Socio-legal Studies Research Articles

Hearing voices: forensic speaker identification technology and expert listening in the American courtroom

ABSTRACT Police wiretaps and taped emergency dispatch calls are just a couple of examples of the kinds of voice recordings that have made their way into criminal and civil proceedings. In some instances, an expert witness may be called upon to identify the person whose voice was captured on tape or digitally recorded. However, this type of forensic analysis – commonly referred to as “speaker identification” – has not been universally accepted by the courts. In this article, I look at several US cases where the efficacy of forensic speaker identification has been brought into question. Using concepts from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Sociolegal Studies, I examine the attempts made by experts to have their methods of voice identification accepted at trial as valid and reliable techniques, and the decisions made by judges to either admit or exclude this evidence. I demonstrate that the various rulings regarding the admissibility of speaker identification evidence reflect the interplay between law and science and is the direct result of the “boundary-work” undertaken by experts and how judges assess these activities. I argue that forensic speaker identification evidence must be understood and conceptualised as “law-science hybrids” that are co-produced over the course of a trial.

Misrecognitions of Victimhood: Discretionary Power of Street-level Bureaucrats in Humanitarian Visas

Humanitarian visas provide one of few potential pathways to citizenship for foreign nationals victimized within the United States and are an important aspect of immigration law. Yet one form of humanitarian visas—T nonimmigrant status (T visa)—has received scant attention in the socio-legal studies literature. “T visas” were designed to aid survivors of human trafficking and, though the US government estimates that tens of thousands of individuals are trafficked in the United States every year, only 15 percent of the five thousand T visas available annually have been granted since the program’s inception in 2002. Why are T visas such an underutilized form of immigration relief? Drawing on twenty in-depth interviews with immigration lawyers, law enforcement personnel, and non-governmental organization service providers routinely involved in T visa applications, we find that the low rate of applications and approvals is driven by a combination of structural barriers and expansive discretion of key actors in the legal process to interpret and apply the law, which results in a narrow and often misinformed construction of victimhood. We add to the literature on the discretionary power of street-level bureaucrats to shape the law and determine how it is applied with considerable consequences for survivors of trafficking.

Influencer regulations, governance and sociocultural issues in Asia

Influencer regulations, governance and sociocultural issues in Asia

In the shadow of the healing rainbow: belonging and identity in the regulation of traditional medicine in Mauritius

ABSTRACT This article explores how traditional healing is regulated in the island of Mauritius. Drawing on postcolonial Science and Technology Studies and their encounter with socio-legal studies, it maps the emergence of the Ayurveda and Other Traditional Medicines Act of 1990, pointing out the selectivity of the notion of ‘tradition’ and its entanglement to broader nation-making processes, born in the process of its independence from Britain. While the social and political histories embedded in the text of the law favour the authorisation of some healing traditions and not others, outside its scope, other practices persist, and triggering competing visions about the island’s healing futures. By bringing into the frame the plurality of Mauritius’s healing landscape, where different traditions coexist despite their ambiguous legal status, this article accounts for the tensions in the regulation of traditional medicine, where the law produces its own inclusions and exclusions, and mundane legalities of everyday healing become sites of broader political questioning about the relationship between law, science, and nation-making.

Should the Muslim President become a constitutional convention in Indonesia? Based on constitutional debates about Islam and state, and the constitutional practice

Since Soekarno to Joko Widodo, all of Indonesia’s presidents have been Muslims. This practice is based on Dicey’s theory of constitutional conventions, i.e. rules of conduct that can persist over time and gradually gain persuasive power before becoming mandatory. Is this a reasonable assumption? Furthermore, should a Muslim President be a constitutional convention? This article employs socio-legal studies in the form of law in context, a historical approach to the constitution-making debate and a practical approach to Indonesian political reality. The study’s findings indicate that having a Muslim President as a constitutional convention is appropriate not only in terms of long-standing customs and practices but also as a resolution to the constitutional debate on Islam and the state, particularly the religious requirements for the President. As a constitutional convention, the Muslim President is not the law in the strict sense that it is binding and enforceable in court. Instead, it is a positive morality, ethics, and comprehension that serves as a moral guide for state officials and politicians. The Constitutional Convention in the form of a Muslim President, as well as the appointment of state offices taking religious proportionality into account, is an informal accommodation in the division of power in the design of the Indonesian constitutional system that takes into account the factors of Indonesia’s plural and potentially divided society. As a result, the convention improves Indonesia’s integration function.

