. Law's Trials identifies successful defenses of the rule of law through qualitative and quantitative analyses, comparing the behavior of judges within and between each category of cases and locating those actions in a comparative history of efforts to redress fundamental injustices.

Law's Wars
  • The Fate of the Rule of Law in the US 'War on Terror'
  • Richard L. Abel
  • Published online:
    23 August 2018
    Print publication:
    16 August 2018
  • The US 'war on terror', which Bush declared and Obama continued, repeatedly violated fundamental rule of law values. Law's Wars: The Fate of the Rule of Law in the US 'War on Terror' is the first comprehensive account of efforts to resist and correct those violations. It focuses on responses to abuses in Abu Ghraib, efforts by Guantánamo Bay detainees to improve conditions of confinement in and win release, exposés of and efforts to end torture and electronic surveillance, and civilian casualties on the battlefield, including targeted killings. Abel deploys a law and society perspective to construct and analyze detailed narratives of the roles of victims, whistle-blowers, the media, NGOs, lawyers, doctors, politicians, military personnel, foreign governments and international organizations in defending the rule of law. Only by understanding past errors can we hope to prevent their repetition in what promises to be an endless 'war on terror'.

Constituting Religion
  • Islam, Liberal Rights, and the Malaysian State
  • Tamir Moustafa
  • Published online:
    04 August 2018
    Print publication:
    25 July 2018
  • Most Muslim-majority countries have legal systems that enshrine both Islam and liberal rights. While not necessarily at odds, these dual commitments nonetheless provide legal and symbolic resources for activists to advance contending visions for their states and societies. Using the case study of Malaysia, Constituting Religion examines how these legal arrangements enable litigation and feed the construction of a 'rights-versus-rites binary' in law, politics, and the popular imagination. By drawing on extensive primary source material and tracing controversial cases from the court of law to the court of public opinion, this study theorizes the 'judicialization of religion' and the radiating effects of courts on popular legal and religious consciousness. The book documents how legal institutions catalyze ideological struggles, which stand to redefine the nation and its politics. Probing the links between legal pluralism, social movements, secularism, and political Islamism, Constituting Religion sheds new light on the confluence of law, religion, politics, and society. This title is also available as Open Access.

Transforming Gender Citizenship
  • The Irresistible Rise of Gender Quotas in Europe
  • Edited by Éléonore Lépinard, Ruth Rubio-Marín
  • Published online:
    21 July 2018
    Print publication:
    19 July 2018
  • Gender quotas are a controversial policy measure. However, over the past twenty years they have been widely adopted around the world and especially in Europe. They are now used in politics, corporate boards, state and local public administration and even in civil society organizations. This book explores this unprecedented phenomenon, providing a unique comparative perspective on gender quotas' adoption across thirteen European countries. It also studies resistance to gender quotas by political parties and supreme courts. Providing up-to-date comprehensive data on gender quotas regulations, Transforming Gender Citizenship proposes a typology of countries, from those which have embraced gender quotas as a new way to promote gender equality in all spheres of social life, to those who have consistently refused gender quotas as a tool for gender equality. Reflecting on divergences and commonalities across Europe, the authors analyze how gender quotas may transform dominant conception of citizenship and gender equality.

The Invention of the Passport
  • Surveillance, Citizenship and the State
  • 2nd edition
  • John C. Torpey
  • Published online:
    06 July 2018
    Print publication:
    26 July 2018
  • This book presents the first detailed history of the modern passport and why it became so important for controlling movement in the modern world. It explores the history of passport laws, the parliamentary debates about those laws, and the social responses to their implementation. The author argues that modern nation-states and the international state system have 'monopolized the 'legitimate means of movement',' rendering persons dependent on states' authority to move about - especially, though not exclusively, across international boundaries. This new edition reviews other scholarship, much of which was stimulated by the first edition, addressing the place of identification documents in contemporary life. It also updates the story of passport regulations from the publication of the first edition, which appeared just before the terrorist attacks of 9/11, to the present day.

