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This paper proposes a historical contextual pedagogy for private international, which helps students reflect on the impact of the field's legal techniques in different historical contexts. To emphasise the richness of a historical lens, the paper reflects on the development and use of private international law tort rules in a colonial, intellectual and gender historical context. By taking Phillips v. Eyre as a reference, the goal is to illustrate how the canonical cases in private international law can serve as entry points towards a broader historical contextualisation of private international law, beyond the doctrine, though inspired by it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across scholarship and legal practice, family law is widely recognised as a subject that is inextricable from the social and cultural forces that shape our understanding of how families work and how they are positioned within society. This paper argues that it is now time to build upon this by integrating an explicit awareness of political context into how we teach family law. This is because teachers of family law are now faced with an urgent challenge: the encroachment of neoliberal governance into all corners of family justice. Neoliberal ideas are far from new, but they are increasingly shaping dominant ideas about what family law is for, who should be entitled to use it and, even in some circumstances, questioning the very legitimacy of family law or legal processes as means for supporting families experiencing breakdown. In response to this challenge, this paper advocates the importance of guiding students to look beyond family law doctrine in order to consider how political initiatives, trends and debates have the power to shape the procedures and processes through which family disputes are resolved. It will argue that drawing this contextual awareness into family law studies is crucially important to ensure that the future development of family law as both a scholarly discipline and an area of practice is centred on the needs and lived experiences of families who need it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2012, judges and prosecutors in Benin have repeatedly protested against political interference and demanded compliance with their statutorily guaranteed independence. In 2014 and 2017, magistrates demonstrated in their judicial robes in the streets, protesting against the government's bill to deprive them of their right to strike and other freedoms. Benin has been described as a 'success story of democracy' (Stroh and Never, 2006, p. 1) and even as a 'model democracy' (cf. Kohnert, 1996, p. 78; Magnusson, 2001, p. 211; Bierschenk, 2009) since its peaceful transition to democratic conditions and its participation in a national conference in 1990/91. So why were magistrates in Benin demonstrating in the streets for the first time in the history of their profession? Based on fieldwork in Benin in 2009 and 2015 and archival research in 2017 in France, my paper analyses the change in the style of interactions between parts of the executive and parts of the judiciary in the history of the profession – a change from political negotiation to confrontation. Through their strikes and industrial action, magistrates fought for judicial independence; yet, at the same time they constructed legality and strengthened democracy because their actions emphasised the rule of law. My paper also considers the specifics of their strikes in the context of other striking civil servants. When magistrates, as bureaucrats, become politically active, it marks a transformation in their self-conception, as they are usually reserved and withdraw themselves from political and public spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is policy implementation affected by increased polarisation and extreme shifts in politics? In order to address this question, the paper focuses on frontline workers' (street-level bureaucrats') interpretations of political shifts and how these are then translated into practice. Building on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among social workers in Northeast Brazil, the paper proposes a theoretical framework for analysing the influence of political landscapes on policy implementation by foregrounding the political processes in which these agents play a critical role. Drawing on empirical data, the paper proposes ideal types of possible outcomes of translation practices – counterbalance, collaboration, resistance – that function as a guiding framework for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on ethnographic research across two street-level bureaucratic institutions in Istanbul, Turkey in the late 2010s, this paper traces the causes and implications of the politicisation of bureaucrats in the context of authoritarianisation. It argues that politicisation of bureaucrats cannot solely be taken as a reflection of the erosion of bureaucratic autonomy and capacity but must be explored further to reveal how bureaucrats cope with authoritarian pressure as well socio-legal destabilisations to preserve their institutional ethos. To this aim, I demonstrate how bureaucrats get politicised in response to authoritarian policies and, in turn, labour to uphold the rule of law despite politico-legal risks. The paper particularly focuses on how bureaucrats weave political solidarity and circulate anti-government discourses and how they use their knowledge of the legal-regulatory repertoire and archives to deter and 'correct' unlawful practices through their everyday work. The paper generates insights into the fashionings of political subjectivities and agency by bureaucrats through their labouring in the face of authoritarian interventions, legal