Socio-legal System Research Articles

The misappropriation of knowledge: unravelling the narratives of efficiency and donor fear in the medicalisation of reproduction for lesbian and bisexual women

The intersection between the feminist movement and the LGBTQIA + movement regarding assisted reproductive techniques has fostered greater openness towards the reproductive possibilities of lesbian and bisexual motherhood in Spain. Until February 2023, lesbian couples were obliged to marry in order to jointly register their children. Access to assisted reproductive technologies in Spain requires medicalised processes and the mandatory anonymity of sperm donors. In this context, we explore how lesbian mothers narrate their journeys towards parenthood through an analysis of interviews. As reproductive rights are individualised through the use of medical interventions, we apply the notion of reproductive justice as a lens to question how women’s bodies are medicalised through a cultural and socio-legal system that imposes mandatory anonymous sperm donation over other possible forms of kinship construction.

The Neo-Victorian Feminist Afterlife of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) in Sam Baker’s The Woman Who Ran (2016)

Anne Brontë’s deliberate exposition in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall of gendered violence as the consequence of the structurally embedded sexism in the Victorian patriarchal socio-legal system is a daring example of feminist critique that was ahead of its time. This article examines the afterlife of Brontë’s feminism in Sam Baker’s The Woman Who Ran (2016), a neo-Victorian domestic noir thriller which re(dis)covers and repurposes Brontë’s novel for contemporary women readers. Baker uncovers the ongoing crisis of domestic violence and sexism in professional spheres that persist despite the progress achieved by Western feminist movements to secure women’s rights in the last century. We argue that The Woman Who Ran demonstrates just how generative Anne Brontë’s writing remains for conceptualising feminist issues in the twenty-first century.

Cultural Changes Routed Through the Novel 'Sool'

In the thirteenth century, Italian artists published a series of stories called novellas. It was the extension of this that later gave rise to the tradition of telling stories through prose. Culture refers to the spheres of human activity and the symbolic systems that give special characteristics and significance to such activities. Cultures are divided into two types. One can be classified as a culture based on internal/domestic life and the other based on social/ political life. Marriage is a socio-legal relationship system. There is no tradition of marrying a girl who has been raised since childhood. There are probably no poets who have not sung about children since the Sangam period. It is a Tamil tradition to plough and produce rice and make food. The 'Sool' novel has also stated the practise of giving food without paying wages if rice is pounded. It also shows how to prepare the soil before plowing. Scatter clods of litter and top it with mullein, then summer ploughing. The land will be fertile as a bride. News about ploughing as rain water accumulates and the soil is happy and mixed with manure and ready for sowing can be seen. Once upon a time, the community appointed someone for water protection, and through them they have been protecting water. At that time, there was no name for the watering device (Neer Paaichi). They call it the "sluice control" (Madai Kudumban). From generation to generation, Madai Kudumban and Kattak Karuppan have been maintaining the sluice and distributing water. The high dignity of not giving food for money can also be seen. Thus, the best practises of society in the past are not in practise today. In this way, the aim of this article is to investigate the cultural changes through the Sahitya Akademi award-winning novel "Sool" by Karisal region writer Cho. Dharman.

Correction to: Socio-legal systems and implementation of the Nash solution in Debreu–Hurwicz equilibrium

Correction to: Socio-legal systems and implementation of the Nash solution in Debreu–Hurwicz equilibrium

Socio-legal systems and implementation of the Nash solution in Debreu–Hurwicz equilibrium

In this article we combine Debreu’s (Proc Natl Acad Sci 38(10):886–893, 1952) social system with Hurwicz’s (Econ Design 1(1):1–14, 1994; Am Econ Rev 98(3):577–585, 2008) ideas of embedding a “desired” game form into a “natural” game form that includes all feasible behavior, even if it is “illegal” according to the desired form. For the resulting socio-legal system we extend Debreu’s concepts of a social system and its social equilibria to a socio-legal system with its Debreu–Hurwicz equilibria. We build on a more general version of social equilibrium due to Shafer and Sonnenschein (J Math Econ 2(3):345–348, 1975) that also generalizes the dc-mechanism of Koray and Yildiz (J Econ Theory 176:479–502, 2018) which relates implementation via mechanisms with implementation via rights structures as introduced by Sertel (Designing rights: invisible hand theorems, covering and membership. Tech. rep. Mimeo, Bogazici University, 2001). In the second part we apply and illustrate these new concepts via an application in the narrow welfarist framework of two person cooperative bargaining. There we provide in a socio-legal system based on Nash’s demand game an implementation of the Nash bargaining solution in Debreu–Hurwicz equilibrium.

