{"title":"Book Review: <i>Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge: Reflections on Power and Possibility</i> by FOLUKE ADEBISI","authors":"RUSSELL SANDBERG","doi":"10.1177/09646639231214753","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09646639231214753","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47163,"journal":{"name":"Social & Legal Studies","volume":"122 51","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136352014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Everyday Healthcare Regulation: British Newspapers and Complementary and Alternative Medicine","authors":"Michael Ashworth","doi":"10.1177/09646639231211234","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09646639231211234","url":null,"abstract":"This article interrogates the controversial field of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), focussing in particular on the implication of the British press in its regulation. It grounds its analysis in a ‘decentred’ understanding of regulation; a socio-legal approach which moves beyond formal regulation and regulators, and instead foregrounds diverse social actors and their attempts to alter behaviour across a given domain. Focussing on The Times newspaper as a case-study, it identifies five regulatory techniques through which the newspaper drew (and redrew) lines separating the safe from the risky, the efficacious from the sham, and the normal from the deviant. By analytically decentring CAM's formal regulation, this article provides a conceptual contribution. It highlights an everyday form of healthcare regulation directed at prospective users which may be just as significant in potentially guiding users towards or away from particular healthcare practices/practitioners as the more traditional, formal kinds of regulation identified in regulatory literatures.","PeriodicalId":47163,"journal":{"name":"Social & Legal Studies","volume":" 41","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135291952","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Revolving Door of Im/Migration: Canadian Refugee Protection and the Production of Migrant Workers","authors":"Azar Masoumi","doi":"10.1177/09646639231210270","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09646639231210270","url":null,"abstract":"This paper places the seemingly distinct projects of refugee protection and temporary foreign worker programs alongside one another to reveal their interlinked relationship. I argue that despite its seeming humanitarian exceptionality, refugee protection is deeply implicated in the production of both the category and supply of temporary foreign workers for the Canadian economy. I demonstrate that the defining limitations of refugee law in relation to questions of class and economic deprivation are integral to the conceptualization of the category of the migrant worker. I then engage with statistical data to show that patterns of refugee adjudications in Canada have contributed to maintaining the supply of temporary foreign workers. In particular, I show that Canada has consistently rejected refugee claims from key source countries of migrant workers, namely Jamaica and Mexico. By refusing these claims, Canadian refugee protection has constituted Jamaican and Mexican nationals as inappropriate subjects of permanent protection and, subsequently, primed them for incorporation as temporary foreign workers. In effect, Canadian im/migration has operated like a revolving door: pushing some nationalities out of the permanent protection of refugee status while pulling them into the precarious opening of temporary labour migration.","PeriodicalId":47163,"journal":{"name":"Social & Legal Studies","volume":"8 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135821499","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Legal Change and Legal Mobilisation: What Does Strategic Litigation Mean for Workers and Trade Unions?","authors":"Ruth Dukes, Eleanor Kirk","doi":"10.1177/09646639231204942","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09646639231204942","url":null,"abstract":"This article addresses the question of what strategic litigation means for workers and trade unions. Drawing on the existing literature and on a series of semi-structured interviews with union officials, lawyers with experience in representing them and other actors from across the labour movement, it explores how U.K. trade unions and actors within them understand and experience strategic litigation and legal mobilisation, what they seek to achieve, and what has been effective and ineffective for them. Uncovering both differences and commonalities between different unions, it suggests that the decision to devote union resources to – usually very costly – litigation is never taken lightly. Trade union approaches to strategic litigation involve neither a straightforward embrace of it nor an outright scepticism regarding its potential.","PeriodicalId":47163,"journal":{"name":"Social & Legal Studies","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135731231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Removals of ‘Dangerous’ Mobile EU Citizens: Public Order and Security as a Police Paradigm","authors":"Jukka Könönen","doi":"10.1177/09646639231207353","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09646639231207353","url":null,"abstract":"Despite being frequently invoked in everyday police work and immigration enforcement to justify coercive measures, public order and security remains an ambiguous legal concept. For EU citizens, the Citizens’ Rights Directive stipulates public order and security grounds to provide a higher threshold against removals than criminal convictions alone. However, the removal grounds for EU citizens were founded on even less than criminal convictions in analysis of 100 removal orders for mobile Estonian and Romanian citizens in Finland. Ultimately, the removal orders relied on the assumption of future crimes and invoked a conception of ‘dangerous individuals’ with criminal tendencies, even based on single minor offences and administrative penal orders without criminal convictions. Notwithstanding various legal meanings, I argue that the required public order and security grounds for the removal of EU citizens corresponded to police conceptions of mobile populations as a potential source of criminality and a threat to social order.","PeriodicalId":47163,"journal":{"name":"Social & Legal