Social & Legal Studies
Latest Publications


TOTAL DOCUMENTS

1521
(FIVE YEARS 171)

H-INDEX

36
(FIVE YEARS 2)

Published By Sage Publications

1461-7390, 0964-6639

2021 ◽  
pp. 096466392110414
Author(s):  
Robert Leckey ◽  
Raphael Schmieder-Gropen ◽  
Chukwubuikem Nnebe ◽  
Miriam Cloutier

The settler state's taking of Indigenous children into care disrupts their communities and continues destructive, assimilationist policies. This article presents the perceptions of lawyers, social workers and judges of how Indigenous parents experience child welfare in Quebec. Our participants characterized those experiences negatively. Barriers of language and culture as well as mistrust impede meaningful participation. Parents experience epistemic injustice, wronged in their capacity as knowers. Mistrust also hampers efforts to include Indigenous workers in the system. Emphasizing state workers’ ignorance of Indigenous family practices and the harms of settler colonialism, participants called for greater training. But critical literature on professional education signals the limits of such training to change institutions. Our findings reinforce the jurisdictional calls away from improving the system towards empowering Indigenous peoples to run services of child welfare. The patterns detected and theoretical resources used are relevant to researchers of other institutions that interact with vulnerable populations.


2021 ◽  
pp. 096466392110588
Author(s):  
Henry Redwood ◽  
Hannah Goozee

In December 2015, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda delivered its final verdict in Butare, bringing the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda to a close after 21-years. Despite the important role that the tribunal played in confirming international criminal justice as a key transitional justice mechanism, and tool of international peace and security, there has been little retrospective analysis of the court’s history. This article draws on a Bourdieusian field analysis to address the absence and makes two contributions. First, it demonstrates that over the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’s history the tribunal’s conception of justice shifted from a weak form of restorative justice to a more traditional form of retributive justice. Second, it reveals that this shift was the result of a ‘settling’ on the law and, more importantly, UN Security Council interventions. This legalisation and politicisation of trial practice saw a shift in the field from prioritising moral authority to legal and delegated authority.


2021 ◽  
pp. 096466392110608
Author(s):  
Alexandra L Cox ◽  
Camila Gripp

This article focuses on the self-legitimation strategies of frontline prosecutors working in a Northeastern city in the United States (“Belton”). The research took place in a self-described “progressive” prosecutor's office in the midst of a legitimacy crisis that prosecutors faced across the country. The prosecutors in Belton spoke about their role and practices in the face of this legitimacy crisis through a strategy of differentiation from other criminal justice actors, aimed at establishing their purported positional and moral superiority in enacting criminal justice practices, and through minimizing their responsibility for the systemic harms that prosecutors more generally have been said to perpetuate.


2021 ◽  
pp. 096466392110608
Author(s):  
Emma Cooke

This paper critically explores the working culture of legal aid lawyers and develops a novel ‘Shared Orientation’ model to better understand contemporary legal aid work and its workers. Set within a context of changing professional identities, a shrinking industry and financial constraints, the paper draws on ethnographic and interview data conducted with a high-street firm, multiple courtrooms and a law centre. It examines the emerging relevance and applicability of this new conceptual lens, refocusing the gaze on working life in fissured legal workplaces. It is argued that the ‘Shared Orientation’ model upholds multiple functions. Firstly, it captures the cultural heterogeneity of the legal aid profession, across civil-criminal and solicitor-barrister remits alike. Secondly, the model functions as a form of cohesive coping mechanism in response to the changing professional identity of the legal aid lawyers. Moreover, the ‘Shared Orientation’ offers unity as a way of functioning in an otherwise fragmented profession through its preservation of working culture ideals.