Beyond the Victim-offender Binary: Legal and Anti-violence Intervention Considerations With Women Who Have Used Force in the U.S. and Australia

In the United States (U.S.) and Australian contexts, the fight to achieve legal and societal recognition of cisgender men's violence against cisgender women operated according to an incident-based victim-offender binary. Those held accountable for the violence were seen as offenders, those who survived the violence were seen as victims. This binary persists across police, court, corrections, intervention, and child protection settings. However, work with cisgender heterosexual women with offenses of abuse and violence demonstrates that the binary does not capture their complex experiences. Instead, they have “offended” in the context of often surviving long-term harm in their families of origin and from their intimate partners. Because their experiences do not align with the binary, they are caught in ineffective and retraumatizing responses. The authors use an intersectional theoretical framework to explore how heterosexual cisgender women's use of force complicates the victim-offender binary. By understanding women who have used force as having both survived and caused harm, rather than “victims” or “offenders,” the authors call attention to the limitations of, and harm caused by, binary approaches. The authors also call for a reconceptualization beyond the binary—challenging established legal and intervention frameworks. To demonstrate the need for this reconceptualization, the authors report on U.S. and Australian legal cases, intervention approaches, and discuss socio-legal systems implications.

The Impact of Adjacent Laws on Implementing Violence Against Women Laws: Legal Violence in the Lives of Costa Rican Women

Most scholarship addressing implementation gaps of violence against women (VAW) laws focuses on countries with high levels of violence in the lives of women—accompanied by weak policing and judicial responses. These studies tend to argue that the most egregious forms of political or social violence explain this gap. However, there has been little attention to countries with lower levels of gender-based violence and relatively responsive state institutions. We analyze the application of VAW laws in Costa Rica, with a focus on the impact of adjacent laws, or laws that are seemingly unrelated to VAW laws but are applied in tandem with and often in conflict with VAW laws. Based on a decade of fieldwork in Costa Rica, we argue that adjacent laws on land, labor, and immigration can be leveraged in ways that undermine the interpretation and implementation of VAW laws. These failures constitute legal violence: the normalized but cumulatively injurious effects of laws that can result in various forms of violence. While legal violence causes implementation gaps in almost every country, our case study reveals that the underlying sociolegal system upon which these laws rest contributes to a significant gap between VAW laws and practice.

Intercultural moments in translating and humanising the socio-legal system

ABSTRACTThis paper seeks to address the question how people go about intercultural differences in an institutional setting which aims to mediate between the socio-legal system and the ‘outsiders’ of the system, i.e. ordinary citizens, through an investigation of professional interactions between a legal advisor and her clients of Eastern European backgrounds in London. Drawing data from a linguistic ethnography, the analysis foregrounds the practice of resemiotisation and calibration. The second aim is to extend the notion of ‘intercultural moments’ and to explore its analytical benefits in understanding fleeting and seemingly mundane moments in encounters.

Reconciling human rights and customary law: legal pluralism in the governance of small-scale fisheries*

The Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries (SSF Guidelines) introduce a human rights framework for fisheries management and development, suggesting an inclusive approach that embraces a range of rights, regimes and interests. These reflect diverse systems of law, values and norms, straddling both customary and statutory systems of governance and tenure. The interface between these different systems poses questions about the extent to which they are reconcilable with a human rights-based approach. The latter originates in the domain of transnational law, which has been increasing in scope and importance in recent decades. How transnational law interacts with and affects various law systems is an empirical question, to which much scholarly attention has gone. The normative question that emerges, however, is how to balance the recognition of universal human rights with respect for historically-evolved and locally legitimate, customary law in case of conflicts between them. This paper investigates some of the tensions and opportunities that arise in the meeting of the SSF Guidelines and customary socio-legal systems, paying special attention to four important fields of overlap and possibly contention: tenure, gender, child labour and markets. Co-management platforms are suggested to be the ideal meeting ground for negotiating acceptable hybrids and designing so-called interlegalities.