Studies","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136079200","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Unionising Sex Workers and Other Feminists","authors":"Katie Cruz","doi":"10.1177/09646639231206695","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09646639231206695","url":null,"abstract":"A minor movement of strippers and sex workers are unionising as the Sex Workers’ Union (SWU) branch of the Bakers Food & Allied Workers Union. SWU have produced a counter hegemonic perspective on law and society in the process of class struggle. This perspective demystifies the view that strippers and sex workers are free workers and enterprising subjects, or unfree vulnerable victims in need of state protection. SWU's counter hegemonic perspective inverts this common-sense assumption and posits that strippers and sex workers are unfree workers and free sexual subjects. This demystification is evident in SWU's ‘feminist law work’, which demands decommodification and decriminalisation for all sex workers by working within, and against, official law. In conclusion, I argue that there are at least three reasons why other feminists should support SWU by ceasing eradication of sex work via criminalisation and closure campaigns. This would open space for a politics of solidarity between sex workers and other feminists, centred on the conditions within which sex workers’ labour is commodified.","PeriodicalId":47163,"journal":{"name":"Social & Legal Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135346344","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Judicial Production of Racial Injustice in <i>Taiwo v Olaigbe:</i> Decolonising the Incomplete Story on Race and Contracting","authors":"Asta Zokaityte, Will Robinson Mbioh","doi":"10.1177/09646639231205275","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09646639231205275","url":null,"abstract":"In Taiwo, one of the most recent landmark cases on racial justice, the Supreme Court rejected race discrimination claims of two domestic migrant workers, ruling that discrimination on the basis of ‘immigration status’ should not be equated to discrimination on the basis of ‘race’. This article presents an argument for decolonising judicial decision-making, using Taiwo as an example to reimagine a much more favourable outcome for victims of racial injustice. This argument is explored through three propositions for decolonial judgment: (a) challenging racial bias in judicial reasoning and legal doctrine; (b) challenging legal frameworks as sites of racial oppression and inequality; and (c) accounting for contextual diversity of experiences of racialisation, avoiding essentialist arguments and categories of racial discrimination. Drawing on these, the article retells the stories in Taiwo to challenge the dominant, traditional race equality paradigm and expose the varied and multi-layered ways in which people are racialised differently across historical and socio-cultural contexts and communities. It also opens the potential for an epistemic shift away from the liberal paradigm of ‘freedom of contract’ and towards the analysis of racial contracting that is co-constituted by multi-layered and context-situated structures of oppression and domination.","PeriodicalId":47163,"journal":{"name":"Social & Legal Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134975156","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lawyers as Constructive Ideologists of Corporate Capitalism: The Legal Framing of Software","authors":"Sol Picciotto","doi":"10.1177/09646639231200420","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09646639231200420","url":null,"abstract":"The study of law as a social process should combine an analysis of structures from a political economy perspective with a sociological focus on the practices of lawyering in mediating social relations and conflicts through the formulation and interpretation of legal texts. This approach is applied here to software, which has become the oxygen of the world economy, powering the digitalisation that has transformed economic activities and social life. The forms this has taken have been moulded by lawyers, battling over intellectual property rights in computer programs, enshrining them in national law and international standards, as well as devising the international tax avoidance strategies that have helped propel the giant digital-tech transnational corporations to global dominance. These contests have taken place through processes of formulation and interpretation of the legal concepts that both reflect and shape social struggles over economic and political power, mediated by law, in contemporary corporate capitalism.","PeriodicalId":47163,"journal":{"name":"Social & Legal Studies","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135538806","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Resilience-building in Adversarial Trials: Witnesses, Special Measures and the Principle of Orality","authors":"Samantha Fairclough","doi":"10.1177/09646639231201913","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09646639231201913","url":null,"abstract":"Using Fineman's vulnerability theory, this paper argues that the traditional adversarial approach to examining witnesses in criminal trials – premised on the principle of orality – reduces the resilience of those giving evidence. This is because the adversarial setting often leaves those testifying in a heightened state of stress, reducing the quality and reliability of their evidence as a result. In turn, this traditional approach to securing oral witness testimony in criminal trials loses resilience, in that it becomes more difficult to justify as the general approach. The use of special measures – to adjust the way testimony is given and ameliorate some of the associated stressors – provides resilience to the individual testifying, the robustness of their evidence, and the safety of consequent criminal verdicts. The positive effects special measures yield therefore lend additional resilience to our commitment to the principle of orality and the principles upon which it rests. This article concludes that the State should maximise such resilience-building through more generous special measures provision.","PeriodicalId":47163,"journal":{"name":"Social & Legal Studies","volume":"27 5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135307132","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}