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Founded in 1997, Cambridge Studies in Law and Society is a hub for leading scholarship in socio-legal studies. Located at the intersection of law, the humanities, and the social sciences, it publishes empirically innovative and theoretically sophisticated work on law's manifestations in everyday life: from discourses to practices, and from institutions to cultures. The series editors have longstanding expertise in the interdisciplinary study of law, and welcome contributions that place legal phenomena in national, comparative, or international perspective. Series authors come from a range of disciplines, including anthropology, history, law, literature, political science, and sociology.

  • Series Editors: Mark Fathi Massoud, University of California, Santa Cruz, Jens Meierhenrich, London School of Economics and Political Science, Rachel E. Stern, University of California, Berkeley

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141 results in Cambridge Studies in Law and Society

Page 2 of 8

The Sentimental Court
  • The Affective Life of International Criminal Justice
  • Jonas Bens
  • Published online:
    05 May 2022
    Print publication:
    19 May 2022
  • Modern law seems to be designed to keep emotions at bay. The Sentimental Court argues the exact opposite: that the law is not designed to cast out affective dynamics, but to create them. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork - both during the trial of former Lord's Resistance Army commander Dominic Ongwen at the International Criminal Court's headquarters in The Netherlands and in rural northern Uganda at the scenes of violence - this book is an in-depth investigation of the affective life of legalized transitional justice interventions in Africa. Jonas Bens argues that the law purposefully creates, mobilizes, shapes, and transforms atmospheres and sentiments, and further discusses how we should think about the future of law and justice in our colonial present by focusing on the politics of atmosphere and sentiment in which they are entangled.

The Ghostwriters
  • Lawyers and the Politics behind the Judicial Construction of Europe
  • Tommaso Pavone
  • Published online:
    31 March 2022
    Print publication:
    07 April 2022
  • The European Union is often depicted as a cradle of judicial activism and a polity built by courts. Tommaso Pavone shows how this judge-centric narrative conceals a crucial arena for political action. Beneath the radar, Europe's political development unfolded as a struggle between judges who resisted European law and lawyers who pushed them to embrace change. Under the sheepskin of rights-conscious litigants and activist courts, these “Euro-lawyers” sought clients willing to break state laws conflicting with European law, lobbied national judges to uphold European rules, and propelled them to submit noncompliance cases to the European Union's supreme court – the European Court of Justice – by ghostwriting their referrals. By shadowing lawyers who encourage deliberate law-breaking and mobilize courts against their own governments, The Ghostwriters overturns the conventional wisdom regarding the judicial construction of Europe and illuminates how the politics of lawyers can profoundly impact institutional change and transnational governance.

Decoupling
  • Gender Injustice in China's Divorce Courts
  • Ethan Michelson
  • Published online:
    24 March 2022
    Print publication:
    31 March 2022
  • Michelson's analysis of almost 150,000 divorce trials reveals routine and egregious violations of China's own laws upholding the freedom of divorce, gender equality, and the protection of women's physical security. Using 'big data' computational techniques to scrutinize cases covering 2009–2016 from all 252 basic-level courts in two Chinese provinces, Henan and Zhejiang, Michelson reveals that women have borne the brunt of a dramatic intensification since the mid-2000s of a decades-long practice of denying divorce requests. This book takes the reader upstream to the institutional sources of China's clampdown on divorce and downstream to its devastating and highly gendered human toll, showing how judges in an overburdened court system clear their oppressive dockets at the expense of women's lawful rights and interests. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in Chinese courts, judicial decision-making, family law, gender violence, and the limits and possibilities of the globalization of law.This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Anti-Constitutional Populism
  • Edited by Martin Krygier, Adam Czarnota, Wojciech Sadurski
  • Published online:
    24 March 2022
    Print publication:
    31 March 2022
  • Around the world, populist parties have sprung up in formerly and formally liberal-democratic polities, challenging their existing political parties and leaders, and frequently overwhelming them. These challenges and successes were rarely predicted, arriving so soon after the wave of liberal democratic and constitutional enthusiasms, proclamations and institution-building which peaked in the 1990s. Bringing together scholars from law, political science and philosophy, this collection explores the character of contemporary populisms and their relationships to constitutional democracy. With contributors from around the world, it offers a diverse range of nuanced perspectives on populism as a global phenomenon. Using comparative and multi-disciplinary techniques, this book considers the specifics and similarities of populisms, and raises general questions about their nature and potential futures.