“I Don’t Think That’s Something I’ve Ever Thought About Really Before”: A Thematic Discursive Analysis of Lay People’s Talk about Legal Gender

This article examines three divergent constructions about the salience of legal gender in lay people’s everyday lives and readiness to decertify gender. In our interviews (and survey data), generally participants minimised the importance of legal gender. The central argument in this article is that feminist socio-legal scholars applying legal consciousness studies to legal reform topics should find scrutinizing the construction of interview talk useful. We illustrate this argument by adapting and applying Ewick and Silbey’s (1998) ‘The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life', ‘before’, ‘with’ and ‘against’ typology to interview talk about legal gender, and critique their cognitivist approach by offering a constructionist alternative. In our analysis, we offer a detailed discursive explication of three key legal consciousness themes. These themes offer a balanced representation of a dataset problematically ‘skewed’ towards sex-based rights feminist perspectives, namely that ‘before’ legal gender is an anti-decertification account, decertification would be risky for natal females; a ‘with’ legal gender construction is neither for nor against decertification per se, though the impact of decertification is produced in accounts as limited and unimportant; and ‘against’ legal gender is a pro-decertification classification, as not abolished legal gender is constructed as harmful to already marginalised groups. In concluding, we explore the reasoning for the lack of readiness for decertification currently, and return to the value of examining the construction of lay discourse about legal matters as talk is a form of social action. We suggest that applying discursive analysis to themes in legal consciousness studies enables a refocusing on the how rather than purely the what of divergent legal consciousnesses, and that this approach is a fruitful addition to feminist socio-legal studies.

PERLINDUNGAN HUKUM KONSUMEN TERHADAP PEREDARAN KOSMETIK PALSU BERDASARKAN UU NOMOR 8 TAHUN 1999 TENTANG PERLINDUNGAN KONSUMEN DAN PERATURAN BPOM NOMOR 23 TAHUN 2019

In general, law is defined as a set of rules of conduct that regulates and coerces society. A country uses law in every step of the way. Therefore, the law becomes a benchmark for state institutions in carrying out all their affairs. The existence of the Consumer Protection Law is a legal product created by legislative institutions to ensure that the law protects as well as stipulates the rights and obligations of consumers and business actors. The problem that is currently being discussed is the distribution of dangerous counterfeit cosmetic products. This research uses a socio-legal studies approach in examining the behaviour of cosmetic business actors in e-commerce media. This research aims to analyze the consumer protection law due to the use of dangerous cosmetic products and the role of BPOM in the distribution of dangerous cosmetics in Indonesia. The results of this research show that consumer protection in the distribution of dangerous cosmetics is regulated in the Consumer Protection Law, Health Law, Minister of Health Regulation, BPOM Regulation, and related technical regulations.

Who is Recognised as a Refugee? Insights from Diverse Disciplines

The implementation practices of ‹who is a refugee› vary widely in their approaches and outcomes. Scholarship in legal anthropology, sociolegal studies and comparative political science aims to understand and to explain the different (and often inconsistent) outcomes of when individuals seek asylum. In this forum article, I provide an overview of this scholarship, critically reflecting its benefits and limitations. The multidisciplinary research on refugee status determination shows that outcomes depend heavily on extraneous political factors, institutional design, and the personal predispositions of individual decision-makers. It is, however, often limited to European asylum systems, with a strong focus on decision makers’ discretion. In light of these limitations of the existing scholarship, the article concludes with a brief overview of the RefMig project’s research, which has aimed to offer a more global view of practices.

Imaginaries of better administration: Renegotiating the relationship between citizens and digital public power

This article investigates future visions of digital public administration as they appear within a particular regulatory process that aims to enable automated decision-making (ADM) in public administration in Finland. By drawing on science and technology studies, public administration studies, and socio-legal studies we analyze law in the making and identify four imaginaries of public digital administration: understandable administration, self-monitoring administration, adaptive administration, and responsible administration. We argue that digital administration is seen from the perspective of public authorities serving their current needs of legitimizing existing automation practices. While technology is pictured as unproblematic, the citizen perspective is missing. We conclude that the absence of an in-depth understanding of the diverse needs of citizens raises the question whether the relationship between public power and citizens is becoming a one-way street despite of the public administration ideals that express values of citizen engagement.

Document Digitization By Notary As Part of Cyber Notary Provision

The digital era is something that cannot be avoided in Indonesia and even throughout the world. Various Activities change from analog to digital. Digitization activities are carried out by a notary, one of the professionals, who digitize documents for needs, and orders of laws and regulations. This article aims to analyze the urgency of document digitization carried out by Notaries, and its implications for the performance of Notaries in the current era of technological transformation. In addition, this article will also discuss the obstacles and challenges for notaries in digitizing documents. This article is the result of research conducted using the socio-legal method. Socio-legal studies carry out textual studies of articles in legislation and policies that can be critically analyzed and explained their meanings and implications for legal subjects. Several laws and regulations require notaries to digitize, especially document digitization. The process of digitizing documents carried out by a Notary is still in the stage of digitizing printed documents and placing them in a file for uploading needs on the web or certain systems. This process has its obstacles and challenges for Notaries and employees who work at Notaries.

