scholarly journals The Every Day Work of Studying the Law in Everyday Life

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan S. Silbey

Susan Silbey began her academic training in political science and in the course of her studies became a sociologist of law, the last two decades as a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's anthropology department and management school. The disciplinary transformations ground, in part, her attention to the ways in which the everyday life of scholarship has led her to study the everyday life of the law. In this article, she describes her scholarly life through seven chapters of relatively distinct challenges and themes. Across the arc of her life, she identifies the recurrent influence of both serendipity and theoretical inference acting within the immediate constraints of family and personal capacity. Reading across descriptions of her work on regulatory enforcement, dispute negotiation and mediation, and popular legal culture and consciousness, she points to the necessity of reconciling on-the-ground vicissitudes of doing legal work with the theories and narratives social scientists construct to make sense of institutions and history. She muses on theoretical attempts to align the particular and the general, the micro and macro forces working in legal cultures, and concludes by celebrating the ubiquity of social ordering whose own momentum both seduces and frustrates social scientists.

2021 ◽  
Vol 120 (3) ◽  
pp. 515-532
Author(s):  
Svati P. Shah

In the wake of the twinned specters of authoritarianism and antidemocratic governance that the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns in India have both exacerbated and facilitated, the author argues that scholarship on sex work deployed through a critique of labor will be pressed to rethink its analytic focus on the law. Instead, the author argues for a field-level focus built around both the everyday life of surviving sex work in the informal economy and the understanding that enforcement of the law regularly diverges from the letter of the law itself. Unless it accounts for prevailing epistemic conditions, new critical work on sex work as a labor strategy may afford opportunities to be taken up in support of reductive narratives of sex work, built around the trope of injury. The consequences of not addressing the conditions of the production of our critiques will be the continued erasure of sex workers as migrant workers and as economic agents. In the post-COVID-19 world, these critiques will be stressed even further, as the informal sector expands along with uneven policing, and as sex work continues to serve as a measure of security for some, against a backdrop of extreme and intensifying precarity.


Author(s):  
Robert Pearce ◽  
Warren Barr

This chapter considers the nature and benefits of an organization gaining charitable status. Charity, in the sense of doing good for one’s fellow man, is often linked with philanthropy, which is the desire to promote the welfare of others. However, the legal definition of ‘charity’ is one that is carefully controlled because of the advantages that organizations which are classed as charities at law enjoy. Nevertheless, it includes a variety of purposes, which affect of the everyday life of citizens. Many people in England and Wales have real, if unknowing, contact with the law of charitable trusts, whether they are putting a small donation into collection boxes or envelopes, putting something into a collection at church, signing a Gift Aid declaration on admission to National Trust properties, contributing regularly through payroll giving schemes, or responding to major disaster appeals.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 577-597
Author(s):  
Shane Chalmers

This essay makes a theoretical argument for reimagining ‘the rule of law’ in light of ‘legal pluralism’. Building on the work of Desmond Manderson and Roderick Macdonald in particular, the essay considers what it means for law’s pluralism—the differences that animate the everyday life of law—to be the very pulse of its rule. In doing so, the essay seeks to open the frame that has been placed around the rule of law in two ways. On one side: to see beyond the law that is made intelligible through institutionalized modes of expression to the law that is made sensible through the richly expressive media of human culture (thus opening the frame around the ‘law’ that is seen to rule). And on the other side: to see beyond law as a mode of governance to law in the everyday lives of subjects (thus opening the frame around how this law is seen to ‘rule’). The result is a reimagination of the rule of law as a broadly socio-cultural phenomenon rather than a narrowly legal-institutional arrangement. The essay proceeds in two steps, beginning with law’s pluralism before turning to law’s rule.


Author(s):  
Khaled Hassan

To identify changes in the everyday life of hepatitis subjects, we conducted a descriptive, exploratory, and qualitative analysis. Data from 12 hepatitis B and/or C patients were collected in October 2011 through a semi-structured interview and subjected to thematic content review. Most subjects have been diagnosed with hepatitis B. The diagnosis period ranged from less than 6 months to 12 years, and the diagnosis was made predominantly through the donation of blood. Interferon was used in only two patients. The findings were divided into two groups that define the interviewees' feelings and responses, as well as some lifestyle changes. It was concluded that the magnitude of phenomena about the disease process and life with hepatitis must be understood to health professionals. Keywords: Hepatitis; Nursing; Communicable diseases; Diagnosis; Life change events; Nursing care.


2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Highmore

From a remarkably innovative point of departure, Ben Highmore (University of Sussex) suggests that modernist literature and art were not the only cultural practices concerned with reclaiming the everyday and imbuing it with significance. At the same time, Roger Caillois was studying the spontaneous interactions involved in games such as hopscotch, while other small scale institutions such as the Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham, London attempted to reconcile systematic study and knowledge with the non-systematic exchanges in games and play. Highmore suggests that such experiments comprise a less-often recognised ‘modernist heritage’, and argues powerfully for their importance within early-twentieth century anthropology and the newly-emerged field of cultural studies.


2019 ◽  
Vol 146 (2) ◽  
pp. 472-480
Author(s):  
Oksana Hodovanska
Keyword(s):  

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Masdar Masdar

Cash waqf in Indonesia has been long enough implemented based on some rules enacted by government and other rules defined by The Waqf Board of Indonesia (BWI). However, the implementation of cash waqf has not reached the level of success. Therefore, this article studies the application of cash waqf law in Indonesia according to Friedman’s legal system theory. The legal system theory of Friedman firstly looks at the substance of the law, which is the rules or regulations; and secondly it examines the structure of the law, encompassing the law enforcement agencies, such as judge, prosecutor, police and legal counselors. And lastly the theory examines the element of legal culture, which is a response from Muslim society. The first two examinations indicate that there is nothing to be a problem. But from the last examination there is a problem regarding the trust from Muslim society. From the legal culture point of view, the implementation of cash waqf by the government, which is performed by BWI, needs attracting society’s credentials in order to improve and maximize the performance of cash waqf in Indonesia.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document