Socio-legal Researchers Research Articles

Pathways to Eviction

Abstract Over the past several years, socio-legal researchers have focused attention on the phenomenon of eviction, particularly in low-income communities and communities of color. One major aspect of the eviction phenomenon has been largely overlooked: how and why certain eviction filings result in forced, legally compelled tenant moves and others do not. Through coding of the legal documents associated with eviction filings and multi-level regression analysis, this article advances the analysis of evictions in two crucial ways. First, it identifies and describes the frequency of the distinct legal procedural pathways that result in forced tenant moves once an eviction case has been filed. Second, it identifies the case, tenancy, neighborhood, and property correlates of forced tenant moves and of distinct procedural pathways to forced tenant moves. The article demonstrates that move-out agreements are the primary procedural pathway by which tenants are forcibly moved, yet they have been largely overlooked in previous eviction research because they are not easily analyzable in administrative datasets. The regression analyses advance the growing work examining the role of landlord characteristics in shaping tenants’ housing stability and break new ground in identifying the characteristics of the different pathways through which tenants are forced out of their homes following eviction filing.

Introduction: A Special Issue on Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory and law

Combating corruption, ordering business practices and regulating the use of artificial intelligence are but some of the challenges of today’s society that socio-legal research engages with. These challenges are often transnational in their character, calling for an analytical toolbox fit to examine phenomena that transcend space and time. Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory offers such a toolbox to examine complicated communicative practices in today’s globalised world. This Special Issue brings together junior and senior socio-legal researchers from the Global South and the Global North who illustrate and exemplify how Luhmann’s systems theoretical framework can be applied and theoretically discussed with the purpose of analysing socio-legal issues of relevance for the world of today. This article first introduces the motivation and aim of the Special Issue. Then, the article introduces key concepts of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory and sociology of law, followed by a presentation of the articles that constitute the Special Issue.

An Insider Within

This article utilizes doctoral research on access to justice and clinical legal education to reflect on the positionality that the researcher embodies from their diverse professional affiliations. It adds a nuance to the debate on positionality by relaying it as a concentric experience. The article offers insights on navigating layered insider status through the use of reflexivity journals, removing familiarity in the interview environment and returning to the literature after fieldwork. Noting that one may still be perceived as ‘other,’ it outlines the role of go-betweens to access research participants, follow-up questions to allow for participant voices to be heard and a friendly demeanour to build rapport. The article supports training of novice researchers in reflexivity and grounded theory research as ways of facilitating rigour. It will be useful for socio-legal researchers who have a propensity to embody layered insider status from their diverse professional affiliations when researching in their own countries.

Measuring judiciarization of people with mental illnesses.

The judiciarization of the psychiatric subject is a two-sided process. It could anti-discriminate people with mental illnesses but, at the same time, it could potentially provoke pathologization of mental illnesses. Current methodologies proposed to measure this important and complicated process for people with mental illnesses do not allow analysis on multiple levels (the macro, meso, and micro). In this article, to fill this gap we propose a methodological strategy that helps to investigate judiciarization of people with mental illnesses on multiple levels at once. This approach is based on critical discourse analysis of legal documents and court decisions that feature people with the poor mental health. Namely, we suggest how to measure the level or degree of judiciarization, its geographical evenness, actors in the legal process, its dimensions (the law branches of its occurrence), and linguistic content. We applied this methodology in examining 1,243 legal documents and 327,311 court decisions that were issued by agents of the Russian law system. The research findings show that judiciarization levels in Russia have been rising over the years, moving away from stigmatizing those with mental illnesses and towards anti-discrimination. Our paper could be of interest to socio-legal researchers and social policy practitioners.

Legal Design could and should be more sociolegal

Legal design could and should be more sociolegal. Sociolegal research can offer conceptual frameworks, empirical methods and data, and normative direction to legal design. At the same time, designerly methods can enhance the abilities of sociolegal researchers to make and communicate sense of things to, with and for themselves, academics in other disciplines, and the wider world. So, if legal designers were to engage more deeply and systematically with sociolegal research and researchers, benefits could flow to legal design, to cross-disciplinary research and to the wider world.

President’s Farewell Message: The Anthropocene, Earth Jurisprudence, and the Rights of Nature

A new paradigmatic shift in confronting the climactic endgame of the Anthropocene in Asia is in order. Scientific studies warned that Asia would become the epicentre of anthropogenic catastrophes and environmental disasters in the world. As the outgoing Asian Law and Society Association (ALSA) president, I wish to contribute to critical discussions on two issues: (1) Earth Jurisprudence and (2) the Rights of Nature. These legal concepts must be critically examined, dis- cussed, and developed by socio-legal researchers and policy-makers in order to avert the impending crises of the Anthropocene in Asia. This report examines the recent development of a robust move- ment toward Earth Jurisprudence in multiple countries of Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific—that is, countries that have recently enshrined the concept of the Rights of Nature into their legal system through transforming nature into rights-bearing entities in order to protect them from harmful human activities. Failing any significant remedial measures, many Asian cities, shores, and coastlines, includ- ing the archipelagos of multiple island states in the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean may soon disappear due to the many decades of egregious human activities of industrialized countries and the corporate world. A robust system of Earth Jurisprudence must be established, in which the Rights of Nature must be imbedded in the centre of legislative and constitutional discussions and deliberations.