Lawyers in Conflict and Transition
  • Kieran McEvoy, Louise Mallinder, Anna Bryson
  • Published online:
    17 March 2022
    Print publication:
    17 March 2022
  • Countries undergoing or recovering from conflict and authoritarianism often face profound rule of law challenges. The law on the statute books may be repressive, judicial independence may be compromised, and criminal justice agencies may be captured by powerful interests. How do lawyers working within such settings imagine the law? How do they understand their ethical obligations towards their clients and the rule of law? What factors motivate them to use their legal practice and social capital to challenge repressive power? What challenges and risks can they face if they do so? And when do lawyers facilitate or acquiesce to illegality and injustice? Drawing on over 130 interviews from Cambodia, Chile, Israel, Palestine, South Africa, and Tunisia, this book explores the extent to which theoretical understandings within law and society research on the motivations, strategies, tactics, and experiences of lawyers within democratic states apply to these more challenging environments.

The Practice and Problems of Transnational Counter-Terrorism
  • Fiona de Londras
  • Published online:
    19 January 2022
    Print publication:
    24 February 2022
  • The attacks of 9/11 kickstarted the development of a pervasive and durable transnational counter-terrorism order. This has evolved into a vast institutional architecture with direct effects on domestic law around the world and a number of impacts on everyday life that are often poorly understood. States found, fund and lead institutions inside and outside the United Nations that develop and consolidate transnational counter-terrorism through hard and soft law, strategies, capacity building and counter-terrorism 'products'. These institutions and laws underpin the expansion of counter-terrorism, so that new fields of activity get drawn into it, and others are securitised through their reframing as counter-terrorism and 'preventing and countering extremism'. Drawing on insights from law, international relations, political science and security studies, this book demonstrates the international, regional, national and personal impacts of this institutional and legal order. Fiona de Londras demonstrates that it is expansionary, rights-limiting and unaccountable.

Policing for Peace
  • Institutions, Expectations, and Security in Divided Societies
  • Matthew Nanes
  • Published online:
    12 November 2021
    Print publication:
    18 November 2021
  • In communities plagued by conflict along ethnic, racial, and religious lines, how does the representation of previously-marginalized groups in the police affect crime and security? Drawing on new evidence from policing in Iraq and Israel, Policing for Peace shows that an inclusive police force provides better services and reduces conflict, but not in the ways we might assume. Including members of marginalized groups in the police improves civilians' expectations of how the police and government will treat them, both now and in the future. These expectations are enhanced when officers are organized into mixed rather than homogeneous patrols. Iraqis indicate feeling most secure when policed by mixed officers, even more secure than they feel when policed by members of their own group. In Israel, increases in police officer diversity are associated with lower crime victimization for both Arab and Jewish citizens. In many cases, inclusive policing benefits all citizens, not just those from marginalized groups.

Five Republics and One Tradition
  • A History of Constitutionalism in Chile 1810–2020
  • Pablo Ruiz-Tagle
  • Published online:
    08 October 2021
    Print publication:
    21 October 2021
  • Like many countries around the world, Chile is undergoing a political moment when the nature of democracy and its political and legal institutions are being challenged. Senior Chilean legal scholar and constitutional historian Pablo Ruiz-Tagle provides an historical analysis of constitutional change and democratic crisis in the present context focused on Chilean constitutionalism. He offers a comparative analysis of the organization and function of government, the structure of rights and the main political agents that participated in each stage of Chilean constitutional history. Chile is a powerful case study of a Latin American country that has gone through several threats to its democracy, but that has once again followed a moderate path to rebuild its constitutional republican tradition. Not only the first comprehensive study of Chilean constitutional history in the English language from the nineteenth-century to the present day, this book is also a powerful defence of democratic values.

The Archival Politics of International Courts
  • Henry Alexander Redwood
  • Published online:
    13 August 2021
    Print publication:
    26 August 2021
  • The archives produced by international courts have received little empirical, theoretical or methodological attention within international criminal justice (ICJ) or international relations (IR) studies. Yet, as this book argues, these archives both contain a significant record of past violence, and also help to constitute the international community as a particular reality. As such, this book first offers an interdisciplinary reading of archives, integrating new insights from IR, archival science and post-colonial anthropology to establish the link between archives and community formation. It then focuses on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda's archive, to offer a critical reading of how knowledge is produced in international courts, provides an account of the type of international community that is imagined within these archives, and establishes the importance of the materiality of archives for understanding how knowledge is produced and contested within the international domain.

Lactation at Work
  • Expressed Milk, Expressing Beliefs, and the Expressive Value of Law
  • Elizabeth A. Hoffmann
  • Published online:
    20 July 2021
    Print publication:
    29 July 2021
  • In recent decades, as women entered the US workforce in increasing numbers, they faced the conundrum of how to maintain breastfeeding and hold down full-time jobs. In 2010, the Lactation at Work Law (an amendment to the US Fair Labor Standards Act) mandated accommodations for lactating women. This book examines the federal law and its state-level equivalent in Indiana, drawing on two waves of interviews with human resource personnel, supervising managers, and lactating workers. In many ways, this simple law - requiring break time and privacy for pumping - is a success story. Through advocacy by allies, education of managers, and employee initiative, many organizations created compliant accommodations. This book shows legal scholars how a successful civil rights law creates effective change; helps labor activists and management personnel understand how to approach new accommodations; and enables workers to understand the possibilities for amelioration of workplace problems through internal negotiations and legal reforms.