2021 ◽  
pp. 096466392110618
Author(s):  
Veronica L. Horowitz ◽  
Ryan Larson ◽  
Allison Nobles ◽  
Victoria Piehowski ◽  
Joshua Page

This paper analyzes the implementation of a domestic violence law in Minnesota that, in 2006, made the violation of a Domestic Abuse No-Contact Order a felony-level offense. Since this legal change, the rate of conviction for Domestic Abuse No-Contact Order felonies skyrocketed with stark racial disparities among Black and Native American residents, relative to Whites. Analysis of case files reveals that Domestic Abuse No-Contact Order convictions result from a range of behaviors, from seemingly mutual contact between the defendant and protected party to serious physical violence. We argue that the Domestic Abuse No-Contact Order law facilitates pragmatic punitiveness for legal actors. It is easier for prosecutors to demonstrate contact occurred than to prove domestic assault. Yet, the penalty for a Domestic Abuse No-Contact Order is as severe as the penalties for other domestic abuse-related crimes in Minnesota. Thus, the Domestic Abuse No-Contact Order law enables prosecutors to respond forcefully to domestic violence while avoiding additional burdens on their time and resources.


2021 ◽  
pp. 096466392110572
Author(s):  
Pilar Tarancón Gómez ◽  
Nuria Romo Avilés ◽  
Laura Pavón Benítez

This study investigates the factors associated with alcohol-facilitated sexual violence among young women in the Spanish night-time economy, through the analysis of twenty-six qualitative interviews with eleven young women and fifteen young men who frequent these spaces. Our results show how this type of violence originates, both from the perspective of the young women and the young men. The young women warn of the risk of sexual victimization associated with the abuse of alcohol. The young men, for their part, describe the tactics used to gain non-consensual sexual contact. These data contribute to showing how important it is for the legislation on these matters to have a gender perspective. They also add to the complex debate on the penal reform that is ongoing in Spain, in particular on sexual crimes facilitated by alcohol abuse.


2021 ◽  
pp. 096466392110401
Author(s):  
Atina Krajewska

This article examines the motivations of doctors operating in restrictive abortion regimes, and it takes Poland as a case study. It places in the foreground institutional and intra-professional factors that determine abortion healthcare, which to date have been accorded little attention. The article compares the impact that criminal, professional, and social sanctions have upon the provision of abortion services. In so doing, its purpose is to refocus debate in this area. It aims to move the emphasis away from legal and political factors, including the criminalisation of abortion, and to place it on medical agency. The Polish case study is examined to test out, in the context of a late-transitional polity, the sustainability of neo-institutionalist approaches to the study of law and organisations and the sociology of professions. The analysis is particularly important and urgent in light of the recent retrenchment of reproductive rights in Poland, and beyond.


2021 ◽  
pp. 096466392110461
Author(s):  
Harry Blagg ◽  
Victoria Hovane ◽  
Tamara Tulich ◽  
Donella Raye ◽  
Suzie May ◽  
...  

Family violence within Aboriginal communities continues to attract considerable scholarly, governmental and public attention in Australia. While rates of victimization are significantly higher than non-Aboriginal rates, Aboriginal women remain suspicious of the ‘carceral feminism’ remedy, arguing that family violence is a legacy of colonialism, systemic racism, and the intergenerational impacts of trauma, requiring its own distinctive suite of responses, ‘uncoupled’ from the dominant feminist narrative of gender inequality, coercive control and patriarchy. We conclude that achieving meaningful reductions in family violence hinges on a decolonizing process that shifts power from settler to Aboriginal structures. Aboriginal peoples are increasingly advocating for strengths-based and community-led solutions that are culturally safe, involve Aboriginal justice models, and recognises the salience of Aboriginal Law and Culture. This paper is based on qualitative research in six locations in northern Australia where traditional patterns of Aboriginal Law and Culture are robust Employing a decolonising methodology, we explore the views of Elders in these communities regarding the existing role of Law and Culture, their criticisms of settler law, and their ambitions for a greater degree of partnership between mainstream and Aboriginal law. The paper advances a number of ideas, based on these discussions, that might facilitate a paradigm shift in theory and practice regarding intervention in family violence.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document