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Asylum Marginalisation Renewed: ‘Vulnerability Backsliding’ at the European Court of Human Rights International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2024-03-26 Ben Hudson
It is now over ten years since the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR or Court) first established that asylum seekers are inherently and particularly vulnerable on account of their very situation as asylum seekers. This occurred in its Grand Chamber judgment in the case of M.S.S. v Belgium and Greece. This article critically examines the Court’s subsequent asylum jurisprudence through the lens of
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‘Route Causes’ and Consequences of Irregular (Re-)Migration: Vulnerability as an Indicator of Future Risk in Refugee Law International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2024-03-26 Maja Grundler
States’ bordering practices force individuals to undertake dangerous migratory journeys and put them at risk of severe human rights violations. Yet, irregular arrivals who are found not to be at risk of serious harm in their countries of origin are perceived as voluntary migrants and are therefore assumed not to be in need of protection. This article employs the concept of vulnerability to challenge
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Epistemic Violence and Colonial Legacies in the Representation of Refugee Women: Contesting Narratives of Vulnerability and Victimhood International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2024-03-26 Malak Benslama-Dabdoub
The traditional drafting and subsequent implementation of international refugee law have been criticised for relying on a male-centric understanding of persecution. Whilst this framework has recently shifted to include a more gender-sensitive interpretation, I argue that this introduction of gender within refugee status determination has traditionally relied on narratives infused with gendered and
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Environmentally Induced Displacement: When (Ecological) Vulnerability Turns into Resilience (and Asylum) International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2024-03-26 Francesca Ippolito
This article aims to reflect on ‘ecological vulnerability’ – which makes evident the relationship, flows and interactions between the human being/body and the environment/non-human world – as applied in the context of environmentally induced migration. In particular, the dual role of the law vis-à-vis environmentally displaced migrants as a generator and exacerbator of their vulnerability as well as
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On the Basis of Migratory Vulnerability: Augmenting Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights in the Context of Migration International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2024-03-26 Moritz Baumgärtel, Sarah Ganty
The fact that migration cases seldom raise any questions under Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is neither inevitable nor justified. This article reaffirms the equality provision as a useful and indeed necessary mechanism for the European Court of Human Rights to deal with such applications. More concretely, we build on our previous work, which identified a legal tool suitable
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Rethinking and Advancing a ‘Bottom-up’ Approach to Cultural Participation of Persons with Disabilities as Key to Realising Inclusive Equality International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2024-03-18 Ann Leahy, Delia Ferri
Debates about cultural participation of persons with disabilities within legal and socio-legal scholarship and within disability studies tend to remain disconnected. This article brings legal analysis and other academic disciplines into a critical dialogue. It sheds light on how the right to cultural participation is understood from the bottom up, building on a study carried out across Europe. Participants
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Looking at the other side: working conditions in Portuguese courts International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2024-02-05 João Paulo Dias, Paula Casaleiro, Conceição Gomes, Fernanda Jesus, Teresa Maneca Lima, Filipa Queirós, Ana Paula Relvas, Luciana Sotero, Marina Henriques, Luca Verzelloni
QUALIS is a research project that studies ‘the other side of courts’ by looking at the working conditions of judicial professions in Portugal and their impacts on the profession, health, family and personal life. The objective of this article is to provide an overview of the results obtained, based mainly on the interviews and the online questionnaire administered to the Portuguese judicial professions
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Contextualising the absence of standardised approaches to transitional justice in the Philippines International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2024-02-01 Tine Destrooper
The professionalisation, institutionalisation and standardisation of transitional justice has often been critiqued for pushing more informal, vernacular or experimental approaches off the radar. While this concern is legitimate and needs to be addressed, this article explores the continued relevance of standardised approaches, and of a shared language of transitional justice more specifically. I develop
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Mainstreaming equality and human rights: Factors that inhibit and facilitate implementation in regulators, inspectorates and ombuds in England and Wales International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2024-01-08 David Barrett
To date the mainstreaming of equality and human rights law into public sector organisations has been underwhelming with the implementation of these norms being ad hoc and inconsistent. Existing research on factors that influence implementation has been either too general or too disjointed. This article has two aims to advance research on the implementation of equality and human rights: (i) to outline
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Critical theory and memory politics: leftist autocritique after the Ukraine war International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2023-11-30 Eric Heinze