Shari‘a, Inshallah
  • Finding God in Somali Legal Politics
  • Mark Fathi Massoud
  • Published online:
    13 May 2021
    Print publication:
    27 May 2021
  • Western analysts have long denigrated Islamic states as antagonistic, even antithetical, to the rule of law. Mark Fathi Massoud tells a different story: for nearly 150 years, the Somali people have embraced shari'a, commonly translated as Islamic law, in the struggle for national identity and human rights. Lawyers, community leaders, and activists throughout the Horn of Africa have invoked God to oppose colonialism, resist dictators, expel warlords, and to fight for gender equality - all critical steps on the path to the rule of law. Shari'a, Inshallah traces the most dramatic moments of legal change, political collapse, and reconstruction in Somalia and Somaliland. Massoud upends the conventional account of secular legal progress and demonstrates instead how faith in a higher power guides people toward the rule of law.

Rule of Law Intermediaries
  • Brokering Influence in Myanmar
  • Kristina Simion
  • Published online:
    17 April 2021
    Print publication:
    06 May 2021
  • Scholars puzzle over the conditions that make rule of law development in authoritarian settings successful. In this significant contribution, focusing on the decade of Myanmar's political transformation, Kristina Simion explores rule of law assistance through the practice and experience of intermediaries, their capital, strategies and challenges. How do intermediaries influence the field, and the ways in which the rule of law is brokered transnationally? And why do they matter? Simion relates her research to law and sociology to bring to light these neglected players, focusing on who they are, the influence they have, their double agency and their crucial importance in establishing trust and translating rule of law. Relying on rich empirical data collected in Myanmar, the book shares the voices of the individuals that help to steer societal change within authoritarian confines. This socio-legal work offers some insights into why rule of law change in authoritarian settings often does not go expected ways, one of the development field's long unresolved issues.

The Law Multiple
  • Judgment and Knowledge in Practice
  • Irene van Oorschot
  • Published online:
    18 February 2021
    Print publication:
    04 March 2021
  • In the field of socio-legal studies or law and society scholarship, it is rare to find empirically rich and conceptually sophisticated understandings of actual legal practice. This book, in contrast, connects the conceptual and the empirical, the abstract and the concrete, and in doing so shows the law to be an irreducibly social, material and temporal practice. Drawing on cutting-edge work in the social study of knowledge, it grapples with conceptual and methodological questions central to the field: how and where judgment empirically takes place; how and where facts are made; and how researchers might study these local and concrete ways of judging and knowing. Drawing on an ethnographic study of how narratives and documents, particularly case files, operate within legal practices, this book's unique and innovative approach consists of rearticulating the traditional boundaries separating judgment from knowledge, urging us to rethink the way truths are made within law.

Health as a Human Right
  • The Politics and Judicialisation of Health in Brazil
  • Octávio Luiz Motta Ferraz
  • Published online:
    21 January 2021
    Print publication:
    17 December 2020
  • Does human rights law work? This book engages in this heated debate through a detailed analysis of thirty years of the right to health - perhaps the most complex human right - in Brazil. Are Brazilians better off three decades after the enactment of the right to health in the 1988 Constitution? Has the flurry of litigation experienced in Brazil helped or harmed the majority of the population? This book offers an in-depth analysis of these complex and controversial questions grounded on a wealth of empirical data. The book covers the history of the recognition of health as a human right in the 1988 Constitution through the Sanitary Movement's campaign and the subsequent three decades of what Ferraz calls the politics and judicialization of health. It challenges positions of both optimists and sceptics of human rights law and will be of interest to those looking for a more nuanced analysis.

Transnational Legal Ordering of Criminal Justice
  • Edited by Gregory Shaffer, Ely Aaronson
  • Published online:
    05 June 2020
    Print publication:
    02 July 2020
  • Hard and soft law developed by international and regional organizations, transgovernmental networks, and international courts increasingly shape rules, procedures, and practices governing criminalization, policing, prosecution, and punishment. This dynamic calls into question traditional approaches that study criminal justice from a predominantly national perspective, or that dichotomize the study of international from national criminal law. Building on socio-legal theories of transnational legal ordering, this book develops a new approach for studying the interaction between international and domestic criminal law and practice. Distinguished scholars from different disciplines apply this approach in ten case studies of transnational legal ordering that address transnational crimes such as money laundering, corruption, and human trafficking, international crimes such as mass atrocities, and human rights abuses in law enforcement. The book provides a comprehensive treatment of the changing transnational nature of criminal justice policymaking and practice in today's globalized world.