Researching colonialism and colonial legacies from a legal perspective

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the difficulties encountered by socio-legal researchers in approaching questions on law and history, with particular reference to choosing adequate methodologies. Drawing on her personal experience in researching colonial laws and questions on indigeneity, the author outlines established lines of thought while suggesting new ways of interpreting historical material. An argument is made for applying a legal lens to historical discourses for the unique insight that may be derived from such study. Certain pitfalls in socio-legal research are highlighted, including perspective and positioning in post-colonial scholarship. The author supplies examples from her research on Mauritius as an illustration of how such an approach can be coherently applied to a chosen topic. The article concludes with recommendations for future legal research in the area of colonialism and its legacies.

President’s Farewell Message: The Anthropocene, Earth Jurisprudence, and the Rights of Nature

AbstractA new paradigmatic shift in confronting the climactic endgame of the Anthropocene in Asia is in order. Scientific studies warned that Asia would become the epicentre of anthropogenic catastrophes and environmental disasters in the world. As the outgoing Asian Law and Society Association (ALSA) president, I wish to contribute to critical discussions on two issues: (1) Earth Jurisprudence and (2) the Rights of Nature. These legal concepts must be critically examined, discussed, and developed by socio-legal researchers and policy-makers in order to avert the impending crises of the Anthropocene in Asia. This report examines the recent development of a robust movement toward Earth Jurisprudence in multiple countries of Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific—that is, countries that have recently enshrined the concept of the Rights of Nature into their legal system through transforming nature into rights-bearing entities in order to protect them from harmful human activities. Failing any significant remedial measures, many Asian cities, shores, and coastlines, including the archipelagos of multiple island states in the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean may soon disappear due to the many decades of egregious human activities of industrialized countries and the corporate world. A robust system of Earth Jurisprudence must be established, in which the Rights of Nature must be imbedded in the centre of legislative and constitutional discussions and deliberations.

Participatory and Designerly Strategies for Sociolegal Research Impact: Lessons from Research Aimed at Making Hate Crime Visible

This paper draws the attention of impact-curious sociolegal researchers to the potential of participatory research strategies; and proposes that the effectiveness of those strategies can be enhanced by the introduction of ‘designerly ways’. It explores and evidences this proposition through the multi-country Facing All the Facts project which aimed to support and accelerate the process of making hate crime conceptually and empirically visible in Europe. The paper concludes that by pursuing the designerly strategy of making experiences, perceptions and expectations around hate crime reporting and recording visible and tangible in artefacts (formal graphics and collaborative prototypes), the project activities generated structured-yet-free spaces in which publics/stakeholders could more effectively participate in practical, critical and imaginative discussion about how things are, and how they might be; and that this has improved the relevance and rigour of the research, and its ability to generate meaningful change (‘impact’).

Enhancing Participatory Strategies With Designerly Ways for Sociolegal Impact: Lessons From Research Aimed at Making Hate Crime Visible

This paper draws the attention of impact-curious sociolegal researchers to the potential of participatory research strategies; and proposes that the effectiveness of those strategies can be enhanced by the introduction of ‘designerly ways’. It explores and evidences this proposition through the multi-country Facing All the Facts project which aimed to support and accelerate the process of making hate crime conceptually and empirically visible in Europe. The paper concludes that by pursuing the designerly strategy of making experiences, perceptions and expectations around hate crime reporting and recording visible and tangible in artefacts (formal graphics and collaborative prototypes), the project activities generated structured-yet-free spaces in which publics/stakeholders could more effectively participate in practical, critical and imaginative discussion about how things are, and how they might be; and that this has improved the relevance and rigour of the research, and its ability to generate meaningful change (‘impact’).

Law, justice and Reza Banakar’s legal sociology

This work provides a specific theoretical reading of the contemporary sociology of law promoted by Reza Banakar. Specifically, it investigates how the scholar approaches the relationship between law’s autonomy and justice claims through socio-legal lenses, and it proposes a partial understanding of his response. This response is critically interpreted in order to outline the potentialities and limitations of the author’s theoretical proposal. The analyses found in this work were operationalized from a bibliographic review of different sets of literature. In the end, the work highlights that, despite certain gaps, Banakar’s sociology of law has much to offer to the field, and it paves the way for the engagement of future socio-legal researchers interested in the different forms of intersection between law and justice in society.