In recent years, Western governments have invoked the values of universal human rights to justify large-scale military operations. Critical theorists have often responded that these campaigns serve not to promote peace, stability, or prosperity, but to entrench Western economic and political power, often in ways that have been devastating for local populations. However, Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine
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Delay and settlement: The disposition of medical negligence claims in Ireland International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2023-11-22 Mary-Elizabeth Tumelty
Reflecting the international experience, statistics show that most medical negligence cases in Ireland settle. Less is known, however, about the duration of these cases, though anecdotal evidence suggests that they are protracted in nature. Procedurally focused reforms, aimed at reducing costs and facilitating more expedient resolution of these disputes have been proposed in Ireland, yet await implementation
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Accounts of vulnerability within positive human rights obligations International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2023-11-07 Nikki Godden-Rasul, C.R.G. Murray
Accounts of human beings as vulnerable have provided powerful reposts to liberal individualism in recent decades. Concurrently, the European Court of Human Rights’ jurisprudence on Convention states’ positive obligations often obliges public authorities to address particular vulnerabilities. These developments reflect elements of different theoretical accounts of vulnerability but lack a coherent approach
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The racialising effects of non-marriage in English Law: A critical postcolonial analysis International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2023-10-31 Zainab Batul Naqvi
In this article I argue that the judicial concept of non-marriage racialises and orientalises minoritised communities and their marriages. Applying a critical postcolonial lens, I show how the development of non-marriage has been influenced by colonial racialising attitudes towards marriage. This has led to its application in racist and orientalist ways to demean and other minoritised marriage practices
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The immigrant versus the state: The marginal contribution of tribunal judges to administrative justice International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2023-10-24 Sule Tomkinson, Mireille Paquet, Laurence Robert
Administrative tribunal judges determine rights and entitlements regarding bureaucratic decisions. In immigration appeal cases, they review negative decisions of permanent residency acquisition and family reunification. Based on an analysis of all immigration appeal decisions in Canada’s Quebec province over a period of twenty-three years, we find that tribunal judges confirm the bureaucratic decision
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How to ‘make law count’: Lessons from the Comisión Internacional contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (CICIG) for the Effectiveness of Hybrid Governance International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2023-10-18 Theresa Reinold
The international community has experimented with a variety of tools for promoting the rule of law in weak states, yet with few successes. An innovative tool is hybrid commissions not supplanting the justice system of the target state but fighting impunity from within it. In this contribution I therefore seek to identify the factors that render this novel mechanism of rule of law promotion effective
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The Vulnerable (M)other and the Autonomous Legal Subject: Rethinking Vulnerability in Criminal Law International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2023-10-02 Sarah Singh
In this article I apply Fineman’s vulnerability thesis to explore the ways in which vulnerability is constructed and mobilised in a criminal law context. Using a ‘failure-to-protect’ offence as a case study reveals contemporary constructs of vulnerability as both a problem to be solved and gendered. Constructing women as pathologically vulnerable allows the state and its institutions to downplay the
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Deliberative Experience and the Civic Aspirations of Legal Education International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2023-09-27 Jeffrey Kennedy
As law graduates wield significant influence in public life, law schools’ responsibility for cultivating students’ civic capacities and dispositions remains an important but often neglected project. Taking up this project, this article traces a thread of deliberative democratic aspirations within legal education scholarship and explores the potential of participation within law schools’ own political
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Intermediaries in the criminal justice system: professional work, jurisdictions, and boundary work International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2023-09-21 John Taggart
Intermediaries are communication experts who facilitate communication between individuals with communication needs and the criminal justice system. In executing the role, intermediaries interact with police, lawyers, judges and other criminal justice professionals. But is the intermediary a professional in its own right? This article argues that a more useful question to ask is whether intermediaries
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Community courts as legal transplants: a socio-legal case study from the Netherlands International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2023-07-10 Nienke Doornbos
Aiming to ensure a responsive and socially relevant approach to court cases, judiciaries have initiated innovative projects, such as problem-solving community courts, over the last three decades. In this socio-legal case study, I analyse the legal transplantation of a community court from the US to the Netherlands. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic field work (interviews, observations and
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‘Informed consent is a bit of a joke to me’: lived experiences of insight, coercion, and capabilities in mental health care settings International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2023-06-20 Magdalena Furgalska