disruptions and the increasing interactions with the citizenry. In doing this, my objective is to shed light on the everyday workings of authoritarian state and to get a better picture of the way the law is 'made real' (Latour, 2002) across mundane encounters between bureaucrats and the citizenry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the tension between law's opportunity to deliver social transformation and the normative limitations that shape its effectiveness as a tool of social struggle. The role of law's normative limitations on legal mobilisation strategies, or the effect of entrenched social interests on permissible legal claims, has not been properly conceptualised in legal mobilisation scholarship. In response, this paper presents a conceptual framework that comprehends the opportunity and limitation of legal mobilisation as caught in the tension between the interpretive opportunity to redetermine legal meaning and the normative deficit inherent to this task. By re-engaging with the theoretical underpinnings of legal mobilisation, we will evaluate the potential for certain types of social transformation using law and revisit the rationale for strategic legal action. We will bring together our conceptual treatment of legal mobilisation with a sobering analysis of the Argentinian factory recuperation movement's mobilisation of legal demands. The movement's relative success in confronting the legal system's commitment to private property rights and winning protections for worker co-operatives presents an opportunity to learn about the effective potential of legal strategy and the extent to which it can be used to confront the normative commitments of a legal system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the functioning of law and legal institutions in Palestine/Israel through the lens of settler colonialism by analysing two thematically interconnected decisions issued by the Supreme Court of Israel, the first involving the starvation of besieged Palestinian civilians and the second involving the force-feeding of Palestinian prisoners. Following a discussion regarding the role of law in settler colonialism, it proceeds to argue that the Court enabled, legitimised and legalised state-sanctioned violence that targeted the native Palestinian population by and through a jurisprudence of elimination in order to facilitate the attainment of Israeli settler-colonial objectives. By so doing, the paper provides further evidence in support of the appropriateness of settler colonialism as a theoretical framework for the case of Israel, including in legal matters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on historical institutionalism to consider the impact of housing-policy responses following the Grenfell fire on the marginalisation of the social-housing resident. We consider three specific policy responses: reform focused on conditions of rented properties; the social-housing White Paper; and building regulation and building-safety reforms. We suggest that, in historical institutionalist terms, each is part of a matrix of reform in which understandings of the social-housing resident play a critical role. We argue that rather than the fire provoking a paradigm shift in the recognition that government accords to the ignored and stigmatised citizens who live in social housing, the policy initiatives to date indicate a much more limited adjustment of policy within a normal frame. We suggest that this is because housing policy is dominated by a consumerist ideology that is self-reinforcing and ignores the social, economic and political complexity of tenure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 represents the most significant change to the rights of homeless people in England for decades. Through an analysis of the history of homelessness legislation in England, but focusing on the 'ground-breaking' 2017 Act, this paper explores how the homeless population is represented and 'constructed' in this new legislation and what this tells us about the place of homeless people in our society. In so doing, this paper exposes how the 2017 Act – a state instrument of apparent homelessness prevention – can be read and understood as contributing to rather than obviating the marginalisation and social exclusion of homeless people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers experiences of penal and voluntary-sector interventions in the lives of young people labelled as 'troubled' or 'at risk' of criminal behaviour. Drawing on data from a case-study conducted in the north of England, this paper focuses on the narratives of young people 'on the margins' of society who were involved with a range of community-based interventions, specifically youth clubs, a support group and a mandatory youth justice course. We consider how young people experience and respond to stigmatising elements prevalent in the structured interventions and everyday interactions with the institutions and agencies intended to support them. We argue that 'promotive' relationships between young people and the adults working with them enable young people to challenge risk-based identities and navigate the barriers they face. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how deportation became a solution to rough sleeping in pre-Brexit England. It identifies relationships between the social regulation of vulnerable and marginalised adults, contemporary governance arrangements and bordering practices characteristic of Britain's 'hostile environment'. Drawing on media reports and grey organisational literature, the focus of discussion is events across 2015–2018 in which three London-based charities were criticised for working with the Home Office to deport homeless migrants under its European Economic Area Administrative Removal policy. The overall tenor of criticism was that collaboration with the government compromised the organisations' independence and charitable missions and aims. This diminished their capacity to both advocate for vulnerable adults and effectively challenge oppressive state practices. The paper observes how state and nonprofit relations structure institutional and socio-legal responses to marginalised and 'othered' adults through commissioning and contracting mechanisms. It demonstrates that the social and legal control of homeless migrants may be differently constituted by institutions delivering services in relation to citizenship, vulnerability and marginalisation. This analysis incorporates a broader appraisal of institutional motivations, values and beliefs in social welfare delivery, including the historic role of charitable agencies in the criminalisation of social welfare users. Taken together, the paper offers an interdisciplinary critique of the relationships between border control, neoliberal governance and the sociocultural and historic construction of homeless migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prisoners have long been recognised as a disenfranchised group. This paper positions non-religious prisoners as further excluded from pastoral care. While chaplaincies aim to serve prisoners of all faiths and none, this paper suggests a hierarchy of access in which the benefits of chaplaincy are more available to some prisoners than others. Shortcomings in secular care mean that non-religious offenders are often the only group unable to connect with like-minded people and it is argued that they are disadvantaged as a result. The paper also explores the challenges for pastoral carers seeking to support inmates equally. It considers the barriers on both sides of the care relationship, specifically the disincentives to chaplaincy engagement faced by prisoners of no faith and the obstacles encountered by the Non-Religious Pastoral Support Network in accessing service users and delivering care. Finally, recommendations are made to narrow the gaps between religious and non-religious prisoners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introducing our Special Issue on marginalisation, this paper considers some of the challenges that this topic poses for legal scholars. The paper identifies that these challenges arise principally from the ambivalence of 'marginalisation' itself: at once an idea so broad that it arguably underpins the bulk of legal research (and socio-legal research in particular), but at the same time an idea that in practice too often quickly gives way to various other neighbouring ones: disadvantage, discrimination, disempowerment, exclusion, inequality, silencing, stigmatisation, victimisation and so on. This paper considers this ambivalence and traces etymological roots (and routes) by which we understand the margin, the marginalised and marginalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary asylum laws challenge the narratives of migrants and legal professional teams. Struggles arise in requirements to tell the right story defined by legal norms while storytelling in everyday life relies on sociocultural norms. Professionals working with socially and legally vulnerable populations, as in education and asylum cases, can bridge that gap if we understand narrating as a relational process with credibility and coherence developing over time in terms of the clients' experience and institutional expectations. This paper presents dynamic storytelling methodology to guide such a process, applied successfully with a Roma community seeking inclusion in public education and used to interpret two unsuccessful asylum cases. Drawing on those examples, we conclude by proposing a socio-legal framework for collaborative lawyering in research on clinical legal training. The goal is a narrative process based on legal actors' awareness that truth acquisition is a human sense-making process framed by human rights norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, human trafficking has become the battleground for competing discourses on human rights and penality. While rights solutions are generally presented as in opposition to crime-control measures, in the context of anti-trafficking interventions, rights-based initiatives and criminal governance are often linked together both discursively and in practice. Drawing on the findings of Discourse Analysis of 120 texts about trafficking, this paper explores how dominant discourses and alternative voices construct the relationship between human rights and penality. It is contended that penality is framed as a crucial tenet of human rights. Dominant discourses (the 'law enforcement' and the 'victims first' discourses) link human rights to state coercive action, seen as a necessary component of their effectiveness. Alternative voices (the 'incompatibility' and the 'transformative justice' discourses) reject the appropriateness of penal intervention, but they end up preserving what they denounce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2018, Ireland has undertaken inter alia the obligation to implement 'an inclusive education system at all levels and lifelong learning', as required by Article 24. However, concerns have been repeatedly expressed about the practice of inclusive education in Ireland in terms of admission policies, funding, school choice and reduced timetabling. This paper investigates whether, and to what extent, the current approach to special educational needs (SEN) in Ireland complies with the aim of ensuring an inclusive educational system in which children with disabilities are valued and empowered. Ireland is an interesting case-study due to its history of marginalisation of children