The Uncounted
  • Politics of Data in Global Health
  • Sara L.M. Davis
  • Published online:
    18 May 2020
    Print publication:
    11 June 2020
  • In the global race to reach the end of AIDS, why is the world slipping off track? The answer has to do with stigma, money, and data. Global funding for AIDS response is declining. Tough choices must be made: some people will win and some will lose. Global aid agencies and governments use health data to make these choices. While aid agencies prioritize a shrinking list of countries, many governments deny that sex workers, men who have sex with men, drug users, and transgender people exist. Since no data is gathered about their needs, life-saving services are not funded, and the lack of data reinforces the denial. The Uncounted cracks open this and other data paradoxes through interviews with global health leaders and activists, ethnographic research, analysis of gaps in mathematical models, and the author's experience as an activist and senior official. It shows what is counted, what is not, and why empowering communities to gather their own data could be key to ending AIDS.

The Edge of Law
  • Legal Geographies of a War Crimes Court
  • Alex Jeffrey
  • Published online:
    11 December 2019
    Print publication:
    19 December 2019
  • The Edge of Law explores the spatial implications of establishing a new legal institution in the wake of violent conflict. Using the example of the establishment of the War Crimes Chamber of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Alex Jeffrey argues that legal processes constantly demarcate a line of inclusion and exclusion: materially, territorially and corporally. In contrast to accounts that have focused on the judicial outcomes of these transitional justice efforts, The Edge of Law draws on long-term fieldwork in Bosnia and Herzegovina to focus on the social and political consequences of the trials, tracing the fraught mechanisms that have been used by international and local political elites to convey their legitimacy. This book will be of interest to socio-legal and geographical scholars working in the fields of transitional justice, legal systems, critical geopolitics and criminology.

Everyday Justice
  • Law, Ethnography, Injustice
  • Edited by Sandra Brunnegger
  • Published online:
    28 November 2019
    Print publication:
    19 December 2019
  • Everyday Justice clearly demonstrates the value of revitalizing the category of justice in ethnographic work by revealing how both justice and injustice are woven into everyday life in manifold and widely differing ways. The contributors account for this complexity across multiple particular social relations, places, and times, such that concepts and experiences of justice are made analytically visible without essentializing the construal of justice both as an idea and in practice. In the best scholarly tradition, Everyday Justice provides theoretical readings of justice and injustice, justice and law, and relational justice, each designed to cut through the specificity of myriad social, political, and legal conjunctures in a clarifying way. One outcome is to suggest future research possibilities to readers by highlighting theoretically distinctive yet ethnographically specific questions about justice. Everyday Justice will be essential reading for anyone interested in justice in theory and practice.

Genocide Never Sleeps
  • Living Law at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
  • Nigel Eltringham
  • Published online:
    03 September 2019
    Print publication:
    12 September 2019
  • Accounts of international criminal courts have tended to consist of reflections on abstract legal texts, on judgements and trial transcripts. Genocide Never Sleeps, based on ethnographic research at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), provides an alternative account, describing a messy, flawed human process in which legal practitioners faced with novel challenges sought to reconfigure long-standing habits and opinions while maintaining a commitment to 'justice'. From the challenges of simultaneous translation to collaborating with colleagues from different legal traditions, legal practitioners were forced to scrutinise that which normally remains assumed in domestic law. By providing an account of this process, Genocide Never Sleeps not only provides a unique insight into the exceptional nature of the ad hoc, improvised ICTR and the day-to-day practice of international criminal justice, but also holds up for fresh inspection much that is naturalised and assumed in unexceptional, domestic legal processes.

Indigenous Water Rights in Law and Regulation
  • Lessons from Comparative Experience
  • Elizabeth Jane Macpherson
  • Published online:
    20 July 2019
    Print publication:
    08 August 2019
  • Indigenous Water Rights in Law and Regulation responds to an unresolved question in legal scholarship: how are (or how might be) indigenous peoples' rights included in contemporary regulatory regimes for water. This book considers that question in the context of two key trajectories of comparative water law and policy. First, the tendency to 'commoditise' the natural environment and use private property rights and market mechanisms in water regulation. Second, the tendency of domestic and international courts and legislatures to devise new legal mechanisms for the management and governance of water resources, in particular 'legal person' models. This book adopts a comparative research method to explore opportunities for accommodating indigenous peoples' rights in contemporary water regulation, with country studies in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Chile and Colombia, providing much needed attention to the role of rights and regulation in determining indigenous access to, and involvement with, water in comparative law.

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