The Independent Review of the Mental Health Act 1983 found that people’s experiences and self-knowledge were mislabelled as a ‘lack of insight’. Insight, a psychiatric concept, is defined as an ability to recognise one’s mental illness, awareness of one’s symptoms and compliance with treatment. Across different jurisdictions, legal scholars have raised concerns about the influence of insight on legal
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Perceiving law without colonialism: Revisiting courts and constitutionalism in South Asia International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2023-06-08 Cynthia Farid
This article argues that the colonial government in India was shaped by changes in property law, race relations and other institutional interests that accompanied the political and economic restructuring of the colonial state. Therefore, the development of constitutionalism was the outcome of an interplay between institutional and professional interests and larger socio-economic and political forces
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A theory of legal apparitions: regulation and escape in Indian divorces International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2023-06-02 Yugank Goyal
When people do not approach a formal court of law to settle their disputes, and cannot enter into out-of-court settlements either, what do they do? I find that people install court-like processes which mimetically follow the court procedures, executing the settlement as if the decision were rendered officially. By examining such practices in the case of divorce-related disputes in India, I advance
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Limitations on fundamental freedoms in Sri Lanka: majoritarian influence of constitutional practice International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2023-05-25 Gehan Gunatilleke
Sri Lanka’s Constitution authorises the state to limit certain fundamental freedoms on the grounds of specific public interests. This article examines how this constitutional limitation regime has become vulnerable to majoritarian influence. It uses a case study approach, supplemented by key informant interviews, to delve into Sri Lanka’s constitutional practice with respect to limitations on fundamental
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The Lawyers’ Movement in Pakistan: how legal actors mobilise in a hybrid regime International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2023-05-09 Maryam S. Khan
Drawing primarily from qualitative interviews conducted between 2017 and 2018, this empirical study tells a granular story of how legal actors mobilised during the Lawyers’ Movement in Pakistan (2007–2009) from the perspective of lawyer-leaders who organised, steered and sustained support for the Movement through rapidly shifting political conditions. By underscoring the contribution of lawyer-leaders
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The response from Scottish health boards to complaint investigations by the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman: A qualitative case-study International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2023-05-04 Gavin McBurnie, Jane Williams, Margaret Coulter-Smith
This article explores how complaint investigations undertaken by health ombudsman contribute to the improvement of the healthcare system. Using a qualitative case-study approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants form the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman (SPSO) and three health boards within its jurisdiction. Health board participants were frustrated by complaints process
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The ideological role of Chilean judges in the definition of Mapuche domestic violence International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2023-05-03 Juan Pablo Zambrano-Tiznado, Renato Lira-Rodríguez
In this work we analyse the way in which ideologies, understood as an extra-legal factor, are discursively manifested in a corpus of judicial rulings that resolve cases of Mapuche domestic violence. We understand the judicial ruling as an ideological discursive genre inherent to the legal field formed by social and discursive practices. By applying critical discourse analysis, we analyse the judicial
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The right to food and substantive equality as complementary frameworks in addressing women's food insecurity International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2023-03-01 Leavides G. Domingo-Cabarrubias
In international human rights law, the right to food has become a widely accepted legal and normative framework for tackling the problem of food insecurity. However, as currently formulated, the right to food is insufficient as a framework to tackle gender-specific barriers that impede women's access to food, which has contributed to the persistence of women's food insecurity globally. While the equal
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The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights: forging a jurisdictional frontier in post-colonial human rights International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2023-02-27 Maria A. Sanchez
The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACtHPR) was finally established in 2004 after decades of negotiations. Despite forty years of resistance from governments who were reluctant to sacrifice sovereignty to a supranational body, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and its Protocol grant the ACtHPR far-reaching authority relative to other regional human rights courts. How did
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Sitting at the Same Table: a cross-disciplinary ‘constitutional-institutionalist’ approach to the study of constitutions International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2023-02-27 Reijer Passchier, Maarten Stremler
This article presents a cross-disciplinary approach to the study of constitutions: ‘constitutional institutionalism’. Conventional approaches in law, philosophy or political science tend to reduce constitutions either to their formal, factual or ideal aspects. The constitutional-institutionalist approach, by contrast, seeks to integrate these aspects into a more general perspective by focusing on the