Colonial Law as Structural Injustice: Reactivating a Justice Agenda

Ever since the controversial voyages of Christopher Columbus and the issuance of the papal bull, Inter Caetera, colonialism and law have been firmly connected at the hip. With that being said, there is a growing corpus of critical sociolegal studies scholarship seeking to attend to the nexus between colonialism and Western legal systems. Jennifer Balint, Julie Evans, Mark, and Nesam McMillan's Keeping Hold of Justice represents a timely interdisciplinary (weaving together criminology, history, and law) contribution to this scholarly puzzle, one that is worth recounting for upholding past and contemporary claims of justice against colonialism's structural injustices. Balint et al. explore the aforementioned connection between colonialism and law by underscoring its structural unjust nature (past and present), which is created and reproduced, on one side, while also exploring how this harmful relationship can paradoxically act as a key hinge for upholding and resuming justice. Therefore, the authors contend that “law is not only a site and source of colonial harm but also a potential means of keeping hold of justice” (4). Substantively, this aspect of the work not only allows for a critical exploration of colonial legality, but also strives for something practical––using law as a tool of reparatory justice in some sense. This, at least to me, sets it apart from other works that have tried to address this burning question and thus represents its key contribution.

From a French minority point of view: Perspectives on socio-legal studies in Europe

This series collects papers and proceedings related with law and society, and produced at the Onati International Institute for the Sociology of Law, including workshops papers, master tesinas, or research grant productions, in any language.

Rethinking research on social harms in an algorithmic context

In this paper we suggest that theoretically and methodologically creative interdisciplinary research can benefit the research on social harms in an algorithmic context. We draw on our research on automated decision making within public authorities and the current on-going legislative reform on the use of such in Finland. The paper suggests combining socio-legal studies with science and technology studies (STS) and highlights an organisational learning perspective. It also points to three challenges for researchers. The first challenge is that the visions and imaginaries of technological expectations oversimplify the benefits of algorithms. Secondly, designing automated systems for public authorities has overlooked the social and collective structures of decision making, and the citizen’s perspective is absent. Thirdly, as social harms are unforeseen from the perspective of citizens, we need comprehensive research on the contexts of those harms as well as transformative activities within public organisations.

The States of Inequality: Methods for Mapping Legal Pluralism in Reproductive Autonomy

The field of public health law has been honing important transdisciplinary methods such as legal epidemiology and legal mapping. These methods can and should be integrated into socio-legal studies because they provide us with a way to capture the legal elements of interlocking power structures, offer ways to meaningfully compare and predict what access to rights will look like across jurisdictions, and capture a new way to study legal pluralism across and within jurisdictions. To illustrate the benefit of such methods for studying legal pluralism, this article offers the State Reproductive Autonomy Index, which compares all fifty states on seventy-five variables. Modeled on legal epidemiology’s survey of multiple types of law, including laws that can be classified as infrastructural (laying the institutional or policy parameters), interventionist (specifically targeted to produce a result), and incidental (distally related, not intentionally), this method integrates the work of reproductive justice scholars with the work on legal pluralism to illustrate the vast inequalities in access to reproductive autonomy across the United States. The State Reproductive Autonomy Index also shows why reproductive justice, rather than reproductive rights discourse, is a more accurate frame for understanding laws relating to reproduction and bodily autonomy.

Revisiting Pound’s Law in Action and Ehrlich’s Living Law to Find the “Gap”: A Compilation of Lecture Notes

Finding research “gaps” is an important aspect that must always be done when starting research. Especially if the research is a sociological research. This article aims to shed light on the sociological approach in legal research into approaches, namely the Sociology of Law approach and the approach of Socio-legal Studies. These two approaches have different and unique ways of defining research “gaps.” This article will examine using empirical methods that rely on primary and secondary data, as well as inductive methods to analyze data. A comparison will also be made between Ehrlich’s “living law” and Pound’s “law in action” so that the differences between the two ideas can be found so that in the future, future researchers will not consider the two ideas identical.

