Socio-legal Analysis Research Articles

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

The Socio-Legal Analysis Of Sexual Harassment And Kindred Offences

Extracted from text ... 112 THE SOCIO-LEGAL ANALYSIS OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND KINDRED OFFENCES* ADENIYI OLATUNBOSUN Department of International Law Faculty of Law Obafemi Awolowo University Ile-Ife Introduction: Sexual harassment is an unwanted, persistent conducts of a sexual nature expressed by words, look and/or actions by a person against another person which offend and distress the person at which it is aimed. It takes many forms ranging from different types of behaviour such as: unwanted display of sexually offensive materials, different acts of intimidation, unwanted physical touch, kiss, pat or any other such gesture, unwanted obscene jokes and insinuations, use of offensive body ..

Sexual Harassment at Workplace: A Socio-Legal Analysis

It is the policy of all workplace that all employees will enjoy a work environment free from all forms of discrimination, including sexual harassment. No employee, either male or female, shall be subjected to discrimination. Any employee who believes he or she has been the subject of discrimination, including sexual harassment, should report the alleged incident immediately not only to his or her supervisor but also to the Director of Personnel. An investigation will be undertaken immediately, and any employee who has been found by the company to discriminate against another employee will be subject to appropriate sanctions. Prevention is the best tool for the elimination of sexual harassment. An employee should take all steps necessary to prevent sexual harassment from occurring, such as affirmatively raising the subject, expressing strong disapproval, developing appropriate sanctions, informing employees their right to raise and how to raise the issue of harassment under the existing rules and regulations of the country, and developing methods to sensitize all concerned.

Human Rights Law and National Sovereignty in Collusion: The Plight of Quasi-Nationals at Strasbourg

This article offers a review of the cases where the European Court of Human Rights has been called upon to decide whether or not the expulsion of a ‘quasi-national’ following criminal conviction violated the European Convention on Human Rights. The Court has adopted various findings since its first ruling in 1991. The first part of this article argues that neither the facts of the cases, nor the composition of the relevant judicial panels, nor an evolution in the overall political climate explain in themselves the inconsistency in the case law, qualified as arbitrariness by one of the judges. The second part of the article moves beyond a close socio-legal analysis to discuss the significance of the common rule (once inadmissibility decisions are taken into consideration), according to which quasi-nationals are deportable. Nationality law, at the core of the case law, is revealed as a fiction that creates privilege at the same time as it obscures the discriminatory basis of this privilege under the guise of operating a neutral categorisation of human beings. The article notes in conclusion the continuing grip of the nation State in the global age and deplores the legitimation, at the highest judicial level, of exclusion on the basis of unquestioned national privilege.

The CANZ Approach to Legal History

The first quality the reader may have noted about these two essays is that they both deal with the question of the legal rights of marriage partners to the economic fruits of one another's labor. But inasmuch as this was only one of several issues addressed by Bruce Kercher, I see it only as an interesting coincidence. Somewhat more noteworthy is the difference between their methodologies: Golder and Kirkby's engagingly crafted socio-legal analysis beautifully illustrates the “thick description” virtues of a case study of litigation, reform agitation and legislation, while Kercher gets us well beyond Alan Atkinson's pioneering study of his subject by carefully drawing evidence unavailable to Atkinson from some of the many cases that he and his research assistants have uncovered from manuscript and newspaper records over the past several years (decisions of the Supreme Courts of New South Wales and VanDieman's Land that are steadily becoming available to us all on two websites). Needless to say, both methodologies “work.”