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Torture and progress, past and promised: problematising torture's evolving interpretation International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2023-02-23 Ergün Cakal
That international law progressively recognises and prohibits emergent forms of torture and related ill-treatment has become widely accepted in the anti-torture discourse. The premise that torture's techniques and contexts change is taken to shape juridical recognition, representation and response. Authoritative international treaties, such as the UN Convention Against Torture, the European Convention
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Ending disability segregated employment: ‘modern slavery’ law and disabled people's human right to work International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2023-02-15 Linda Steele
Disability segregated employment (also referred to as ‘sheltered workshops’) violates disabled people's human right to work and employment. This article argues that modern slavery law might serve as one part of a broader strategy to end disability segregated employment, ensure accountability for the injustices within them and ensure equal access to open employment opportunities for disabled people
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Law-jobs in the algorithmic society International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-11-29 Pedro Rubim Borges Fortes, David Restrepo Amariles
It is now well established that algorithms are transforming our economy, institutions, social relations and ultimately our society. This paper explores the question – what is the role of law in the algorithmic society? We draw on the law-jobs theory of Karl Llewellyn and on William's Twining refinement of Llewellyn's work through the perspective of a thin functionalism to have a better understanding
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Contextual legal pedagogy: still radical? International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-11-22 Kenneth A. Armstrong, Maksymilian Del Mar, Sally Sheldon
This is an introduction to the Special Issue on ‘Contextual Legal Pedagogy’. It introduces the themes of the Special Issue and offers summaries of the papers in the collection. The introduction considers whether, and how, contextual legal pedagogy can still be radical, and how addressing pedagogical issues also necessarily involves addressing vital theoretical issues.
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How to do things with legal theory International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-11-22 Coel Kirkby
Legal theory must not merely describe our world; it must also assist us acting in it. In this paper, I argue that teaching legal theory should show law students how to do things with legal theory. My pedagogical approach is contextual and historical. Students learn how to use theory by seeing how past jurists acted in their particular worlds by changing dominant concepts of law. Most introductory legal
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Teaching by historicising private international law International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-11-22 Roxana Banu
This paper proposes a historical contextual pedagogy for private international, which helps students reflect on the impact of the field's legal techniques in different historical contexts. To emphasise the richness of a historical lens, the paper reflects on the development and use of private international law tort rules in a colonial, intellectual and gender historical context. By taking Phillips
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Peace, war, law: teaching international law in contexts International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-11-22 Megan Donaldson
This essay takes up the question of what it is to teach international law ‘in context’, drawing on experiences of teaching undergraduate survey courses in the US and UK, and designing a new LLM module on Histories of International Law. The essay begins with an exploration of teaching as a particular context of its own – one with constraints which might also function as foils for creativity. It then
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Incongruous pedagogy: on teaching feminism, law and humour during the pandemic International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-11-22 Debolina Dutta
In the wake of the devastating second wave of the pandemic in India, I taught an elective subject called ‘A Politics of Frivolity? Feminism, Law and Humour’. I offered a subject that intellectually embraced frivolity, precisely for the purpose of responding to the serious anguish and hopelessness of the pandemic. That the study of law is serious business works as (almost) a truism. Understandably,
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Teaching family law in neoliberal times International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-11-22 Jessica Mant
Across scholarship and legal practice, family law is widely recognised as a subject that is inextricable from the social and cultural forces that shape our understanding of how families work and how they are positioned within society. This paper argues that it is now time to build upon this by integrating an explicit awareness of political context into how we teach family law. This is because teachers
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Place-based pedagogies of hope International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-11-22 Bronwen Morgan, Amelia Thorpe
The need to engage students in thinking about the politics of law, especially in a time of escalating climate and other crises, is increasingly urgent. In this paper, we discuss a series of place-based teaching strategies designed to foster critical legal thinking, but also hope and a sense of agency. Inspired by a range of scholars – Bruno Latour, Doreen Massey, Henry Giroux and J.K. Gibson-Graham
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Historical futures and future futures in environmental law pedagogy: exploring ‘futures literacy’ International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-11-22 Elen Stokes, Ben Pontin