with disabilities and its relatively recent engagement with the concept of inclusive education. By using a socio-legal approach, drawing on qualitative interviews with key stakeholders in education combined with a legal analysis of relevant primary and secondary sources, it examines the current practices relating to the education of children with disabilities in Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Launched in April 2018, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations' Smart Cities Network (ASCN) initiative raises important issues regarding the tensions between achieving smart city objectives on the one hand and protection of human rights on the other. The aim of this paper is to explore these tensions using a Knowledge Commons Framework analysis. I first analyse the three key pillars of the ASCN pilot city knowledge commons – knowledge resources, community attributes and governance 'rules in use' – using human rights criteria. I the apply the lessons of this analysis to two fundamental aspects of human experience in smart city contexts – mobility through transport systems and access to essential services through energy supply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the rise of algorithmic systems – that is, systems of data-driven governance (and social-credit-type) systems – in the form of ratings systems of business respecting human rights responsibilities. The specific context is rating or algorithmic systems emerging around national efforts to combat human trafficking through so-called Modern Slavery and Supply Chain Due Diligence legal. Section 2 provides a brief contextualisation of the problems and challenges of managing compliance with emerging law and norms against forced labour and, in its most extreme forms, modern slavery. Section 3 examines the landscape of such algorithmic private legal systems as it has developed to date in the context of forced labour ratings systems. There is a focus on the connection between the power to impose the normative basis of data analytics and the increasingly tightly woven-in connection between principal actors in this endeavour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is now well established that algorithms are transforming our economy, institutions, social relations and ultimately our society. This paper explores the question – what is the role of law in the algorithmic society? We draw on the law-jobs theory of Karl Llewellyn and on William's Twining refinement of Llewellyn's work through the perspective of a thin functionalism to have a better understanding of what law does in this new context. We highlight the emergence of an algorithmic law, as law performs jobs such as the disposition of trouble-cases, the preventive channelling and reorientation of conduct and expectations, and the allocation of authority in the face of algorithmic systems. We conclude that the law-jobs theory remains relevant to understanding the role of law in the algorithmic society, but it is also challenged by how algorithms redefine who does or should do what law-jobs, and how they are done. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different organisations recently published reports identifying the challenges and potential solutions to ensure privacy in blockchain platforms. The proposed solutions frequently emphasise the role of privacy-compliance technologies to be incorporated into the blockchain design. Often, these solutions imply a techno-regulatory approach, ignoring that the level of privacy implemented in a blockchain involves legal and policy choices, disregarding the need to implement human participation and contestability in these platforms. Against this backdrop, this paper proposes to examine how privacy-compliance technologies can incorporate human participation and contestability: first, resorting to the interdisciplinary literature to examine how technological design could balance privacy with human oversight; second, discussing the challenges to ensure ex post contestability for aggrieved data subjects; third, examining the difficulties in identifying liable parties in a blockchain platform. The current disregard of the social and human element risks undermining the role of privacy-compliance technologies in the blockchain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need to engage students in thinking about the politics of law, especially in a time of escalating climate and other crises, is increasingly urgent. In this paper, we discuss a series of place-based teaching strategies designed to foster critical legal thinking, but also hope and a sense of agency. Inspired by a range of scholars – Bruno Latour, Doreen Massey, Henry Giroux and J.K. Gibson-Graham – we use context in an effort to cultivate what Giroux calls 'educated hope'. Our starting point is what the law does (and also what law does not do and what it could do), not what the law is. Instead of taking a field of law and then using examples to illustrate how it works in context, we discuss three courses that start with the context of a particular place. Our courses cover a range of laws that work together to shape that place, spanning multiple fields, and emphasise their peopled and place-based specificity. After discussing teaching and assessment strategies that we have found productive, we reflect on implications beyond our courses, and the potential for broader place-based legal pedagogies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we begin reflecting on how 'futures literacy' – recently championed by UNESCO as a vital skill that allows people to better understand the role of the future in what they see and do – might be developed in environmental law pedagogy. Law and legal analysis tend to be absent from futures scholarship and we discuss