Books in the Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies series

Not the Marrying Kind is a new and comprehensive exploration of the contemporary same-sex marriage debates in several jurisdictions including Australia, Canada, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States.

This book explores key issues in relation to parole and public opinion, including the relevance of public opinion to parole boards decision-making and strategies for increasing public confidence in parole. It presents the findings of semi-structured interviews with 80 members of parole authorities in 12 jurisdictions, across Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Scotland. Unlike judicial processes, which are open to the public, there is little awareness of and research on the work of parole authorities. This book therefore shines a light on a little-understood, but hotly-contested, aspect of the criminal justice system. Specifically, it explores differences across the study jurisdictions and considers how parole authorities in the four study countries view public attitudes, as well as the role of the media in shaping public attitudes towards parole. The book also considers whether public reaction matters for parole board decision-making and the interplay between informing the public and offender reintegration. It explores a range of strategies which may improve public confidence in parole and therefore the criminal justice system more broadly. This includes consideration of the value, definition and possibility of public confidence. The authors then discuss both passive forms, such as parole authority websites, publication of decisions and social media, before examining active forms of engagement, including an information/liaison officer, roadshows and community fora.

The book subjects the largely hidden phenomenon of benefit sanctions in the UK to sustained examination and critique. Each chapter ends with a paragraph that attempts to highlight the most salient points in that chapter, and the book ends with a short conclusion in which benefit sanctions are assessed against the chosen benchmark.

Drawing on new research material from ten European countries, Asylum Determination in Europe: Ethnographic Perspectives brings together a range of detailed accounts of the legal and bureaucratic processes by which asylum claims are decided.

Nobody's Law shows how people - who are disappointed, disenchanted, and outraged about the justice system - gradually move away from law. While previous studies emphasize the law's hegemony and argue that it's 'all over', Hertogh shows that legal proliferation makes it harder for people to know, and subsequently identify with, the law.

This book uses a case study of a low-cost home ownership initiative at the margins of renting and owning provided by social landlords - known as shared ownership - to challenge everyday assumptions held about the 'social' and the 'legal' in property.

¿The family justice system in England and Wales has undergone radical change over the past 20 years. A significant part of this shifting landscape has been an increasing emphasis on settling private family disputes out of court, which has been embraced by policy-makers, judges and practitioners alike and is promoted as an unqualified good.Mapping Paths to Family Justice: Resolving Family Disputes in Neoliberal Times examines the experiences of people taking part in out-of-court family dispute resolution in England and Wales. It addresses questions such as how participants¿ experiences match up to the ideal; how recent changes to the legal system have affected people¿s ability to access out-of-court dispute resolution; and what kind of outcomes are achieved in family dispute resolution.This book is the first study systematically to compare different forms of family dispute resolution. It explores people¿s experiences of solicitor negotiations, mediation and collaborative law empirically by analyzing findings from a nationally representative survey, individual in-depth interviews with parties and practitioners, and recorded family dispute resolution processes. It considers these in the context of ongoing neoliberal reforms to the family justice system, drawing out conclusions and implications for policy and practice.

Development in an Era of Capital Control investigates Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), a 21st century buzz word. Centred around the responsibility of business to give back to society, this idea is a departure from the traditional view that the responsibility of business is to make a profit.

Global economic factors and the changing contours of work and workplace relations have led to a reorientation of the social, economic, political and cultural environment within which labour law has developed.

Changing Concepts of Contract is a prestigious collection of essays that re-examines the remarkable contributions of Ian Macneil to the study of contract law and contracting behaviour.

A fresh theory on how individuals respond to inequalities occurring within their own communities. This original and insightful study draws on empirical research on the Santal people of Asia, examining power relations within social fields, and the state, to reveal a typology of power practices, and applies these to forced marriage in the West.

The principle of content-neutrality is the cornerstone of freedom of expression jurisprudence, protecting the core values of freedom of speech set out in the first amendment, whilst also enabling the government to place reasonable restrictions on protected speech.

In this insightful collection, a broad range of scholars analyzes a core issue for socio-legal studies, what is understood by the 'socio' of the 'socio-legal'. Drawing from legal theory, cultural studies, and social policy, the collection's wide scope of themes and topics provides an important stock-take and analysis of the socio-legal field.

Socio-legal studies have had an ambivalent relationship with the 'legal' - one of its defining aspects, but at the same time one that the discipline has sought to transcend or even leave behind.

In a break from the contemporary focus on the law's response to inter-racial crime, the authors examine the law's approach to the victimization of one Indigenous person by another. Drawing on a wealth of archival material relating to homicides in Australia, they conclude that settlers and Indigenous peoples still live in the shadow of empire.