In this paper, we begin reflecting on how ‘futures literacy’ – recently championed by UNESCO as a vital skill that allows people to better understand the role of the future in what they see and do – might be developed in environmental law pedagogy. Law and legal analysis tend to be absent from futures scholarship and we discuss various ways of engaging with environmental law as an important but underexplored
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Bringing EU law back down to Earth International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-11-22 Charlotte O'Brien
Traditional approaches to teaching EU law can seem almost deliberately alienating; there is a lot of incomprehensible stodge that students are told they ‘just have to get through’ before they can really begin. So courses start with memorising technical terminology, institutional facts and then some principles that, without context, can just seem like more jargon. By the time they move on to case-law
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The algorithmic law of business and human rights: constructing private transnational law of ratings, social credit and accountability measures International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-11-16 Larry Catá Backer, Matthew B. McQuilla
This paper examines the rise of algorithmic systems – that is, systems of data-driven governance (and social-credit-type) systems – in the form of ratings systems of business respecting human rights responsibilities. The specific context is rating or algorithmic systems emerging around national efforts to combat human trafficking through so-called Modern Slavery and Supply Chain Due Diligence legal
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Tensions between norms of everyday narrating and legal narrating International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-11-09 Colette Daiute, Flora Di Donato
Contemporary asylum laws challenge the narratives of migrants and legal professional teams. Struggles arise in requirements to tell the right story defined by legal norms while storytelling in everyday life relies on sociocultural norms. Professionals working with socially and legally vulnerable populations, as in education and asylum cases, can bridge that gap if we understand narrating as a relational
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Predictive analytics and governance: a new sociotechnical imaginary for uncertain futures International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-10-03 Christophe Lazaro, Marco Rizzi
In an era of global sanitary, economic and ecological crisis, beliefs in the predictive power of artificial intelligence (AI) progressively penetrate the legal and political spheres, in search of new ways to anticipate and govern the future. In this context, it is critical to understand the idiosyncratic nature of the interplay between governance and algorithmic logics of prediction. This contribution
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Governance and human rights implications of ASEAN's Smart Cities Network: a knowledge commons analysis International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-09-28 Alice de Jonge
Launched in April 2018, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations' Smart Cities Network (ASCN) initiative raises important issues regarding the tensions between achieving smart city objectives on the one hand and protection of human rights on the other. The aim of this paper is to explore these tensions using a Knowledge Commons Framework analysis. I first analyse the three key pillars of the ASCN
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Layers of privacy in the blockchain: from technological solutionism to human-centred privacy-compliance technologies International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-09-28 Pablo Marcello Baquero
Different organisations recently published reports identifying the challenges and potential solutions to ensure privacy in blockchain platforms. The proposed solutions frequently emphasise the role of privacy-compliance technologies to be incorporated into the blockchain design. Often, these solutions imply a techno-regulatory approach, ignoring that the level of privacy implemented in a blockchain
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Politicised Bureaucrats: Conflicting Loyalties, Professionalism and the Law in the Making of Public Services International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-09-07 Sophie Andreetta, Annalena Kolloch
Over recent years, public servants from across the world, from French nurses and Belgian social workers to Beninese judges, have been protesting their governments. These protests, some even overt, have erupted in response to specific policies imposed on them or needing to be enforced by them. This Special Issue, however, delves into diverse processes, strategies, actions and practices adopted by civil
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Situating ‘law’ as ‘culture’ in scholarly discourse on the International Criminal Court: a reflection on Fraser and McGonigle Leyh's Intersections of Law and Culture at the International Criminal Court International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-08-19 Tomas Hamilton
Within the rich literature on the International Criminal Court (ICC), across international criminal law scholarship, transitional justice and international relations, the study of ‘law and culture’ has a lengthy pedigree. After the ICC came into operation on 1 July 2002, several years followed before the first monographs on the Court's law and culture were published, notably Sarah Nouwen's Complementarity
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Charitable purposes and the shaping effects of money International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-08-18 Dave Cowan, Barbara Hardy
We 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
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Bureaucracies under authoritarian pressure: legal destabilisation, politicisation and bureaucratic subjectivities in contemporary Turkey International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-07-14 Erol Saglam
Drawing on ethnographic research across two street-level bureaucratic institutions in Istanbul, Turkey in the late 2010s, this paper traces the causes and implications of the politicisation of bureaucrats in the context of authoritarianisation. It argues that politicisation of bureaucrats cannot solely be taken as a reflection of the erosion of bureaucratic autonomy and capacity but must be explored