Participatory Research and the Medicalization of Research Ethics Processes

This article illustrates how medicalized epistemologies and methodologies significantly influence the institutional ethical review processes applied to sociolegal research in law schools. It argues this development has elevated particular renderings of mental distress and objectivity to universal definitions, potentially placing a straitjacket on methodological innovation. The authors use two case studies from their experiences as researchers in a UK Law School, alongside a small-scale survey of sociolegal researchers in other UK law schools, to illustrate the problems that can arise in securing ethical approval for sociolegal research, in particular with participatory research designs that mobilize ideas of mental distress and objectivity not premised on conventional medical understandings. The article develops key proposals that the authors feel merit further inquiry. First, there should be a comprehensive evaluation of how the jurisdiction of ethical review for sociolegal research is established. Second, sociolegal scholarship can contribute to debates concerning the discursive, material and procedural constitution of institutional ethics approval processes. Finally, we might rethink the nature of, and relationship between, university-based research ethics committees and National Health Service research ethics committees, by placing both within wider ecologies of capacities for ethical decision-making.

‘Governing Celebrity: Multiculturalism, Offensive Television Content and Celebrity Big Brother’: A Response

This response to the special issue on ‘Governing Celebrity: Multiculturalism, Offensive Television Content and Celebrity Big Brother’ highlights its contribution to key socio-legal debates about popular legal consciousness, responsive regulation and social change through law. The response also discusses some of the methodological challenges posed by research into media regulation. How should such research be theoretically framed and is it necessary to distinguish clearly between deconstructionist and modernist understandings of human rights? Are social-psychological dynamics a relevant factor for explaining whether some forms of speech become labelled as racist? The concluding section provides suggestions for further research into the patterns that shape how socio-legal researchers read the social world and how the opening up of a new field of inquiry – the governance of celebrity – can be extended to understanding celebrity politics.

Reforming or Rejecting a New Commodity: Carbon Farming and Forestry Research

This working paper reviews the research into a market mechanism for carbon farming and forestry. The review locates the empirical studies within a debate about the perspective that socio-legal researchers should adopt. Within the frame of regulatory studies, it is possible for researchers to investigate whether reforms can be made, so that offsets reduce emissions; however, within development studies and political economy perspectives, offsets are expected to exploit local farmers and should be rejected. The offsets controversy points up the practical and ethical challenges that socio-legal researchers face when they seek to study such global capitalist systems.

On Chronotopes of Law

What exactly are we doing when we talk theory, in this day and age? Chronotopes of Law (Valverde 2015) is a book that, perhaps immodestly, attempts to promote reflexive thought at the same time that it presents substantive arguments about how sociolegal scholars and other researchers working on governance might borrow Bakhtin’s dialogical ethos in order to analyze how we govern and are governed. An important preliminary note: this comment is limited to a reflection on my use of Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope. The book also integrates theoretical work on scale and jurisdiction that I had been conducting, somewhat separately, for some time, with the Bakhtinian dimension. But to discuss scale and jurisdiction here would result in a schematic summary, instead of a dialogical engagement with the commentators featured in this journal issue and other readers. I have thus chosen here to probe the prehistory of my take-up of the chronotope, leaving second thoughts on scale and jurisdiction to another occasion. I must begin by profusely thanking the editors of Feminist Legal Studies and the organizers of the Queen Mary symposium, not to mention the three amazing readers I am lucky to have found. Together they have given me a unique chance to reflect in print on the unsystematic and discontinuous process that led me to conclude that this type of book was worth writing—despite the fact that I have long believed that critical social theory today suffers from an overabundance of abstract ideas marketed as recipes that can be used in any intellectual kitchen (to borrow

The Dispute Tree and the Legal Forest

Since the Civil Litigation Research Project in the 1980s, sociolegal researchers have referenced the metaphor of the dispute pyramid to understand dispute resolution. The pyramid focuses on formal legal dispute resolution and represents disputes as a linear process of attrition in which only a small proportion of perceived injuries proceed to adjudication. Although a fertile metaphor, the dispute pyramid approach left important processes undertheorized and understudied. We propose a new metaphor: the dispute tree. The dispute tree has many branches, both legal and nonlegal, through which grievances may be resolved. Grievances may move along several branches simultaneously, and dispute resolution may be a nonlinear process. Branches represent the evolving nature of disputes as living organisms that may bear flowers and fruit or may wither and die. Not only dispute trees but also their forests are subjects for study. Dispute trees exist in social environments that may foster or inhibit healthy growth; they may grow within public or privately governed forests. We argue that the dispute tree metaphor better represents decades of research on disputing, which has identified myriad disputing channels outside of courts, as well as both individual and collective mobilization. We also believe that this new metaphor for disputes and the dispute process will open new avenues of inquiry.