Grants as a Model of Inheritance Prospective Distribution in the Coastal Santri Community

The practice of Islamic inheritance law in Muslim communities in Indonesia experiences many obstacles. One of the reasons is that there is still a tradition of distribution of assets when parents are still alive and the prevailing kinship system. It was found in transferring property to the coastal santri community in Pekalongan City. This paper reveals the method of dividing the prospective inheritance of the coastal santri community and the mechanism for resolving disputes in the event of a dispute. This article uses a qualitative socio-legal studies approach and is descriptive and analytic. This article finds two things. First, the model for distributing the assets of the coastal santri community in Pekalongan City is carried out using grants orally and deliberation for consensus. Prospective inheritance is divided by the grant system equally, without distinguishing between men and women. The dispute resolution mechanism is carried out in negotiation and mediation.

Can Affordable Homes be Healthy? Legal Strategy, Socio-Legal Studies and Activism in Indonesia

This article uses two Constitutional Court decisions in Indonesia to exemplify the importance of analysing legal strategies. These decisions declared a rule barring developers from building and selling tiny houses to be unconstitutional and invalid. The article shows that ‘justice’ in legal procedures still needs further definition, and that judges’ elaboration of decisions and their legal reasoning still needs improvement. The article will first discuss the cases, using Legal Strategy analysis. It will then highlight problems with the commoditisation of houses. Finally, it will argue that the problem of unhealthy and unaffordable housing in Indonesia can be resolved, by bringing together activists and researchers in a joint enterprise and tackling the issue as a collective societal project. In turn, socio-legal scholars need to keep including in-depth analysis of case law as one of the foundations of their work in law and society development.

Against Discrimination

Racial discrimination and violence against minority communities are prohibited by law, and the protection of these minority groups is protected by the Constitution, national laws, and international laws or conventions ratified by Indonesia, such as ICCPR, and ICERD. Violence cases involving ethnic Papuans are a form of human rights violation that is often ignored by the state. This study will use the normative juridical approach method, by presenting and analyzing the validity of the provisions of the legislation. Socio-legal studies, in this study, will be conducted by conducting an analysis of social studies, the theory of multidisciplinary theory of social sciences, related to the phenomenon of racial discrimination against ethnic Papuans, such as Psychological science in looking at a guess, to discrimination; communication science; Theory of Social Integration and Disintegration; and Social Conflict Theory. The aim of this study was to examine law enforcement, using paradigms in the social sciences. In this study, it will be reviewed on the quality of law enforcement, the extent to which the rules are enforced, as well as the extent to which law enforcement, as well as the government, can fulfill the rights of citizens not to discriminate in it. This research shows that discrimination against the Papuan people is caused by racial discrimination in various aspects, economic, political, educational, law enforcement, etc. The application of anti-discrimination law must be based on the professionalism of law enforcement officers, so as not to cause new discrimination in law enforcement. This study recommends that the Government of Indonesia to further increase political will in the enforcement of anti-discrimination and violence laws in all cases, especially against Papuan ethnic groups. Maximum anti-discrimination law enforcement efforts are needed to realize human rights goals, namely the fulfillment, enforcement, and protection of human rights.
 Keywords: Discrimination, Minority, Human Rights, Papua, Politics

The Absence of Constitutional Court’s Decision Follow Up: Is it A Loss?

The establishment of the Constitutional Court as the guardian of constitution that protects the citizens’ human rights gives hope for the implementation of “rule of law” principle. The Constitutional Court is expected to play a big role in upholding and protecting the citizens’ constitutional rights through each of its decisions. This expectation has become meaningless since Article 59 (2) of Law Number 8/2011 is declared to have no binding legal force by the Constitutional Court Decision Number 49/PUU-IX/2011. What are the impacts of the elimination of Article 59 (2) which has been formulated in Law Number 7/2020? This research is socio legal studies that uses secondary data that are collected through literature study. The elimination of Article 59 (2) in Law Number 7/2020 shows violation of the rule of law principles. In addition, the legislation products which are legitimized based on Law Number 7/2020 are unable to guarantee the citizens’ constitutional rights.

Charitable purposes and the shaping effects of money

AbstractWe address a curious omission from both the literature on the law of charity and socio-legal studies – the effect of apparently extraneous factors, such as politics and ideology, as well as the searching for money on the charitable purposes and identities of the public who are to benefit from the charity. This is a curious omission because even the law accepts that the idea of public benefit in charity law is a sociological concept, albeit one that has developed a technical meaning. We argue that approaching charitable purposes and public benefit as sociological concepts enables us to appreciate the tensions that those external factors produce as they re-shape those purposes and refashion the public who are to benefit. We refer to these factors under the rubric of the shaping effects of money. We use a case-study of the Canal and River Trust (CRT) to develop this argument. The trust was set up by the government as a charity to manage and control 2,000 miles of inland waterways in England and Wales. We draw on interviews with households who live on boats and ‘continuously cruise’ those boats on the canals to illustrate how their interests have been marginalised as the CRT has re-shaped itself as a well-being charity.