A Sociology of Justice in Russia
  • Edited by Marina Kurkchiyan, Agnieszka Kubal
  • Published online:
    27 June 2018
    Print publication:
    12 July 2018
  • Much of the media coverage and academic literature on Russia suggests that the justice system is unreliable, ineffective and corrupt. But what if we look beyond the stereotypes and preconceptions? This volume features contributions from a number of scholars who studied Russia empirically and in-depth, through extensive field research, observations in courts, and interviews with judges and other legal professionals as well as lay actors. A number of tensions in the everyday experiences of justice in Russia are identified and the concept of the 'administerial model of justice' is introduced to illuminate some of the less obvious layers of Russian legal tradition including: file-driven procedure, extreme legal formalism combined with informality of the pre-trial proceedings, followed by ritualistic format of the trial. The underlying argument is that Russian justice is a much more complex system than is commonly supposed, and that it both requires and deserves a more nuanced understanding.

The Powers of Law
  • A Comparative Analysis of Sociopolitical Legal Studies
  • Mauricio García-Villegas
  • Published online:
    20 April 2018
    Print publication:
    03 May 2018
  • Comparative studies can reveal much about how law is formed out of social reality and political power by exploring these interactions in different national contexts. In this work Mauricio García-Villegas compares ideas about law and society in France and the United States, demonstrating different approaches to sociopolitical legal studies. Using the interdisciplinary tools of the sociology of law, critical legal theory, and sociolegal studies, García-Villegas builds up an insightful overview of what constitutes law and society theory and practice in France and the United States. He brings together diverse perspectives and practices that generally do not communicate well with one another, as is often the case between the critical theory of law of jurists and the legal sociology of sociologists. This study will allow readers to understand the sociology of law in a comparative perspective and sets out a new research agenda for the field of sociopolitical legal studies.

Ruling before the Law
  • The Politics of Legal Regimes in China and Indonesia
  • William Hurst
  • Published online:
    04 April 2018
    Print publication:
    19 April 2018
  • How do legal systems actually operate outside of Western European or North American liberal democracies? To understand law and legal institutions globally, we must go beyond asking if countries comply with idealized, yet under-theorized, rule of law principles to determine how they work in practice. Examining legal regimes across different areas of criminal and civil law in both urban and rural China and Indonesia during distinct periods from 1949 to the present, William Hurst offers a new way of understanding how cases are adjudicated (and with what implications) across authoritarian, developing, post-colonial, and newly democratizing settings. This is the first systematic comparative study of the world's largest Communist and majority-Muslim nations, and the most comprehensive scholarly work in many years on the micro-level workings of either the Chinese or Indonesian legal system at the grassroots, based on a decade of research and extensive fieldwork in multiple Indonesian and Chinese provinces.

Injury and Injustice
  • The Cultural Politics of Harm and Redress
  • Edited by Anne Bloom, David M. Engel, Michael McCann
  • Published online:
    24 February 2018
    Print publication:
    15 March 2018
  • This book addresses some of the most difficult and important debates over injury and law now taking place in societies around the world. The essays tackle the inescapable experience of injury and its implications for social inequality in different cultural settings. Topics include the tension between physical and reputational injuries, the construction of human injuries versus injuries to non-human life, virtual injuries, the normalization and infliction of injuries on vulnerable victims, the question of reparations for slavery, and the paradoxical degradation of victims through legal actions meant to compensate them for their disabilities. Authors include social theorists, social scientists and legal scholars, and the subject matter extends to the Middle East and Asia, as well as North America.

Muslim Women's Quest for Justice
  • Gender, Law and Activism in India
  • Mengia Hong Tschalaer
  • Published online:
    08 February 2018
    Print publication:
    10 March 2017
  • This book is an urban ethnographic study of several Muslim women's organisations in northern India. These organisations work to carve out spaces that allow for the articulation of alternative experiences and conceptions of religion and justice that challenge Islamic orthodoxy as well as the monopoly of the Indian state in the domain of family law. While most analyses on reform efforts within Muslim family law in India have focused on women's protection within the state legal system, this book offers the rare opportunity to understand how organised groups of Muslim women's rights activists contest marginalising forces present in the family and criminal courts, Shariat courts, local mosques, workplace, legislature and legal documents. It pushes against troubling assumptions that Islam is incompatible with ideas of women's rights and that the State is the only dispenser of justice, and offers new directions for studies on the dispersed nature of women's identities in Islamic family law.

Hunting Justice
  • Displacement, Law, and Activism in the Kalahari
  • Maria Sapignoli
  • Published online:
    02 February 2018
    Print publication:
    15 February 2018
  • This book presents a long-term study of the activist campaign that contested the Botswana government's much-publicized removal of the San and Bakgalagadi people from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. Sapignoli's multiple points of observation and analysis range from rural Botswana to the nation's High Court, and a variety of United Nations agencies in their Headquarters, focusing on rights claimants and officials from NGOs, states and the United Nations as they acted on the grievances of those who had been displaced. In offering a comprehensive discussion of the San people and their claims-making through formal institutions, this book maintains a consistent focus on the increased recourse to law and the everyday experience of those who are asserting their rights in response to the encroachments of the state and the opportunities inherent in new indigenous advocacy networks.

