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This paper examines the presence of lonely, isolated and impoverished older citizens in Japan's prison population, many of whom have turned to petty crime only recently and arguably lack a genuine need for corrective services. The paper offers empirical evidence drawn from a mixed-methods study that appears to confirm their compliant, 'law-abiding' attributes. It argues that their influx into prisons can be seen, at least in part, as citizens who are already socially excluded and stigmatised leveraging law to assert an additional risk-laden and stigmatised identity, which provides protection. The outcome is the subversion of prisons as de facto aged-care communities. This analysis resonates with an emerging body of literature that Chua and Engel (2018; 2019) have described as the 'Identity' school of legal-consciousness scholarship. This literature centres on empirical studies of marginalised cohorts who leverage legal structures to embrace an identity that complicates their stigma while providing desired protections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a legal-consciousness approach, this paper discusses the issue of stigma and law from the perspectives of a group of older homeless people in Singapore. Focusing specifically on the Destitute Persons Act 2013 Rev. Ed. (DPA), the paper shows the different ways in which homeless people make sense of, negotiate, resist or succumb to the stigma of a homeless identity ascribed by the DPA. From these experiences, two fundamental problems with the DPA are highlighted. First, the DPA imposes a homeless identity that is entangled in archaic legal definitions that often do not relate to contemporary experiences of homelessness in Singapore. Second, the enforcement of the DPA legitimises a differential treatment of homeless people, without addressing the broader complexities of homelessness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights the intersection of gender, sexuality and class in shaping the ways in which 'leftover' women navigate legal and social discrimination. 'Leftover women' is a stigmatising term in China that refers to women who do not get married by the time they reach their late twenties. Based on my fieldwork in China with queer and heterosexual 'leftover' women, I introduce two strategies of stigma management: 'buying a licence to be deviant' and 'identity-hopping'. The former is a strategy adopted by heterosexual women with financial resources and a desire frequently expressed by queer women. 'Buying a licence to be deviant' refers to the strategy of accumulating sufficient financial resources to justify one's choice to be deviant and deal with the legal consequences of the evasion of the population policies. 'Identity-hopping' is popular among those with a lower social and financial status, who use the law's labelling function to hop from one stigmatised identity to another as a way to deal with stigma. From an intersectional lens, this paper advances law and society's study of stigma and discrimination by emphasising the hierarchy of stigmatised identities and the strategy of using the law's power of labelling identities to hop from one identity to another. It also demonstrates how the intersection of gender, sexuality and class complicates the ways in which leftover women understand and engage with the law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The EU has progressively introduced antidiscrimination enforcement measures like the duty to set up Equality Bodies (EBs) that applies to the ground of racial or ethnic origin, among others. Until recently, however, EU law only envisaged vague standards for EBs that allowed a wide range of national configurations. Building on international benchmarks, this paper draws a set of dimensions considered necessary to improve promotion-type EBs responsiveness to discrimination. These dimensions are applied to the British and Spanish EBs to illustrate how the gaps left by EU law may lead to the design of ineffective bodies. The paper argues that EBs can contribute to effectively tackling discrimination if they are designed to be responsive at individual and systemic levels. The 2018 EU Recommendation on Standards for EBs makes a step forward in that direction, but its practical relevance may be limited by its non-binding nature. [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]

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]

By highlighting a large number of recent studies mainly based on empirical methods, the aim of this paper is to emphasise and illustrate the rising influence of legal sociology in France today, and the interesting results produced. More generally, it is noteworthy to emphasise the growing importance of law and legal domains as a topic of great interest in French social sciences in general. It remains an open question whether this trend is linked to the ‘judicialisation’ of French politics and society and its influence over the academic field, or, alternatively, to the growing capacity of social scientists to resist the monopolistic claim of French academic lawyers on the analysis of legal subjects and to develop their own. Nevertheless, those trends converge towards a better knowledge of French legality, relevant from a national perspective, as well as to assess its contribution to socio-legal knowledge in general. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]