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This article surveys the remarkable transformation of law and legal education in China in the past few years. Not long after the Gang of Four was toppled in 1976, a long-term legal development plan was adopted. Its steady implementation has led to widespread codification, an extension of courts, a restoration and expansion of the legal profession, an ambitious and popular legal education program, and substantial growth in formal legal education. Previously an authoritarian political tradition and a preference for mediation over litigation had retarded the development of a formal and autonomous legal system in China. Today, however, the popular demand for stability and justice, the need for legal rules and procedures to improve economic efficiency, and the desire to attract foreign technology and investment serve as powerful motivations for strengthening the legal system. The resulting need for more legal specialists has spawned more than 30 new law schools, along with a growing program of legal education exchange with the United States and other countries.

Why are most British lone mothers unemployed? And is 'welfare to work' the right sort of policy response? This book provides an in-depth analysis of how lone mothers negotiate the relationship between motherhood and paid work. Combining qualitative and quantitative data, it focuses on social capital in different neighbourhoods, local labour markets and welfare states. Criticising conventional economic theories of decision-making, it posits an alternative concept of 'gendered moral rationality', and sets up new frameworks for understanding national policy differences and discourses about lone motherhood.

Early intervention policies reinforce engrained ideas about the culpability of mothers through a logic that centres the biological reproduction of inequalities. Drawing on examples from the UK and more widely, this chapter shows how the use of brain science in early years intervention practices reproduce inequalities through two processes: (i) positioning mothers as buffers who can overcome the effects of a harsh environment for their children; and (ii) asserting the effacement of social divisions at the same time as embedding inequalities. Gender inequalities are reproduced through use of attachment theory that keys into 'intensive parenting' culture coupled with brain development. Social class distinctions are reinforced through early intervention and brain science ideas that pose deprived mothers and children as biologically and culturally different, while race and ethnicity oppressions are carried through the imposition of Eurocentric notions of optimal childrearing roles and practices in early intervention initiatives.