Insiders, Outsiders, Injuries, and Law
  • Revisiting 'The Oven Bird's Song'
  • Edited by Mary Nell Trautner
  • Published online:
    21 December 2017
    Print publication:
    11 January 2018
  • A central theme of law and society is that people's ideas about law and the decisions they make to mobilize law are shaped by community norms and cultural context. But this was not always an established concept. Among the first empirical pieces to articulate this theory was David Engel's 1984 article, 'The Oven Bird's Song: Insiders, Outsiders, and Personal Injuries in an American Community'. Over thirty years later, this article is now widely considered to be part of the law and society canon. This book argues that Engel's article succeeds so brilliantly because it integrates a wide variety of issues, such as cultural transformation, attitudes about law, dispute processing, legal consciousness, rights mobilization, inclusion and exclusion, and inequality. Contributors to this volume explore the influence of Engel's important work, engaging with the possibilities in its challenging hypotheses and provocative omissions related to the legal system and legal process, class conflict and difference, and law in other cultures.

Criminalizing Children
  • Welfare and the State in Australia
  • David McCallum
  • Published online:
    08 December 2017
    Print publication:
    21 December 2017
  • Incarceration of children is rising rapidly throughout of Australia, with indigenous children most at risk of imprisonment. Indigenous and non-indigenous children have been subject to detention in both welfare and justice systems in Australian states and territories since colonization. Countless governments and human rights enquiries have attempted to address the problem of the increasing criminalization of children, with little success. David McCallum traces the history of 'problem children' over several decades, demonstrating that the categories of neglected and offending children are both linked to similar kinds of governing. Institutions and encampments have historically played a significant role in contributing to the social problems of today. This book also takes a theoretical perspective, tracking parallel developments within the human sciences of childhood and theories of race. Applying a social theoretical analysis of these events and the changing rationalities of governing, McCallum challenges our assumptions about how law and governance of children leads to their criminalization and incarceration.

Global Lawmakers
  • International Organizations in the Crafting of World Markets
  • Susan Block-Lieb, Terence C. Halliday
  • Published online:
    14 November 2017
    Print publication:
    26 October 2017
  • Global lawmaking by international organizations holds the potential for enormous influence over world trade and national economies. Representatives from states, industries, and professions produce laws for worldwide adoption in an effort to alter state lawmaking and commercial behaviors, whether of giant multi-national corporations or micro, small and medium-sized businesses. Who makes that law and who benefits affects all states and all market players. Global Lawmakers offers the first extensive empirical study of commercial lawmaking within the United Nations. It shows who makes law for the world, how they make it, and who comes out ahead. Using extensive and unique data, the book investigates three episodes of lawmaking between the late 1990s and 2012. Through its original socio-legal orientation, it reveals dynamics of competition, cooperation and competitive cooperation within and between international organizations, including the UN, World Bank, IMF and UNIDROIT, as these IOs craft international laws. Global Lawmakers proposes an original theory of international organizations that seek to construct transnational legal orders within social ecologies of lawmaking. The book concludes with an appraisal of creative global governance by the UN in international commerce over the past fifty years and examines prospective challenges for the twenty-first century.

Duties to Care
  • Dementia, Relationality and Law
  • Rosie Harding
  • Published online:
    01 September 2017
    Print publication:
    24 August 2017
  • The world of dementia care can be a difficult one for carers to navigate, posing new challenges at every stage from diagnosis to end of life. In her ground-breaking investigation, rooted in original empirical data, Rosie Harding explores the regulatory and legal dimensions of caring for a person with dementia. By exploring carers' experiences of dementia care, she critiques the limitations of current approaches to health and social care regulation. This socio-legal work is a new contribution to the study of feminist care ethics, relationality, and vulnerability theory. Duties to Care argues that by understanding the relational contexts that shape everyday experiences of regulatory structures, we will better understand where law is operating to support carers, and where it adds to the difficulties they experience. Ultimately, the challenges that dementia poses will be addressed only if we find solutions that take account of the relationality of life, dementia, and law.

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