African immigrant women’s transition and integration into Canadian society: expectations, stressors, and tensions

This article contributes to an emergent body of research that explores African immigrant women’s experiences in Western destination countries. Foregrounding these immigrant women’s voices in this research, we aim to better understand the challenges they grapple with as newcomers to Canada. Specifically, our study sought to explore the stressors they faced within and outside the family and how these stressors mediate their transition and integration into Canadian society. We conducted, audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and thematically analyzed two focus groups with twenty African immigrant women in Alberta, a Western province among Canada’s ten provinces. Three main themes emerged from our study: (1) Participants felt ill prepared to face the challenges of starting life anew in Canada, which included in particular navigating changes in economic wellbeing and gender roles; (2) Participants experienced a lack of community support, which was reflected in both mental/emotional health and parenting issues; and (3) Participants expressed frustration with the manner in which Canadian socio-legal systems manage immigrants’ family issues. Our findings underscore the need to actively engage African immigrant women and men in the development of policies and practices that mediate their everyday lives in Canada. Such policies and practices should consider the changing gender relations, cultural knowledge, and informal support channels within African immigrant communities.

Children, human rights organisations, and the law under occupation: the case of Palestinian children in East Jerusalem

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the (im)possibility of human rights organisations and state judicial actors’ success in safeguarding of children’s rights in Occupied East Jerusalem (OEJ). Considering Israel’s political reality, and consequently, the Israeli justice system’s mode of operation and treatment of Palestinian children, we argue that civil society actors, particularly those dealing with children, are unable to challenge violations of Palestinian children’s rights. Our analyses of media coverage, key informant interviews, and focus group and round table discussions reveals that formal and informal socio-legal systems are failing in their mandate to protect children’s rights, challenge the state’s biased juvenile justice system, and prevent the racialised state from breaching local laws and ethical and international standards. Instead of challenging the systems that are embedded within the settler-colonial setting, human rights organisations reinforce the state’s control by operating within its systems and according to its rules. In so doing, these entities help the state in keeping Palestinian children under conditions of suffering within their ‘otherised’ spaces.

Crossing Legal Boundaries through International Marriage and Migration: Analysis of Japanese Women’s Oral Histories

ABSTRACTThis article examines the experience of crossing legal, political, and socio-cultural boundaries by Japanese migrant women in international marriages in Australia. The data is drawn from oral history interviews with 16 Japanese women living in Australia and married to Australian citizens or permanent residents. Australia is one of the most popular destinations for Japanese emigrants. For Japanese women in particular, applying for permanent residency as a spouse of an Australian citizen or permanent resident has been a popular settlement path. I analyze the women’s negotiations between their perceptions of socio-legal systems constructed in Japan and their newly experienced social reality in Australia. The women’s negotiations reflect their individual ways of crossing boundaries. Their practices of the Japanese socio-legal custom of changing one’s surname at the time of legal marriage provide a focus for the article. I argue that individuals’ experiences of crossing boundaries are shaped by, and embedded in, their personal histories constructed in their land of origin. In this sense, their act of ‘crossing’ means creating a connection between both sides whereby the rigidity of these boundaries is blurred.

Children's Rights, State Criminality and Settler Colonialism: Violence and Child Arrest in Occupied East Jerusalem

Over the past few years, Palestinian children in Occupied East Jerusalem (OEJ) have faced high rates of arrest. The article examines violence against children during arrest by juxtaposing state official documents recording debates and analyses of children's rights with published reports by human rights and civil society organizations. The article suggests that arrested children in OEJ suffer from three intersecting discriminatory regimes: structural discrimination that targets them as criminals based on their ethnicity; a lack of assistance as they fall under the responsibility of neither the Palestinian nor the Israeli socio-legal systems; and limited access to welfare, justice, and educational opportunities. The article concludes by suggesting that Palestinian children face severe structural violence that amounts to state-hate criminality.

Rooted Rights Systems in Turbulent Water: The Dynamics of Collective Fishing Rights in La Albufera, Valencia, Spain

Valencia's Albufera Lake is a wetlands area where different sociolegal systems interact. Its El Palmar community is governed by customary laws for fishing and territorial control. These exist alongside, yet in tension with, governmental laws. This article examines the dynamics of fishing rights, focusing particularly on the conflict between the desire to practice autonomous management and the incursion of outside authorities and third parties seeking to question these arrangements. Hereby, competition between multiple authorities, users, and even nonusers occurs in different arenas, characterized by conflicting normative frameworks. The article analyzes how the fishing community has defended its rooted, customary rights to regulate the Albufera Lake fisheries, against internal and external coalitions and influences that have threatened its structure and collective and individual rights. Their demands are, however, difficult to meet in an unequal power geography, especially since the community has authority over fishing management but not over the lake's water regime.

