Academic Journals - latest articles

Social & Legal Studies recent issues

• Book review: The Ombudsman Enterprise and Administrative Justice
• Book review: A History of Drugs: Drugs and Freedom in the Liberal Age
• Contextualised Equality and the Politics of Legal Mobilisation: Affirmative Action in Northern Ireland
  

  This article examines the development of affirmative action and equality policies targeted at the two main ethno-national communities in Northern Ireland, as an example of ‘contextualised equality’. The argument places particular weight on a politics of legal mobilisation. The article suggests that the ability to connect post-1998 reforms, in practical and symbolic ways, to overriding inter-communal narratives was often a determining factor in identifying those elements of the Good Friday Agreement which advanced, or were constructed as achievable. The argument has implications for understanding how equality debates will progress, and explaining why certain agendas appear to ‘succeed’ and others ‘fail’.

  
  
  
• Book reveiw: Equality: The New Legal Framework
• Taking Exception: The Cases of Financial and Urban Governance
  

  The concept of the exception has garnered increasing notice from scholars, where it has been used to denote the outer limits, and yet most absolute embodiment, of sovereign rule. However, the concept and its relevance to law and governance in specific contexts remain underdeveloped. Drawing on detailed studies of two domains – financial and urban governance – where the importance of the exception is evident yet unrecognized, we argue that this concept provides a valuable analytic for thinking through, not the vicissitudes of sovereign rule, but rather the internal logics, possibilities, and limits of governmental programmes and the place of law therein. We use these empirical forays to develop the concept of the exception as a technicality of governance that bears critical implications for the nature, shape, and effects of governmental programmes.

  
  
  
• The Crown in a Multicultural Age: The Changing Epistemology of (Post)colonial Sovereignty
  

  In Canada as in other (post)colonial settings, courts have been facing the challenging task of redefining both substantive aboriginal legal rights and evidentiary rules that now look ethnocentric. Recent litigation has shown that while rights claims made by indigenous collectives are difficult to make and sustain in court, the newly revived doctrine of the Crown’s inherent ‘honour’ can work for aboriginal peoples precisely because the Crown’s honour is, as it were, self-acting. But the neo-medieval discourse of the Crown coexists, in the text of Canadian courts, with discursive practices that enact a contemporary, pluralistic, socially aware form of judicial anthropology. These two wholly conflicting representations of the Canadian state live happily side by side in current Canadian judicial discourse. This easy eclecticism stands in marked contrast to the difficulties and embarrassments experienced by aboriginal leaders testifying before judges. The close judicial scrutiny of aboriginal claims contrasts with the tolerance of major epistemological contradictions in the state’s discourses about itself.

  
  
  
• Are Judicial Approaches to Adult Social Care at a Dead-End?
  

  This article examines the limits of law to resolve or transform the contemporary dilemmas provoked by the provision of social care to adults in the UK. It juxtaposes the judgments in two cases, each of which interrogates the legal consequences of the mixed economy of care: the majority and minority opinions of the House of Lords in YL v Birmingham City Council (2007) and the Care Standards Tribunal decision in Alternative Futures v National Care Standards Commission (2002). We read the opinions/decisions as narratives that tell a variety of stories reconciling the different roles of law, the state, the family and the individual in the provision of care. Drawing upon David Scott’s concern with ‘the conceptual problem of political presents and with how reconstructed pasts and anticipated futures are thought out in relation to them’ (2004: 1), we seek to examine legal responses to the contractions and mutations of social welfare.

  
  
  
• Book review: Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights inCity-States and Democratic Courtrooms
• Auctoritatis Interpositio: How Systems Theory Deconstructs Decisionism
  

  A deconstructivist interpretation of Luhmann’s systems theory can provide a new basis for the understanding of legal decision-making. While legal scholars traditionally describe the process of judgement either as a stylized conclusion whose content educes from legal sources (judicial deduction) or – in the tradition of Carl Schmitt – as an act of will, whose normative content entails a creatio ex nihilo (judicial will), contemporary legal thought supports, for the most part, some form of compromise between the two theories. In a systems theoretical perspective, however, the opposing notions of will and deduction have to be traced back to a fundamental paradox of law, the paradox of legal decision-making. We argue that this paradox-oriented approach is not just another variation of decisionism of a Schmittian nature. Rather it goes well beyond decisionism in that it takes account of the societal context of the decision-making process and insists on the importance of the legal form and the autonomy of law as a social system. A deconstructivist interpretation further sets the stage for a new conception of the political dimension within law, by pointing out that legal decision-making in the light of undecidability is itself a political act. This conceptionalization calls for an identification of real-world social conflicts and their reformulation within the quaestio iuris.

  
  
  
• Book review: Prostitution, Politics and Policy