Chinese criminal trials: a comprehensive empirical inquiry

In the past decade, research on Chinese criminal justice has witnessed a notable shift from broad–brush doctrinal overviews to fine–grained empirical studies using social science methods. With different research agendas, both criminal procedure law professors in China and social scientists overseas (mostly criminologists and socio–legal researchers) have begun to collect and analyze empirical data on various aspects of the criminal justice system. Ni He’s new book Chinese Criminal Trials is a recent product of this new trend. While many existing books on the Chinese criminal justice system focus on one specific aspect of it, such as policing, court trial, or criminal defense, He’s study provides a comprehensive examination of the system with both historical length and empirical breadth. The book opens with a short but ambitious overview of the historical context of Chinese criminal justice from antiquity to modernity. The author traces the legacy of the Chinese legal system and its institutional arrangements in Imperial China, such as the yamen and bureaucratic norms. Then he proceeds to analyze the socio–legal context of the contemporary Chinese criminal justice system in terms of the “tripartite rules” (pp.39–46), namely, rule of man, rule by law, and rule of law. These two parts are mainly based on the secondary literature on Chinese law, with occasional references to general social theorists such as Montesquieu, Parsons, Merton, and Inglehart in explaining the structural and cultural transformations of the so–called “Chinese legality” (pp. 10–14). The core empirical findings are reported in Part III, arguably the most exciting and valuable part of the book. The research is based on a pilot study in a southeast province of China during 2009–2011, funded by the MacArthur Foundation. The data consist of three components: (1) a survey of 642 legal professionals in the province, including 348 practicing attorneys, 177 criminal justice practitioners (i.e., those working in the police, procuracy, or court), and others working in the state or private sectors; (2)325 criminal trial observations; and, (3) 149 complete criminal case files. This excellent combination of complementary data sources provide the author a great opportunity to Crime Law Soc Change (2014) 62:87–89 DOI 10.1007/s10611-014-9521-y

Socio‐legal Studies in Aotearoa/New Zealand

This article reviews the development and impact of the socio‐legal field in New Zealand. It begins by assessing the socio‐legal presence within teaching and research conducted across New Zealand's law faculties before analysing factors likely to inhibit future growth of the sub‐discipline in this remote jurisdiction. Having examined how New Zealand's legal scholars map and influence national legal behaviour, without always recognizing contradictions between these objectives or categorizing their research as ‘socio‐legal’, the article goes on to examine how the next generation of socio‐legal researchers might exert stronger influence over the law curriculum and new areas of legal policy. In conclusion, it argues for a distinctive New Zealand approach toward socio‐legal studies and notes that future prospects appear encouraging, and in certain respects more promising than those in the United Kingdom, particularly when considering research impact.

The End of Impunity? Global Law-Making and Atrocity Crimes / Den Kreislauf der Straflosigkeit durchbrechen: Internationales Strafrecht und Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit

Abstract There was nothing inevitable about the amazing development of international criminal law and justice institutions since the 1990s, and neither about the proliferation of international and domestic procedures to end im­punity for gross human rights violations and international crimes, in particular atrocity crimes. As socio-legal researchers engaged with the processes of global lawmaking in the arena of international criminal justice, thy found “recursive” cycles of lawmaking (Halliday 2009), which involved transnational and domestic politics and actors, and were driven by mechanisms resulting from structural characteristics of the global sphere, and the very nature of interna­tional law itself The article explores this development through the lens of three “constitutional moments ” and the diagnostic struggles and contestation of the legal and political concept of genocide. Finally it analyses the emerging power of international criminal law through the processes of commitment and compliance, deterrence and expressivism. In a surprising analogy to E.P. Thompson’s study of lawmaking in 18th centuy Britain, the self-binding power of law emerges as a decisive factor in international criminal lawmaking.

Integrating Law and Health Policy

This review considers what can be learned from bridging sociolegal scholarship with contemporary research on health policy. Public health scholars have relied on a narrow understanding of the role law can play in health care reform, viewing law as a set of commands from above that direct the behavior of individuals. Incorporating a cultural perspective of law would allow public health scholars to observe law's effects in a much wider range of contexts. Meanwhile, the cultural turn in sociolegal studies toward an emphasis on law's role in the construction of everyday life has resulted in a shift away from the study of state policy altogether. As a consequence, the microlevel analyses that have come to dominate sociolegal scholarship are rarely connected to the macrolevel politics that shape them. Issues relating to health care offer sociolegal researchers an opportunity to reestablish a connection with social policy and extend their understanding of the power and meaning of law.