An important collection examining how socio-legal studies and empirical legal research can be integrated into the law curriculum, looking at both core qualifying subjects and stand-alone socio-legal modules, and considering theoretical and methodological approaches combined with practical examples.

How do ordinary people experience and make sense of the informal justice system? Creutzfeldt shows that the everyday relationship that people have with the informal justice system is shaped by their experiences and expectations of the formal legal system and its agents.

The desperate need for a vast part of the global population to access better medicines in more certain ways is one of the biggest concerns of the modern era.

An inter-disciplinary, international collection that examines the mutual influences between law and culture through a series of sophisticated case studies showing how cultural phenomena are brought under legal regulation, how laws are resisted through cultural practices, and how those practices shape the way in which law is understood and applied.

Despite a popular view that trials are the focal point of the criminal justice process, in reality, the most frequent way a criminal matter resolves is not through a fiercely fought battle between state and defendant, but instead through a process of negotiation between the prosecution and defence, resulting in a defendant pleading guilty in exchange for agreed concessions from the prosecution. This book presents an original empirical case-study of plea negotiations drawing upon interviews with legal actors and an analysis of defence practitioner case files, to shine light on the processes and ways in which an agreed outcome is reached in criminal prosecutions, within the setting of a jurisdiction, like many others world-wide, which is suffering major shifts in state resources. Plea negotiations, also referred to as "plea bargaining", "negotiated guilty pleas" and "negotiated resolutions" are neither an alloyed benefit nor a detriment for defendants, victims or the criminal justice system generally, and like all compromises, this book shows how the perfect "justice" outcome gives way to the good, or just the reasonably acceptable justice outcome.

This highly topical collection of essays addresses contemporary issues facing Indigenous communities from a broad range of multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives. Drawing from across the social sciences and humanities, this important volume challenges the established norms, theories, and methodologies within the field, and argues for the potential of a multidimensional approach to solving problems of Indigenous justice.Stemming from an international conference on 'Spaces of Indigenous Justice', Indigenous Justice is richly illustrated with case studies and comprises contributions from scholars working across the fields of law, socio-legal studies, sociology, public policy, politico-legal theory, and Indigenous studies. As such, the editors of this timely and engaging volume draw upon a wide range of experience to argue for a radical shift in how we engage with Indigenous studies.

This highly topical collection of essays addresses contemporary issues facing Indigenous communities from a broad range of multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives. Drawing from across the social sciences and humanities, this important volume challenges the established norms, theories, and methodologies within the field, and argues for the potential of a multidimensional approach to solving problems of Indigenous justice.Stemming from an international conference on ¿Spaces of Indigenous Justice¿, Indigenous Justice is richly illustrated with case studies and comprises contributions from scholars working across the fields of law, socio-legal studies, sociology, public policy, politico-legal theory, and Indigenous studies. As such, the editors of this timely and engaging volume draw upon a wide range of experience to argue for a radical shift in how we engage with Indigenous studies.

Judicial authority is constituted by everyday practices of individual judicial officers, balancing the obligations of formal law and procedure with the distinctive interactional demands of lower courts.

How is religion, particularly non-Christianness, conceptualised and represented in English law?

Changing Concepts of Contract is a prestigious collection of essays that re-examines the remarkable contributions of Ian Macneil to the study of contract law and contracting behaviour.

How do ordinary people experience and make sense of the informal justice system? Creutzfeldt shows that the everyday relationship that people have with the informal justice system is shaped by their experiences and expectations of the formal legal system and its agents.

This book brings together a range of theoretical perspectives to consider fundamental questions of health law and the place of the body within it.

How should we understand sentencing decision-making? Despite huge efforts world-wide to critique, measure, and reform sentencing, why does it remain an enigma?This book argues that sentencing is an enigma because academic and policy thinking about sentencing is dominated by a set of taken-for-granted assumptions rooted in a paradigm which presumes autonomous individualism.Sentencing as a Social Process proposes a distinctive approach. Understanding sentencing as a socially-generated process allows us to rethink seemingly obvious binary categories, including: rules versus discretion; aggravating versus mitigating factors; and offence versus offender. Tata unearths the implications for classic policy conundrums, including: judicial independence and accountability; consistency and individualisation; the efficiency and quality of justice; and technology and judging.Scholars and students across a range of disciplines including criminology, criminal justice, socio-legal studies, decision-making and law will find this book stimulating and provocative.

Though states provide critical supports to the construction and ongoing maintenance of transnational legal constraints, David Schneiderman argues that states remain crucial sites for resisting, even rolling back, investment law disciplines.