Exploring the bullying behaviours experienced by South African domestic workers

This article phenomenologically explores the nature of bullying behaviours as experienced by domestic workers in South Africa. Participants were a convenience sample of 10 black female domestic workers (age range = 27 to 53 years, work experience = 3 to 26 years). The domestic workers responded to an unstructured interview on their experience of work place bullying. Data were analysed using thematic analysis. Findings suggest that bullying is prevalent in domestic work and is perpetrated by both sexes and all races. Bullying behaviours were categorised into verbal bullying (belittlement, deception and false accusations) and non-verbal bullying (intimidation and excessive control, disregard for basic needs and wellbeing, disregard for employment legislation). Bullying behaviours towards domestic workers are explained by the historical socioeconomic disempowerment of domestic workers and a socio-legal system inaccessible to those with disadvantages.

Recovery Narratives, War Stories, and Nostalgia: Street-Based Sex Workers’ Discursive Negotiations of the Exclusionary Regime

This article draws upon 18 months of participant observation with 50 street-based sex workers living in a transitional housing facility. Subsequent in-depth interviews with 50 different women actively working on the street also inform analysis presented here, which explores discursive practice as one of the most salient means by which women maneuver within a socio-legal system that targets them as individuals engaged in criminalized behavior. Findings presented in this article build upon the larger project’s goal of articulating the complex and highly individualized ways in which US street-based sex workers struggling with addiction negotiate the move from membership in a criminalized group to what more than a few women describe as “being a productive member of society.” Street-based sex workers engage in this complex shift while embedded in what I term an exclusionary regime, a dense coalescence of punitive forces which involve both governance in the form of the criminal justice system and engagement with the courts and other state agents, and regular patterns of action, including myriad forms of discrimination resulting from stigma. This article discusses three narrative forms that partially enable street-based sex workers to negotiate the exclusionary regime: recovery narratives, war stories, and nostalgia. These highly context-bound expressive forms function as powerful tools that help women to obtain resources and status, as well as convey the complexities of their experiences in ways that move beyond the otherwise constrained identities available to them.

“It Depends on the Cop:” Street-Based Sex Workers’ Perspectives on Police Patrol Officers

Based upon 50 interviews that took place over the course of 3 years of ethnographic research with 100 female street-based sex workers in Denver, Colorado, the tenth largest city in the United States, this article explores the cultural ethos informing women’s interactions with police and the tools women use to navigate their struggles with homelessness, addiction, and the everyday violence of the street. It identifies three beliefs about patrol officers that reflect the complexities of women’s interactions with police: arrest is indiscriminate in a “known prostitution area,” arrest avoidance strategies necessitate interpreting behavioral cues while showing respect to officers and forming affective bonds with potential clients, and officers may abuse their authority. This belief system is part of an environment in which women’s stigmatized behaviors are highly visible and constitute an increased risk of negative police encounters. Changes to policing practices remain unlikely while women’s sex work and drug use activities remain criminalized. Findings presented support arguments for decriminalizing prostitution as well as the implementation of harm reduction-oriented social policy, including services that inform women about their rights in the criminal justice system while facilitating awareness of how their individual lives intersect with gender, class, and racial bias in a sociolegal system that stigmatizes and criminalizes their choices.

Hierarchical Production of Privacy: Gating in Compact Living in Hong Kong

Measured by both the physically fortified character and socio-legal systems of service delivery and governance, the number of neighborhoods in Hong Kong that falls into the category of gated community is huge. Gating here is widely employed in various types of housing estates, from luxury developments for the affluent, to aged tenement houses that usually house the less advantaged group, and even to public housing for the population segment who are at the very bottom of the social strata. In the densely populated Hong Kong, privacy is a rare urban resource, the competition for which thus leads to valorization of buffer between public and private lives in a hierarchical way. Gating, in its various forms and correspondingly varying magnificence to which one’s privacy is protected and separated from the public, then serves as the marker of social differences. This paper attempts to investigate the hierarchy in three tiers, with a focus on Tier Three, where vertical gating is invented as another dimension to mark social differences in the composite development model.