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Failing, writing, litigating: daily practices of resistance in Belgian welfare bureaucracies International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-07-14 Sophie Andreetta
This paper builds on ethnographic fieldwork in Belgian welfare administrations to identify daily practices of resistance among Belgian ‘welfare bureaucrats’ who interrogate the new welfare and immigration law reforms that further restrict migrants’ access to social assistance. The contestation strategies are used to circumvent and sometimes break the formal and informal policy guidelines while still
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Magistrates marching in the streets: making and debating judicial independence and the rule of law in Benin International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-07-11 Annalena Kolloch
Since 2012, judges and prosecutors in Benin have repeatedly protested against political interference and demanded compliance with their statutorily guaranteed independence. In 2014 and 2017, magistrates demonstrated in their judicial robes in the streets, protesting against the government's bill to deprive them of their right to strike and other freedoms. Benin has been described as a ‘success story
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Translating politics into policy implementation: welfare frontline workers in polarised Brazil International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-07-11 Flávio Eiró
How is policy implementation affected by increased polarisation and extreme shifts in politics? In order to address this question, the paper focuses on frontline workers’ (street-level bureaucrats’) interpretations of political shifts and how these are then translated into practice. Building on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among social workers in Northeast Brazil, the paper proposes a theoretical
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Changing the administration from within: criticism and compliance by junior bureaucrats in Niger's Refugee Directorate International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-07-08 Laura Lambert
Research has rarely investigated the actions bureaucrats take to challenge the status quo of their organisation from within. Proposing a power-analytical approach to voice, exit and everyday resistance as political strategies of challenging the bureaucratic status quo, I study the difficulties of achieving organisational change in a context of structural constraints on junior bureaucrats’ reformative
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Distributing the costs of change: property transitions and pacts International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-06-08 Rachael Walsh
In A Liberal Theory of Property (2021), Hanoch Dagan makes an important, thought-provoking contribution to property theory – one that unifies divergent, and at time apparently dichotomous, strands of thought in property theory and revives rich dormant ideas. Dagan persuasively centres property's justification and design on the value of autonomy and on the basic need for reciprocal recognition of the
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Ethical vulnerability analysis and unconditional hospitality in times of COVID-19: rethinking social welfare provision for asylum seekers in Scotland International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-06-06 Sylvie Da Lomba, Saskia Vermeylen
We deploy a novel and radical approach to vulnerability theory to investigate Scotland's response to asylum seekers’ vulnerability during the COVID-19 pandemic and test Scotland's self-affirmation as a hospitable country. Our ethical vulnerability analysis enhances Fineman's vulnerability analysis by denationalising the vulnerable subject and locating her within our ‘uneven globalised world’. We further
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Discursive alignment of trafficking, rights and crime control International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-05-27 Mattia Pinto
Since the 1990s, human trafficking has become the battleground for competing discourses on human rights and penality. While rights solutions are generally presented as in opposition to crime-control measures, in the context of anti-trafficking interventions, rights-based initiatives and criminal governance are often linked together both discursively and in practice. Drawing on the findings of Discourse
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Inclusive education and the law in Ireland International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-05-25 Muiread Murphy, Stephanie Thompson, David M. Doyle, Delia Ferri
By ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2018, Ireland has undertaken inter alia the obligation to implement ‘an inclusive education system at all levels and lifelong learning’, as required by Article 24. However, concerns have been repeatedly expressed about the practice of inclusive education in Ireland in terms of admission policies, funding, school choice
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Women and self-defence: an empirical and doctrinal analysis International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-04-22 Rachel McPherson
The problem of women's access to self-defence has been internationally recognised. This paper presents original empirical data on women's use of self-defence in practice alongside critical feminist analysis of the requirements of self-defence under Scots law. The empirical findings confirm that women are rarely successful with self-defence at trial level and the doctrinal analysis further demonstrates
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Race-making, religion and rights in the post-colony: unmasking the pathogen in assembling a Hindu nation International Journal of Law in Context (IF 1.17) Pub Date : 2022-04-20 Ratna Kapur
This paper intervenes in critical socio-legal/post-colonial scholarship on human rights directed at how religion is constitutive of race and shapes who and what is regarded as ‘human’ and entitled to rights. It focuses on the Indian post-colony and legal persecution of the Tablighi Jamaat, a global, quietest Islamic movement, by the Hindu Right government during the Covid pandemic. It analyses how