Restorative Justice and Collective Responsibility: Lessons for and from the Rwandan Genocide

Genocide struck Rwanda in 1994. Since then, national and international trials have endeavored to promote reconciliation, deterrence, peace, justice, and human rights. This article posits a disconnect between these trials and the attainment of their avowed goals. This disconnect emerges in part from the influential agendas of international lawyers who equate selective criminal prosecution with the "rule of law" and espouse criminal prosecution as the preferred and uniform response to mass atrocity. Creating a presumption in favor of criminal prosecution has dampened the need to explore whether such trials actually are suitable for the particular afflicted society. A socio-legal analysis suggests that Rwanda is precisely a place where constructed notions of what "rule of law" ought to be are supplanting the need to implement reconstructive policies that may be best for Rwanda. In particular, the populist nature of the Rwandan genocide, coupled with the vast level of victimization, suggest that a shame-based restorative approach may be more successful in promoting reconciliation, deterrence, and peace than the guilt-based retributive approach currently in vogue. This article argues that, when the law blames occurrences of genocidal evil largely on the existence of some evil people, it obscures the fact that so many people, to varying degrees of complicity, are required for this evil to result in so many deaths.

Integrating Reciprocal Perspectives: On Gurvitch's Theory of Immediate Jural Experience

RésuméCet article suggère que plusieurs idées de Gurvitch, présentées à l'origine de manière abstraite, ont gardé leur pertinence pour l'analyse socio-juridique. Sous une forme révisée qui permettrait leur application, elles seraient utilisables en recherche empirique. À cette fin, je réinterprète quelques une des principales approches théoriques de Gurvitch à la lumière de la recherche socio-juridique des dernières décennies. Je les applique par la suite aux données empiriques recueillies personnellement ou par d'autres chercheurs dans des études variées. Il s'agit de savoir si les perspectives théoriques de Gurvitch peuvent approfondir leur compréhension et ainsi ouvrir de nouvelles voies à la recherche socio-juridique.

Book Reviews

Book reviews: Becket, Katherine and Theodore Sasson, The Politics of Injustice: Crime and Punishment in America (reviewed by Peter Duff); Smart, Carol and Bren Neale, Family Fragments? (reviewed by Alison Diduck); Krygier, Martin, and Adam Czarnota (eds), The Rule of Law After Communism: Problems and Prospects in East-Central Europe (reviewed by Jan Zeilonka); Freedland, Mark and Silvana Sciarra (eds), Public Services and Citizenship in European Law: Public and Labour Law Perspectives (reviewed by Tony Prosser); Bainham, Andrew, Shelley Day Sclater and Martin Richards (eds), What is a Parent? A Socio-Legal Analysis (reviewed by Felicity Kaganas); Carver, Terrell, and Veronique Mottier (Eds), The Politics of Sexuality: Identity, Gender, Citizenship (reviewed by Sharon Cowan)

Andrew Bainham, Shelley Day Sclater and Martin Richards (eds.), What is a Parent? A Socio Legal Analysis

Andrew Bainham, Shelley Day Sclater and Martin Richards (eds.), What is a Parent? A Socio Legal Analysis

Law Under and After Apartheid: Abel's Sociolegal Analysis

It is a rare event when a single academic work and a particular analytical method help shape the way a nation understands its past. Richard Abel's Politics by Other Means, which employs a sociolegal analysis to reveal the roles of under apartheid, has achieved this distinction. Many South African lawyers, judges, and academics submitted arguments to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's (TRC) institutional on the role of the legal community and under apartheid. Abel alone, however, is cited in the final report as the source of the Commission's conclusion-which acknowledges the contradictory roles and pervasive complicity of the in the creation and endurance of the apartheid system. The TRC read its mandate fairly narrowly-to investigate the violation of human and to provide a means, through establishing truth and granting amnesties, for the society to move beyond the crimes of apartheid. Nevertheless, it took a significant step when it decided to hold a hearing in an attempt to understand the role the legal system played in contributing to the violation and/or protection of human rights during the apartheid period. In so doing the TRC joined the long-standing debate over the rule of law under apartheid. Unlike the academic debate, however, the TRC was faced with the duty to make findings and even recommendations based on the submissions it received.