various ways of engaging with environmental law as an important but underexplored site and means of future-making. We consider our shared teaching of an undergraduate module in which students examine historical legislation for what it says about past ideas of the environment's future and the action within the law necessary to safeguard it; and contemporary texts, including science fiction and poetry, imagining a future for the environment on and through which law operates. Futures literacy, we argue, is at its richest when 'historical futures' and 'future futures' are read together, or alongside one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an introduction to the Special Issue on 'Contextual Legal Pedagogy'. It introduces the themes of the Special Issue and offers summaries of the papers in the collection. The introduction considers whether, and how, contextual legal pedagogy can still be radical, and how addressing pedagogical issues also necessarily involves addressing vital theoretical issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal theory must not merely describe our world; it must also assist us acting in it. In this paper, I argue that teaching legal theory should show law students how to do things with legal theory. My pedagogical approach is contextual and historical. Students learn how to use theory by seeing how past jurists acted in their particular worlds by changing dominant concepts of law. Most introductory legal theory courses are organised by what I will call the usual story of jurisprudence. In this story, great thinkers in rival schools of legal thought attempt to answer perennial questions about the nature of (the concept of) law. In this story, the thick context of our world recedes beyond the horizon of theory. I argue that critical genealogy can let us critique this usual story and its unspoken assumptions of morality, politics and history. Amia Srinivasan's account of 'worldmaking' is especially compelling in its emphasis on critical genealogies' capacity to transform our representational practices (and thus open up new possibilities for action). Critical genealogy also has certain pedagogical 'uses and advantages' for teaching legal theory in law schools. Here, context is method. The teacher must defend their political choices of context – choices that are naturalised and so beyond critique in the usual story of jurisprudence. By making these choices explicit, students are invited to both challenge the teacher's choices of context and critique their own common law education. This pedagogical approach also encourages students to experiment in 'worldmaking' themselves, and so cultivate a creative capacity to use legal theory to change the world through transforming their representations of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interrogates the depoliticising effects of a seemingly neutral regulatory drive at the heart of the World Health Organization (WHO)'s promotion of traditional medicine. Emerging at WHO in the late 1960s against a political backdrop of decolonisation and pan-Africanism, traditional medicine has continued to be promoted in subsequent decades, culminating in the latest global Traditional Medicine Strategy (2014 to 2023). Yet WHO's promotion and acceptance of traditional medicine have also become increasingly conditional upon its standardisation and regulation – something that appears fundamentally at odds with traditional medicine's heterogeneity. Drawing on insights from critical law and science and technology studies, we suggest that such a process at WHO has done more than simply disqualify the toxic and the dangerous. Rather, it has implicitly and explicitly marginalised and excluded those aspects of traditional medicine that deviate from scientific, biomedical ways of seeing, knowing and organising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intervenes in critical socio-legal/post-colonial scholarship on human rights directed at how religion is constitutive of race and shapes who and what is regarded as 'human' and entitled to rights. It focuses on the Indian post-colony and legal persecution of the Tablighi Jamaat, a global, quietest Islamic movement, by the Hindu Right government during the Covid pandemic. It analyses how religion structures race in Hindu nationalist discourse to transform the Muslim into a perpetual outsider and an existential and epistemic threat to the Hindu nation and rights of the Hindu racial majority. The discussion connects to the epistemic anxiety generated by the alternative worldviews presented by this racialised 'Other' that shape legal consciousness and rights interventions globally. In complicating how anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia are integral to the transnational histories of race and race-making, the analysis triggers a rethinking of human rights interventions and the epistemological closures they enact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of women's access to self-defence has been internationally recognised. This paper presents original empirical data on women's use of self-defence in practice alongside critical feminist analysis of the requirements of self-defence under Scots law. The empirical findings confirm that women are rarely successful with self-defence at trial level and the doctrinal analysis further demonstrates that self-defence does not adequately reflect women's experience of violence, especially sexual violence, and instead continues to reflect male experiences of (public) violence. It is intended that this research will form part of a larger developing evidence base, the type of which has been called for (Fitz-Gibbon and Vannier, 2017) and can be used to support reform in this area. As such, it represents a significant contribution