Books in the Cambridge Studies in Law and Society series

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.

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 in criminal prosecutions, courts martial, military commissions, habeas corpus petitions, civil damage actions and civil liberties cases.

This volume provides a genealogy of global economic governance through the history of contracts, examining how and by whom they were designed and legally validated. It will appeal to lawyers, economists, and historians interested in the globalization of markets over the past century.

Set apart from related literature, this collection anchors trafficking debates in transnational legal theory. Whilst addressing the tensions in the implementation of the Palermo protocols, it exemplifies a labor approach to trafficking and elaborates on what this paradigm shift means in comparison to a human rights or criminal justice approach.

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.

The book mixes theoretical and practical perspectives, providing analysis for crucial impact litigation cases on women's rights, in addition to intricate insights from NGO staff members who have first-hand experience with both women, and state institutions. It further demonstrates the enabling factors that allow NGOs to do such impactful work.

This book explores the inescapable experience of injury and its implications for social inequality in different cultural settings. Authors include social theorists, social scientists and legal scholars, and the subject matter extends to the Middle East and Asia, as well as North America.

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 in criminal prosecutions, courts martial, military commissions, habeas corpus petitions, civil damage actions and civil liberties cases.

Is the Russian justice system actually as unreliable, ineffective and corrupt as we are led to believe? This volume identifies a number of tensions in the everyday life experiences of justice that illuminate some of the less obvious layers of Russian legal tradition.

This book examines socio-political constructions of risk related to sexual offending behaviour by and among children and young people, combining theoretical analysis with primary research. The book will appeal to scholars, legal and other professionals, and schools and parents in helping children navigate today's highly sexualised landscape.

What explains the success of criminal prosecutions against former Latin American officials accused of human rights violations? Why did some judiciaries evolve from unresponsive bureaucracies into protectors of victim rights? Using a theory of judicial action inspired by sociological institutionalism, this book argues that this was the result of deep transformations in the legal preferences of judges and prosecutors. Judicial actors discarded long-standing positivist legal criteria, historically protective of conservative interests, and embraced doctrines grounded in international human rights law, which made possible innovative readings of constitutions and criminal codes. Litigants were responsible for this shift in legal visions by activating informal mechanisms of ideational change and providing the skills necessary to deal with complex and unusual cases. Through an in-depth exploration of the interactions between judges, prosecutors and human rights lawyers in three countries, the book asks how changing ideas about the law and standards of adjudication condition the exercise of judicial power.

How do we know that development aid is reaching those who need it most? The answer is increasingly data. This book cracks open high-level debates over indicators and data, showing the political and economic forces that shape what gets measured and how in HIV finance.

During Myanmar's political opening, intermediaries played a key role in the field of rule of law development.This book brings to light these neglected players, focusing on who they are, the influence they have, their double agency, their challenges and their crucial importance for rule of law progress.

Genocide Never Sleeps provides an ethnographic account of the messy, human process of international criminal justice at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. It is for readers interested in international criminal justice, human rights, the anthropology of law and contemporary African politics.

With pro bono initiatives identified in over 80 countries, now is a critical time to assess the growing importance of pro bono in civil justice systems. This book examines the forces shaping - and the contestation surrounding - its development within and across national contexts and is essential reading for those seeking to advance access to justice.

Child pornography and sexual grooming provide case study exemplars of problems that society and law have sought to tackle to avoid both actual and potential harm to children. Yet despite the considerable legal, political and societal concern that these critical phenomena attract, they have not, thus far, been subjected to detailed socio-legal and theoretical scrutiny. How do society and law construct the harms of child pornography and grooming? What impact do constructions of the child have upon legal and societal responses to these phenomena? What has been the impetus behind the expanding criminalisation of behaviour in these areas? Suzanne Ost addresses these and other important questions, exploring the critical tensions within legal and social discourses which must be tackled to discourage moral panic reactions towards child pornography and grooming, and advocating a new, more rational approach towards combating these forms of exploitation.

Legal mobilization is the process by which individuals invoke their legal rights and use litigation to defend or develop these rights against the government. In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to this phenomenon as it occurs under authoritarian regimes. It is often suggested that, in such situations, legal mobilization is caused by the strategic interests of the ruling elites. Using the case study of post-colonial Hong Kong, where legal mobilization has by no means unfolded as political authorities would wish, Waikeung Tam casts doubt on this contention. To do so, he examines in depth why and how legal mobilization arises under authoritarianism. Tam analyses quantitative data of changes in the Hong Kong judiciary agendas over the last three decades and uses detailed interviews with activists, politicians, cause lawyers, judges and government officials to reveal the complex underlying socio-political forces at play.

This book shows how Rwanda's transitional courts that tried genocide crimes - the gacaca - produced social complicity and cemented authoritarian rule. It is unique for its in-depth investigation of the courts' legal operations: confessions, denunciation, and lay judging, and shows how targeted incentives such as grants of clemency, opportunities for private gain, and career advancement drew the masses into the orbit of the ethnic minority-dominated regime. Using previously untapped data, it illustrates how a decade of mass trials constructed a tacit patronage-driven relationship in which the interests of the citizenry became tied to the authoritarian elite that had discretionary power to grant or withdraw those benefits at will. The operation of law in individual behavior and authoritarian control presented in this volume will be of use to students and scholars in the social sciences, and practitioners interested in criminal law and transitional justice.

This examination of Palestinian experiences of life and death within the context of Israeli settler colonialism broadens the analytical horizon to include those who 'keep on existing' and explores how Israeli theologies and ideologies of security, surveillance and fear can obscure violence and power dynamics while perpetuating existing power structures. Drawing from everyday aspects of Palestinian victimization, survival, life and death, and moving between the local and the global, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian introduces and defines her notion of 'Israeli security theology' and the politics of fear within Palestine/Israel. She relies on a feminist analysis, invoking the intimate politics of the everyday and centering the Palestinian body, family life, memory and memorialization, birth and death as critical sites from which to examine the settler colonial state's machineries of surveillance which produce and maintain a political economy of fear that justifies colonial violence.