Individual Bankruptcy: Preliminary Findings of a Socio-Legal Analysis

Individual Bankruptcy: Preliminary Findings of a Socio-Legal Analysis

Constitutive Criminology: Beyond Postmodernism

Introduction 'Here There Be Dragons' Human Subjects and Human Behavior On the Problem of Similarity and Difference Society and Social Structure Criminology's Visions of the House of Social (Dis)Order The Structuring of Law A Constitutive Socio-Legal Analysis Definitions of Crime and Constructions of the Victim Modernist Theories of Crime Causation Postmodernist Approaches to Causality and the Constitution of Crime The Justice Policy of Constitutive Criminology Reconstruction through Replacement Discourse(s) The Justice Practice of Constitutive Criminology Replacing Technologies of Discipline with Languages of Possibility

Part 2 – Stereotyped Assumptions versus Sex Equality: A socio-legal analysis of Equality Laws in Canada and the United States of America

Part 2 – Stereotyped Assumptions <i>versus</i> Sex Equality: A socio-legal analysis of Equality Laws in Canada and the United States of America

Part 1 – Stereotyped Assumptions versus Sex Equality: A socio-legal analysis of Equality Laws in the European Union

This article seeks to evaluate the legal developments of the European Community in its attempts to eliminate sex discrimination and inequalities in treatment between men and women and to analyse, from a socio-legal perspective possible inefficiencies of the Community’s primary and secondary legislation on the issue. In the light of the Intergovernmental Conference and the European Community’s aspirations to become a fullfledged federal state, the social dimension of European Integration acquires relativeimportance from a legal, political as well as economic perspective. In a second follow-up article the authors will attempt to provide a comparative analysis of the evolution of equality law and policy and the social parameters in labour relations between men and women that exist in two alrerady established federal states, the United States of America and Canada.

A sociolegal analysis of Canadian youth justice: The impact of offender's race on judicial decisions

There is evidence to suggest that even within ostensibly egalitarian systems of justice young offenders are, at least in part, socially selected. Police, court workers, lawyers, and judges make prejudgments of young offenders on the basis of extralegal as well as legal factors. This study examined the influence of extralegal variables, especially offender's race, on judicial outcomes including detention on arrest, plea, adjudication, and sentencing. While the principal focus was the effect of offender's race, the effects of other attributes including sex, age, family support, and counsel status were incorporated into the analysis to present a comprehensive explanatory model of justice. Loglinear/logit modelling techniques were employed to assess the simultaneous effects of social and legal variables. In summary, the data consistently supported the claim that at all levels of the justice process extralegal variables, most noticeably race, had a substantial systematic influence on judicial decisions, especially when seriousness of offense and criminal record were controlled. Most importantly, the study showed that the effects of race occured primarily in interaction with both legal and extralegal factors.

Court Management of AIDS Disputes: A Sociolegal Analysis

Historically, disease scares reveal contradictions in the social order. We postulate that courts focus on depoliticizing social tensions revealed by AIDS, legitimating the routines of dominant parties in the AIDS sociolegal network. At the same time, courts deviate from their normal practices try upholding the claims of subordinate parties in this network, particularly people living with AIDS (PWAs) and their allies. Our analysis of 36 AlDS-related court rulings, published during the formative years of AIDS litigation in the United States, supports the notion that courts operate as “double-edged” institutions. To explain the duality of judicial decision making, we concentrate on the powers of social and cultural factors rather than on the doctrinal judgments of the courts. We trace how relational attributes, evident in contestants' characteristics (e.g., plaintiff/defendant, status differentials) and the nature of claims (i.e., restrictive/expansive), combine to account for wins for dominant parties and how other combinations of these attributes define wins for subordinate parties. We also show how judges combine specific interpretational attributes in the text of their rulings (e.g., use of divisive AIDS metaphors, deference to medical authority) to justify wins. We consolidate these findings to discuss how PWAs and their allies might use the courts to their advantage and point out the ways in which the changing epidemiology of AIDS in the United States limits the use of courts.

