Journal of Law and Society

Publisher:
Wiley
Publication date:
2021-02-01
ISBN:
0263-323X

Issue Number

Latest documents

  • Applied Legal Pluralism: Processes, Driving Forces and Effects By Ghislain Otis, Jean LeClair, and Sophie Thériault, London: Routledge, 2022, 284 pp., £130.00
  • The emotional labour of judges in jury trials

    Judges are required to suppress and manage their own emotions as well as those of other court users and staff in their everyday work. Previous studies have examined the complex emotional labour undertaken by judges, but there is limited research on the emotion management performed by judges in their interactions with jurors. Drawing on a qualitative study of judge–jury relations in criminal trials in Ireland, we illustrate how judges learn and habituate emotional labour practices through informal and indirect processes. Judges described managing their emotions to demonstrate impartiality and objectivity. Their accounts also underline the importance of balancing presentations of neutrality with empathy, as well as being mindful of the potential emotional toll of jury service on jurors.

  • Issue Information
  • Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Criminal Law OpinionsEdited by Bennett Capers, Sarah Deer, and Corey Rayburn Yung, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023, 306 pp., £39.99
  • Care on the move: the gender care gap and intra‐EU mobility

    The structure, interpretation, and implementation of the European Union (EU) free movement of persons rules mean that when one's circumstances involve caring responsibilities, the quality of one's rights and protections under EU law diminishes. The consequence of this, in the context of the gender care gap, is that women who are exercising their free movement rights and living in another EU member state are exposed to a disproportionately increased risk of legal and physical precarity, poverty, destitution, and exploitation. They face challenges in attaining and retaining rights and are at risk of falling through gaps that exist between legal rules. Furthermore, the gender care gap is not visible. The connection between the gender care gap and the EU free movement rules has not been made by EU policy makers and civil society; there is currently no strategy among EU civil society organizations to represent the lived experience of EU citizens and lobby the EU institutions for progress on gender equality in this regard.

  • ‘Would any of them have suffered from a guilty conscience if they had won?’: Rudolf Wiethölter and post‐Second World War German law1

    This article reads the theory of law of the Frankfurter jurist Rudolf Wiethölter as an ambitious attempt to realize through law the indispensable radical democratization of post‐Second World War German society. The occasion was provided by the resurgence of critical theory and the subsequent and related emergence and affirmation of the student protest movement of 1968 at the Goethe University Frankfurt. Following the thread of the conflict/dialogue at the university with fellow philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the article brings into focus some stages in the evolution of Wiethölter's critical theory of law and of ‘true jurists’.

  • Five angry men: advocating for and mobilizing EU gender equality law to advance men's rights

    This article analyses the impact of a men's rights organization involved in political lobbying and legal mobilization around gender equality issues at the European level since 1986. Drawing on the as‐yet unexplored archival materials of the Campaign for Equal State Pension Ages (CESPA), an organization that had a membership of about 1,200 individuals in the 1990s and later rebranded itself as PARITY, the article explores the meaning of European Union gender equality advocacy and mobilization by and for an organization initially composed exclusively of men based in the United Kingdom. It argues that anti‐discrimination law was successively used as a strategic tool by this organization to further class equality and as a potentially anti‐feminist instrument to defend men's rights.

  • The making of neoliberal legality: the legal imagination of business elites and the ‘social constitutionalization’ of ‘free enterprise’ in Latin America

    The ‘free enterprise’ system is a normative cornerstone of many Latin American political constitutions and a formative principle of neoliberal legality. However, the way in which this economic model shapes the legal field and conceptions of the rule of law remains understudied. Though lawyers, judges, and legal experts have played an important role in the legal buttressing of the free enterprise model, this article explores the shaping of neoliberal legality from the periphery of the juridical system. We argue that the rise of neoliberal legality in Latin America owes much to the legal imaginary crafted by business associations. In line with this, we examine the ‘norm entrepreneurship’ undertaken since the 1940s by an organization barely noted in mainstream histories of neoliberalism: the Inter‐American Council for Commerce and Production (IACCP). Drawing on the concept of social constitutionalism and archival work, we investigate the IACCP's role in the struggle to give business activities social legitimacy and establish free enterprise as a socio‐legal norm and a source of public law.

  • ‘Human rights cities’ in Africa? Rights as resources for urban governance in the Global South

    This article considers the use of human rights law as a resource for urban governance by African cities, thereby supplementing the growing literature on ‘human rights cities’ that has thus far focused on the experiences of cities in the Global North. It considers the motivations for and impact of human rights city initiatives, before taking a closer look at reported instances of rights invocation in and by African cities and pointing to factors that explain the seemingly limited traction of human rights law for urban local governments on the continent. The article shows that incomplete and politically contested devolution arrangements across African constitutional systems have combined with pressures pertaining to the domestic enforceability of socio‐economic rights to structure a somewhat cautious and fraught, but nevertheless promising, relationship between local governments in African cities and human rights law.

  • Shari'a, Inshallah: Finding God in Somali Legal Politics By Mark Fathi Massoud, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, 368 pp., £84.99

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