Social & Legal Studies

Publisher:
Sage Publications, Inc.
Publication date:
2021-09-06
ISBN:
0964-6639

Issue Number

Latest documents

  • “The Law is too Grey”: Liminal Legality and Moral Injury in Encounters with Drug Law Enforcement

    Overdose mortality and the legitimacy crisis facing policing have propelled momentum for drug law reform. Yet, resulting reforms and associated protections are often functionally undermined by enforcement practices and the legal environment faced by people who use drugs. To explore this tension, we conducted a community-based study in Ontario, Canada. Our findings show that people's experiences of policing at overdose events reflect a legal regime characterized by their ambiguous legal status and uncertain protections. We argue that the resulting state of liminal legality is enacted in large part through police discretion and the uneven distribution of enforcement practices across spaces and populations; individuals compensate for this legal environment by mobilizing their knowledge of legal risks. Together, these expressions of law and drug enforcement generate substantial moral injury among people who use drugs.

  • Symbiotic Justice: Hate Crimes, Police Humiliation, and Layered Legal Consciousness in Dalit Human Rights

    This article responds to scholarly critiques, which highlight the failures of hate crime legislation in delivering justice to historically oppressed groups. Drawing on ethnographic data on the mobilisation of India's only hate crime law – the Prevention of Atrocities (PoA) Act– among Dalit (untouchable) communities, the article proposes that the potential of hate crime law to create a restitution must be analysed in conversation with other social justice frameworks. In India, Dalit legal aid advocates interweave hate crime cases with a culturally specific discourse of Dalit human rights. By strategically bringing “failed” PoA investigations before India's National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), Dalit advocates hold the police accountable for negligent investigations, while also creating collective affects of hope for survivors of casteist crimes. This process, which I call symbiotic justice, engenders a form of legal consciousness, which regards hate crime law as a creative tool that can offer new avenues of agency.

  • Book Review: Gender Recognition and the Law: Troubling Transgender Peoples’ Engagement with Legal Regulation
  • Forced Marriage in Australia: Building a Social Response with Frontline Workers

    The practice of forced marriage has been the subject of focussed attention over the past 15 years in Australia. The policy approach has largely centred on criminal law responses. In this paper we turn to the social safety net, supports available for those experiencing pressure to marry or in a forced marriage, and their families. We report on eight focus groups with 56 participants working in key frontline roles, drawing on their perspectives to advance our understanding of key features of the social response. We identify four key features: the first is relational; frontline workers observe that an effective social response is contingent on trusting, client-led relationships. Secondly, appropriate framing and considered language is highlighted as critical. The third and fourth features are structural considerations within a social response: Australia's migration and asylum-seeking system and the resourcing of relevant social services.

  • Book Review: Leading Works in Criminal Law
  • Book Review: Infrastructure: New Trajectories in Law
  • The Lesser of Two Evils? Explaining Chinese Rural Migrant Workers’ Preference for On-demand Food Delivery Work With Reference to the Legal Framework

    Drawing on a series of interviews with on-demand food delivery riders, who are rural migrant workers, this paper seeks to explain the workers’ decision to give up stable jobs in factories in favour of largely unregulated and precarious on-demand work. Focusing on those aspects of the legal framework which shape workers’ decisions, it presents the explanation under the dual banners of ‘income’ and ‘freedom and flexibility’. In terms of income, Chinese law often enables low factory wages and a reliance on overtime; migrant workers view social insurance contributions as a loss; issues with payroll and wage arrears are significant. In terms of freedom and flexibility, insufficient rest rights lead to inadequate breaks for assembly line workers and, compounded by unspecified ‘special working time’ permit physically unbearable shifts without extra compensation. Age and gender discrimination are prevalent both in factories and various sectors. In contrast, on-demand delivery work has relatively low barriers to entry.

  • ‘Back Off! Stop Making US Illegal!’: The Criminalisation of Homelessness in Australia

    In Australia, vagrancy and public order laws have been used to criminalise homelessness since colonisation. Such laws have never provided an effective deterrent against ‘offending’ because most crimes committed by homeless people are survival-related or otherwise associated with their homeless status. It is generally agreed that a welfare-oriented rather than a punitive approach is needed if these ‘crimes’ are to be prevented, however the perspectives of homeless people on this subject remain largely unknown. We undertook a national study where we asked homeless individuals and criminal law practitioners to comment on whether and how criminal law processes could respond more appropriately to the ‘offending’ behaviour of homeless people. Practitioners viewed criminal law interventions as an opportunity to connect homeless individuals with the services they required. However, the homeless participants were not supportive of mandated social service intervention. They eschewed a criminal identity and wanted state actors to leave them alone.

  • Justice in Contention: The Dynamics of Legal Mobilisation in Caimanes’ Environmental Struggle

    This paper examines legal mobilisation in socio-environmental movements through the Caimanes case, a Chilean community opposing the Los Pelambres mining project. It integrates structural and agency perspectives, highlighting the community's adaptation to political and legal opportunities and focusing on distributive environmental justice. The study identifies two protest cycles: the first seeking compensation, leading to community divisions, and the second addressing mining externalities, fostering unity and solidarity. It discusses judicial mobilisation's limitations, including challenges in aligning community and legal advisors’ aims and constraints within the Chilean judicial system. The analysis, based on fieldwork and secondary sources, contributes to understanding legal strategies in environmental justice movements, emphasising strategic decision-making's importance.

  • ‘You Can Sue for Anything’: Student Rights to Participate in School Disciplinary Procedures and Legal Socialisation

    This study explored how participatory disciplinary systems in democratic (open) schools reflect distinct models of students’ collective rights to participate in decision making embedded in different patterns of legal socialisation. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with students, educators, and parents from three democratic schools in Israel, the study revealed contradictory approaches. One student participation model subscribes to a strictly legalistic approach, grounded in a criminal justice discourse and encompassing all aspects of the school's everyday life as well as after-school hours. A second model of participatory practices operates a flexible disciplinary system derived from mediative and therapeutic principles, applying procedural rules only in severe cases. The differences between the models indicate that participation does not inherently shape the contours of schools’ disciplinary systems. They challenge the dichotomous discourse in the literature on participation rights and legal socialisation, contrasting punitive vs. participative disciplinary methods and coercive vs. consensual approaches towards rules.

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