Court Management of AIDS Disputes: A Sociolegal Analysis

Historically, disease scares reveal contradictions in the social order. We postulate that courts focus on depoliticizing social tensions revealed by AIDS, legitimating the routines of dominant parties in the AIDS sociolegal network. At the same time, courts deviate from their normal practices try upholding the claims of subordinate parties in this network, particularly people living with AIDS (PWAs) and their allies. Our analysis of 36 AlDS-related court rulings, published during the formative years of AIDS litigation in the United States, supports the notion that courts operate as “double-edged” institutions. To explain the duality of judicial decision making, we concentrate on the powers of social and cultural factors rather than on the doctrinal judgments of the courts. We trace how relational attributes, evident in contestants' characteristics (e.g., plaintiff/defendant, status differentials) and the nature of claims (i.e., restrictive/expansive), combine to account for wins for dominant parties and how other combinations of these attributes define wins for subordinate parties. We also show how judges combine specific interpretational attributes in the text of their rulings (e.g., use of divisive AIDS metaphors, deference to medical authority) to justify wins. We consolidate these findings to discuss how PWAs and their allies might use the courts to their advantage and point out the ways in which the changing epidemiology of AIDS in the United States limits the use of courts.

Contract and Business Transactions: A Socio-Legal Analysis

Empirical studies demonstrating the non-contractual nature of business relations1 have tended to suffer from both the lack of any coherent socio-legal perspective2 and the failure to take proper account of important doctrinal developments within the law of obligations.3 In arguing that a Weberian theoretical model may be developed and used in the reappraisal of results of existing studies and in further empirical research,4 I am assuming that an adequate socio-legal analysis of the transaction process must be theoretically informed, methodologically explicit, and capable ultimately of explaining the links between legal and economic aspects of social relations.' I hope to establish the following points in the course of this paper: (i) that Weber's main concern in his writings on law and capitalism is the general analysis of the role of legal norms in relation to other normative and non-normative systems in orienting rational social action; (ii) that Weber's account allows for the possibility that extra-contractual private law may play just as important a part in the transaction process as the law of contract; (iii) that existing empirical studies have tended to focus too narrowly on the role of contract in business relations, and as a consequence have underestimated the importance of extracontractual, non-legal, and completely non-normative factors in regulating those relations; (iv) that the argument on the last two points may be supported by reference to analyses of developments within the private law of obligations, which see the decline of contract in relation to the increasing importance of reliance-based forms of liability.

Judges and Experts in England and Wales and in France: Developing a Comparative Socio-Legal Analysis

At the superficial level of legal processes and procedures, nothing could be more different than the legal systems operating in England and Wales and in France for the protection and welfare of children. England and Wales operate an adversary system where much emphasis is placed on the formal courtroom process during which 'facts' have to be proved by oral evidence as in the criminal courts, after which part-time, non-professional magistrates decide whether the child should return to the family or become the responsibility of state child-care agencies. In France, on the other hand, professional career magistrates often hold informal consultations in their rooms, frequently act as intermediaries between social workers and the family and, finally, decide not only whether social work intervention should take place but also the detailed nature of that intervention. Moreover, formal rules governing relationships between judges and social workers are also very different. In England the social worker is a witness, like any other; once a child is declared in need of care, it is the local social services department and not the court which becomes responsible for that child's future. Under the French system judges and social workers, particularly those social workers employed by the Ministry of Justice, work in close collaboration with the children's judge. The social workers put into effect the judge's orders and report back to the judge on the progress of the child and the family. Each major change in the child's circumstances has to receive the prior approval of the judge.

Lay Tribunals in the Sudan: An Historical and Socio-Legal Analysis

(1983). Lay Tribunals in the Sudan: An Historical and Socio-Legal Analysis. The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law: Vol. 15, No. 21, pp. 61-128.