to socio-legal work that has considered the issue of women's access to criminal defences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on ethnographic fieldwork in Belgian welfare administrations to identify daily practices of resistance among Belgian 'welfare bureaucrats' who interrogate the new welfare and immigration law reforms that further restrict migrants' access to social assistance. The contestation strategies are used to circumvent and sometimes break the formal and informal policy guidelines while still allowing them to perform and remain loyal to the state and to higher principles such as a commitment to the fundamental right to human dignity. Three main contestation strategies are identified: failing to provide certain services to demonstrate the absurdity of certain guidelines, writing reports against the administration and in favour of the user, and encouraging litigation against the federal agencies that employ them. These strategies show Belgian welfare workers' commitment to providing a form of public service that aligns with their professional ethos rather than enforcing specific government policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews scholarship regarding migrants' legal consciousness. After discussing the personal, geographic and methodological scope of the reviewed studies, the conceptualisation of legal consciousness is examined in light of evolutions in general legal consciousness studies. Thereafter, factors emerging as shaping migrants' legal consciousness are analytically clustered at four levels: individual characteristics, relational factors, cultural dynamics, and public policies and discourse. Future research on legal consciousness could shift its gaze towards understudied migrant groups as well as places. We suggest being more explicit regarding the conceptualisation of dimensions of what is 'legal' and of 'consciousness', and adopting a pluralist approach to law. The analytical grouping of the factors impacting migrants' legal consciousness may serve as a useful reference point for future research and facilitate a more comprehensive appraisal of the various dynamics shaping migrants' legal consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1722, Daniel Defoe published A Journal of the Plague Year – a supposed account of the 'great plague' of 1665. It is commonly thought to be one of his most incisive pieces of 'realist' fiction. And, in our moment, one of his most prescient. The purpose of this paper is to revisit Defoe's Journal in order to stimulate reflection on our present experience of living through the 'plague year' of 2020. There is much, as we shall see, about governance during a plague that is resonant – but much also about 'hearts melted into tears', about suffering, how it is felt and how it is perceived. The purpose of the Journal, according to Defoe at least, was to inform 'those who come after', so that they might be better prepared, so that they would not make the same mistakes. We will see. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the current legal framework in relation to minors who are the recipients of exorcism. Such individuals are ordinarily doubly marginalised, by virtue of their membership of a minority religious or cultural community and their disempowered position as children. This piece aims to assess whether the current arrangements strike an appropriate balance between respecting personal and collective autonomy, as well as protecting vulnerable young people, paying particular attention to the impact of their intersectional position and multiple marginalising factors at play. It seeks to define exorcism and emphasise the very diverse settings in which it arises within twenty-first-century England and Wales. It examines proposals being made for a blanket prohibition in relation to children, considering both the desirability and viability of a ban. It also highlights that exorcism is not the only context in which religious minors will find themselves in a position of multiple marginalisation, and explores what debates in this area might reveal about the wider operation of Article 9 and the ECHR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an integrating interpretation of the term 'place of safety' in the International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue, 1979, grounded in international human rights and refugee law. It argues that the exposure to harm as a consequence of the conditions under which sea migrants endure irregular journeys raises vulnerability concerns and the need to search for mechanisms of redress. It further claims that sea migrants are marginalised by states' refusal to allow their disembarkation on land. It also argues that a narrow interpretation of the term 'place of safety' risks perpetuating, if not exacerbating, situations of vulnerability and marginalisation among sea migrants. Key themes addressed in this contribution are vulnerability and marginalisation of sea migrants, vulnerability reasoning in the interpretation process and the scope for a more integrating reading of the term 'place of safety' that is responsive to the specific needs among sea migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The English homelessness scheme has been lauded as being one of the most progressive in the world for offering an individually legally enforceable right to housing to those people who meet the statutory criteria. Its definition of homelessness is also liberal by comparison with many other countries within Europe and beyond, extending significantly beyond the stereotypical rooflessness experienced by rough sleepers. Nevertheless, the scheme is highly selective and targeted, and assesses homelessness through a test of relative need, rather than enshrining a minimally