Books in the Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies series

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.