Arbitrating in a World of Communicative Reason

The present article advocates for a reworking of the theoretical foundations of international arbitration. With the aim of strengthening legitimacy and improving its dispute resolution efficiency, the authors argue in favour of a different approach to international arbitration's practices. Taking in consideration the transnational and trans-cultural nature of international arbitration they claim for a framework that would be more inclusive of parties' different socio-legal systems of reference, the latter suggested as the proper foundation upon which to build a system respectful of the parties' expectations. Jürgen Habermas's discourse theory provides the theoretical outline for a communicative dynamics that would move international arbitration towards a new dimension of mutual understanding among parties' diverging backgrounds. The authors explore the feasibility of such project and, suggesting possible guidelines, hope to open up a debate about the future perspectives of international arbitration.

<i>The Royal Pardon. Access to Mercy in Fourteenth-Century England</i> (review)

Reviewed by: The Royal Pardon. Access to Mercy in Fourteenth-Century England Matthew Giancarlo The Royal Pardon. Access to Mercy in Fourteenth-Century England. By Helen Lacey. York: York Medieval Press, University of York; Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2009. Pp. viii + 260. $95. Helen Lacey's exemplary new monograph investigates the king's pardon in England from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the reigns of Edward III and Richard II. During this period the royal pardon was not only important for the operation of justice and the courts—as Lacey notes, at least forty thousand pardons were issued from the accession of Edward I to the deposition of Richard II (p. 1)—it also evolved several new forms as the legal system changed and political [End Page 128] struggles flared. The Royal Pardon is the first comprehensive study in several decades of this vital part of the medieval English legal and political system. It represents yet another good product of the foundational work recently done on the documentary records in The National Archives. Drawing from the newly searched and indexed classes of petitions, pardons, parliamentary records, and various letter rolls (especially the patent rolls class C 66, the chancery pardon rolls class C 67, and the "Ancient Petitions" class SC 8), Lacey assembles a detailed yet clear assessment of how the royal pardon functioned as both a legal tool and a political symbol. The study convincingly reshapes our understanding of such central events as the Good Parliament of 1377 and the Uprising of 1381, and it also gestures toward a better understanding of how the royal pardon came to figure prominently in the popular literature of the period. The book is divided into three sections with eleven chapters and four appendices. After an Introduction to the historical and historiographical background of late-medieval pardons, Chapters 2-5 analyze the operation of "Individual Pardons"—pardons granted by the crown to individuals—by approaching each constituent element of the pardoning process: "Procedures," "Supplicant," "Intercessor," and "Monarch." The processes for obtaining, justifying, and "proving" a pardon are described first, with the early notice that in the operation of pardoning, "the king was supposedly guided by principles of equity that followed natural law . . . however such concepts did not merge easily with the common law of the English legal system" (p. 23). Supplicants did not necessarily petition directly for pardon themselves. More often trial judges recommended mercy on behalf of defendants. Nonetheless some five hundred direct petitions for pardon survive, and Lacey provides an illuminating assessment of the class, gender, circumstances, and language that variously characterize these documents. Here also Lacey looks at popular representations of "pardon scenes" in ballads and records, some with idealized portraits of royal clemency suggesting "the extent to which the law of the realm was regarded as personal to the king" (pp. 42-43). Even more interesting are the evaluations of the roles of intercessors and of the monarch. In Chapter 4 and in Appendix 4, Lacey quantifies the number and social positions of intercessors for pardons, those persons who actually bore the request for mercy to the sovereign and whose mediatory role became an intermittent focus of anxiety and legal control. Lacey demonstrates that the queens of Edward III and Richard II were prominent intercessors (as we might expect), but also that "in terms of sheer numbers of pardons secured . . . Edward III's military commanders stand out from other patrons" (p. 47). The numbers provided in Appendix 4 give a fascinating view of this. Men such as Henry Grosmont, the duke of Lancaster; Edward of Woodstock, the prince of Wales; and William de Bohun, the earl of Northampton, were responsible for dozens and sometimes hundreds of intercessions, especially at times of military muster when pardons could be used as a recruiting tool. Such intercession also led to abuse and inquiry. This is reflected both in attempts to regulate it and in contemporary comments about corruption (as in the Corpus Christi plays and Piers Plowman). The focal element of the pardon, the king himself, also provides a category for exploring the fundamental conflict inherent in a sociolegal system which looked to the sovereign as the personal embodiment of...