acceptable standard of housing. It thereby creates a category of the marginally housed whose housing needs are assessed as insufficiently poor to be officially categorised as homeless, yet who are living in severely inadequate housing. To reduce the uncertainty and contingency of the current test, the paper proposes the adoption of a new test of habitability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I take George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's thesis that metaphors shape our reality to approach the judicial imagery of the new criminal justice system in Mexico (in effect since 2016). Based on twenty-nine in-depth interviews with judges and other members of the judiciary, I study what I call the 'dirty minds' metaphor, showing its presence in everyday judicial practice and analysing both its cognitive basis as well as its effects in how criminal judges understand their job. I argue that the such a metaphor, together with the 'fear of contamination' it raises as a result, is misleading and goes to the detriment of the judicial virtues that should populate the new system. The conclusions I offer are relevant beyond the national context, inter alia, because they concern a far-reaching paradigm of judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows that social inequalities are cumulative and occur at each stage of the dispute pyramid, from the identification of a conflict through to satisfaction with its outcome. Based on a large and original survey on ordinary people's representations of and practices within the legal system in France (N = 2,660), our study finds that an individual's contact, or lack of contact, with a legal intermediary, who may be a legal professional or a non-legal professional, has a very significant impact on the decision to take a case to court. Contact with a legal intermediary also influences the individual's satisfaction with the outcome, but not in the same way for all plaintiffs: income is a more determining factor in satisfaction with the outcome in cases where the judge makes a decision than in cases where a solution is found outside the courtroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While access to civil-law institutions has been a traditional area of socio-legal research, access to administrative justice still constitutes an underresearched field. In the field of administrative law, public ombuds institutions represent an important pathway to resolve disputes without invoking a court. To date, we have little knowledge about who uses these ombuds institutions and which factors facilitate access to the ombuds. In this paper, on the basis of our survey among users of the Austrian Ombudsman Board (n = 8,274), we explore the effects of institutional design on the user population. The findings suggest that the two outreach measures – regular consultation days and a weekly TV broadcast – contribute to reducing existing inequalities with regard to users' sociodemographic characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we adopt an experimentalist approach to determining the content of international human rights for assessing national mandatory work programmes for recipients of social assistance (MWPs). This approach implies going back and forth between law and experience in order to determine the better way to secure human rights in an ever-changing environment. After having identified six criteria for evaluating MWPs in the soft case-law of international bodies, we confront this emerging international human rights framework with an empirical study on MWP practices in the Netherlands. This confrontation reveals that specific aspects of the capability for voice of working welfare recipients are absent in the human rights framework and that the framework is not gender-neutral. Including these aspects, we construct an experimentalist human-rights-based instrument that is suitable for evaluating national MWPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is an attempt to examine how Carl Schmitt's constitutional theory can be useful to analyse the Constitution of the State of Israel designed in the late 1940s – the impact of which Jacob Taubes once certified. The author analyses three projects created then by Leo Kohn through the prism of Schmitt's concept of Verfassung and Verfassungsgesetz. He also reads in the context of Schmitt's philosophy (from Constitutional Theory and The Nomos of the Earth) the constitutional situation of Israel as a country where, first, the Constitution has not been passed and the basic matter of its legal system is regulated by the Basic Laws; second, citizens of Arab origin are excluded from the national community; and third, the borders of the state remain fluid and change due to the constant partition of the land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing international emphasis on the importance of diversity in the judiciary and the impact of the individual in decision-making. However, it can be a challenge to gain insight into the individuals who sit on the bench. For instance, there is limited official information about the individuals who sit on the High Court of Australia. One of the rare glimpses provided by the justices themselves is their judicial swearing-in speech. Drawing on a case-study of the swearing-in speeches of High Court justices sitting between 2008 and 2016, this paper illustrates how these speeches can illuminate key demographic information about the judiciary, as well as facets of the individual rarely explored in studies of judicial diversity: personality and values. This study demonstrates how swearing-in speeches can assist with filling information gaps about judicial diversity, and so extend debates about judicial selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]