Books in the Cambridge Studies in Law and Society series

This book examines gift exchanges as a foundational notion both in anthropology and in debates about international economic governance. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This book presents the definitive history of the passport and why it became so important for controlling movement in the modern world. It explores the history of passport laws, the parliamentary debates about those laws, and the social responses to their implementation.

Constituting Religion examines how activists work to expand or challenge the reach of the shariah court system, and how these legal struggles shape popular understandings of Islam, liberal rights. This title is also available as Open Access.

All Americans should be deeply troubled by violations of fundamental freedoms in the US 'war on terror'. This is the only comprehensive account of efforts during the Bush and Obama administrations to defend the rule of law against egregious wrongs committed in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, torture, wiretapping, civilian casualties, and targeted killings.

This is the first comparative analysis of law and politics in China and Indonesia, for scholars of politics, law, sociology, and history. Based on extensive archival, interview, and observational research across multiple localities in both countries, it is the most comprehensive work in decades on either country's legal system.

In each country or culture a certain type of interaction between law, power, and society contributes to the formation of a national legal doctrine, legal practice, and legal scholarship. This is a detailed comparative study of the sociology of law in France and the United States.

This book follows the activist campaign that contested the Botswana government's removal of indigenous peoples from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. The means by which indigenous peoples can access a justice system to protect their rights is of interest to a broad audience of human rights scholars and practitioners.

Duties to Care delivers a groundbreaking new socio-legal investigation into the regulatory dimensions of caring for a person with dementia. Exploring the legal aspects of dementia care by covering everything from diagnosis to end-of-life decision making, this book uses empirical data to provide original analysis of dementia care regulation.

This book offers the first extensive empirical study of global lawmaking for commerce and trade within the United Nations. It shows who makes law for the world, how they make it, and who comes out ahead.

This original ethnographic study investigates petty corruption in Ukrainian and Belarusian bureaucracies and challenges the dominant belief that political transition causes ubiquitous corruption. It will appeal to scholars across social sciences, policymakers and a variety of anti-corruption and social justice activists.

Examining how demographic changes, including low birth rates, increasing ethnic diversity, continuing immigration and population ageing are transforming ideas about citizenship and belonging, The Demographic Transformations of Citizenship provides insights into a number of interrelated and topical subjects and will appeal to readers from a variety of backgrounds.

This book examines the social processes that lead to the evolution of legal norms with global constitutional standing in contemporary society. It makes an important contribution to the sociology of constitutional law, post-legal national legal processes and human rights law. This title is also available as Open Access.

As the first ethnographic study of the practice of Islamic law by Chinese Muslims (Hui), this book will appeal to students and specialists who study the state and religion, legal pluralism, and conflicts of law from the perspectives of anthropology, law and society, Asian studies, and Islamic studies.

Through a meticulous detailing of the everyday life of development bureaucracy on the Himalayan borderland, Paper Tiger shifts the frames of the debate on state failure and opens up a refreshingly new understanding of the workings of the contemporary Indian state.

This interdisciplinary study juxtaposes the popular, legal, and indigenous accounts of a dispute over a Coca-Cola facility in Kerala, India. It includes interviews with members of indigenous communities, activists, politicians, lawyers, and judges, as well as an analysis of litigation currently pending before the Supreme Court of India.

Based on in-depth fieldwork, this book explores the historical development of immigrant rights litigation in both the United States and France over the past four decades. It illustrates that, contrary to conventional wisdom, activity in court can have important effects on immigration policymaking.

This is a book about the improbable: seeking legal relief for environmental pollution in contemporary China. The book offers a close-to-the-ground account of everyday justice and the factors that shape it. In a country known for tight political control and ineffectual courts, Environmental Litigation in China unravels how litigation works.

How do a legal order and the rule of law develop in a war-torn state? Using his field research in Sudan, the author uncovers how colonial administrators, postcolonial governments and international aid agencies have used legal tools and resources to promote stability and their own visions of the rule of law amid political violence and war in Sudan.

Empirically grounded in both Burmese and English sources, this book offers the first major study of the contemporary court system in Myanmar. Nick Cheesman calls upon legal and political theory to explain how and why institutions animated by a concern for law and order oppose the rule of law.

Drawing on theoretical frameworks from social constructivism and new institutionalism, this study explains how institutions transform Family and Medical Leave Act rights to recreate systems of power and inequality but at the same time also provide opportunities for law to change social structure.

Combining textual analysis of constitutions and historical reconstruction of formative social processes, Chris Thornhill examines the legitimating role of constitutions from the first quasi-constitutional documents in medieval Europe to recent constitutional transitions.

Focused on the turbulent upheavals of the 1990s and mid-2000s, this socio-legal exploration of the politics of urban water services assesses two modes of governance - managed liberalization and participatory democracy - that reflect tensions between water viewed as a scarce commodity and as an essential public good.

This book provides law scholars and students with a critical review of international speech crimes and will also appeal to social scientists studying hate speech and incitement. The book integrates social science and legal perspectives, advocating a preventative approach and proposing a new risk assessment model for inciting speech acts.

Since 2001, the Gacaca community courts have been the centrepiece of Rwanda's justice and reconciliation programme. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in Rwanda and nearly five hundred interviews with participants, this book's conclusions provide indispensable insight into post-genocide justice and reconciliation.

This study shows the impact of the ICTY on Bosnian society and its role in translating international law in domestic contexts.

Using an approach that combines anthropological and political analysis, this book examines the roles of military command, mystical powers, child soldiers, forced marriage and fact-finding in the Special Court for Sierra Leone, arguing that cultural differences have obstructed justice and that international justice requires a more multicultural approach.

The purpose of this book is to examine and discuss the violence perpetrated against women in politically conflicted or militarized areas. The voices of Palestinian women show how militaristic values and policies affect female victimisation and agency in conflict zones.

This book examines different hypotheses about Chilean judicial behavior before, during, and after the authoritarian interlude. The book explores arguments based on judges' personal policy preferences, social class, and legal philosophy, but contends that institutional features, grounded in the ideal of 'apoliticism', best explain judges' conservative and conformist conduct.

This book explores how notions of justice are negotiated through everyday practices and made to represent the real, the law. It takes on the challenge of mapping the growth of the rule of law criminal justice movement alongside a range of other justice formations and in that process explores the processes by which justice is made.