Suchergebnisse

France's official republican doctrines preclude public recognition of legal pluralism, whether in the guise of legislative plurality or customary and religious legal orders. This unusually emphatic rejection of legal pluralism stems from an ideology of abstract universalism that translates primarily as a formalistic understanding of equality before the law and thus as a rejection of all identity-based classifications. Equality, in this sense, requires citizens to be subject to identical laws under a single legislative jurisdiction. Yet notwithstanding the republican orthodoxy, French constitutional doctrine has been adapted in recent decades to accommodate various forms of legislative and even jurisdictional pluralism in peripheral regions, particularly in the outre-mer (overseas territories) but also in some parts of the metropolitan territory. In turn, I will argue that the abandonment of strict legislative uniformity can be traced to a wider crisis of French universalism and its conception of rights.

The law is heavily implicated in creating, maintaining, and reproducing racialised hierarchies which bring about and preserve acute global disparities and injustices. This essential book provides an examination of the meanings of decolonisation and explores how this examination can inform teaching, researching, and practising of law. It explores the ways in which the foundations of law are entangled in colonial thought and in its [re]production of ideas of commodification of bodies and space-time. Thus, it is an exploration of the ways in which we can use theories and praxes of decolonisation to produce legal knowledge for flourishing futures

A speedy response made a significant difference to the number of infections and deaths due to COVID-19. Did legal philosophies matter for policy responses? We find that when 100 cases had been diagnosed (and 7–14 days thereafter), common law countries had implemented weaker measures than civil law countries. However, no significant difference is found for COVID-19 related deaths. Lower vulnerability is also associated with weaker policies.

While Dworkin views law as the embodiment of moral principles, the sources of those principles that he identifies do not supply the justification of force he ascribes to them. In this article I propose that judges interpret justice from what I call the social forms of society. I call this method justice as integrity and propose it as the foundation of law as integrity. By showing how social meanings are necessarily part of our understanding of social and natural phenomena, I hope to show that Dworkin's political theory, and hence his legal theory, are tenable only upon a constructivist foundation of justice closer to Michael Walzer's than his own. While this methodology better explains the moral foundations of law, I reject the metaphysical implications that both he and Dworkin ascribe to it. Constructivism does not imply ethical relativism nor does it provide any moral or epistemological barriers to criticism of social practice in one's own society or elsewhere. I hope to make Dworkin's constitutional theory more viable by reconceiving the objectivist pedigree of social and empirical meanings. Social meanings can create clear, objective principles that apply across a pluralistic community and permit judges to interpret justice as insiders of the social forms of their community.

This article presents the first empirically-based and theoretically-informed investigation of the effectiveness of the 'self-declaration model' of legal gender recognition in Denmark, the first European state to adopt it. Drawing upon analysis of legislative materials, as well as interviews with stakeholders in the legislative process and trans and intersex legal subjects, it contends that self-declaration is not without its limitations. By conceptualising embodiment as an ontological and epistemological process of becoming, and emphasising the institutional dimensions and effects of such processes, it demonstrates that self-declaration may not address the complexities of legal embodiment, particularly concerning restrictions on trans and intersex people's access to health care. The article's empirical findings are directed towards the policymakers and activists tasked with shaping reforms of gender recognition legislation in the UK and elsewhere. The analytical agenda it develops may be adopted, and adapted, by scholars working in this area and other regulatory contexts.

This article discusses the complexity inherent in the relationship between written law and social action. It uses actor-network theory (`ANT') to amplify this complexity and considers its value both in understanding socio-legal objects and, more broadly, to socio-legal studies itself. The article uses a case study of the role of the Trade Related Intellectual Property agreement (`TRIPS') regarding pharmaceutical patents in a `least developed country', Djibouti. The study uses this pharmaceutical example to argue the insights offered by ANT, conceptualizing socio-legal objects, beyond comparable approaches such as implementation studies. It also offers a different, more compelling set of understandings than that which appears in the more standard texts on TRIPS.

This paper examines Irish campaigns for condom access in the early 1990s. Against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, activists campaigned against a law which would not allow condoms to be sold from ordinary commercial spaces or vending machines, and restricted sale to young people. Advancing a conception of 'transformative illegality', we show that illegal action was fundamental to the eventual legalisation of commercial condom sale. However, rather than foregrounding illegal condom sale as a mode of spectacular direct action, we show that tactics of illegal sale in the 1990s built on 20 years of everyday illegal sale within the Irish family planning movement. Everyday illegal sale was a long-term world-making practice, which gradually transformed condoms' legal meanings, eventually enabling new forms of provocative and irreverent protest. Condoms 'became legal' when the state recognised modes of condom sale, gradually built up over many years and publicised in direct action and in the courts.