Symbolic Power Without Violence? Critical Comments on Legal Consciousness Studies

In this paper I analyze the reception of constructivist social theory in these sociolegal studies. The hypothesis that I want to demonstrate is that despite the importance of their contributions to understanding of law, there is a theoretical ambiguity in these studies. This follows from the fact that they adhere to social theories which are premised on different presuppositions about social relations and thus irreconcilable. To illustrate this ambiguity I will contrast the way that the concept of symbolic efficacy is employed in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who is frequently cited in the legal consciousness studies as an authorized theoretical reference. I will analyze the basic concepts that underpin the sociolegal studies considered here, discuss the idea of the symbolic in law, and provide a theoretical comparison between Bourdieu and legal consciousness studies.     

The ethical identity of law students

This paper uses measures of values, moral outlook and professional identity to explore the ethical and professional identity of law students. We do so in two jurisdictions, surveying 441 students studying in England and Wales and 569 students studying in the US. The survey covers the first and final years of an undergraduate law degree and the postgraduate vocational stage in England and Wales, as well as students in all years of the JD programme in the US. We explore whether law students towards the end of their legal education have ethical identities predictive of less ethical conduct than those at the beginning of their legal education; whether law students intending careers in business law have values and profiles consistent with less ethical conduct than those intending to work for government or individuals; and what factors might explain these differences in ethical outlook. Our findings suggest that ethical identity is strongly associated with gender and career intentions. They also suggest weaker moral identities for students intending to practise business law. Ultimately, our findings support a conclusion that is more nuanced than the predominant theses about the impact of legal education on student ethicality which tend to suggest legal education diminishes ethicality.     

Resignifications and subversive transformations: Judith Butler’s queer theory and women who kill

This article provides an empirical study of a number of cases dealing with women who kill their abusive partners and the construction of the battered woman syndrome in order to identity the possibilities for transformation within the legal system. Drawing upon the work of Judith Butler, the article will argue that the unstable nature of social terms and the nature of social power provides the potential for resignifying and subversively transforming the gender identities constructed and perpetuated by the law. In addition to outlining the defences for murder and engaging in a close examination of the cases, the article will also provide a critical analysis of Judith Butler’s approach to subject formation. Dr Anna Carline LLB (Hons), LLM, PhD. Law Lecturer, Liverpool John Moores University.     

SOCIAL WORK AND LAW: A MODEL APPROACH TO INTERDISCIPLINARY EDUCATION,PRACTICE, AND COMMUNITY‐BASED ADVOCACY

Many schools of social work maintain partnerships with schools in other fields, including law schools. Social work educators also seek to provide students with real‐life educational experiences. Schools maintain ties with community‐based organizations to facilitate field placements for students and also to effect social change. I review existing literature regarding social work interdisciplinary education, focusing on law and social work. I describe a social work program designed to provide students with interdisciplinary education both in the classroom and in the field and to effect community‐based advocacy. Finally, I describe pending research designed to measure the program's efficacy.     

Post-secular Messianism Against the Law: Judith Butler on Walter Benjamin and ‘Sacred Life’

This essay focuses on Judith Butler’s configuration in Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012a) of sacred life from the mystical motifs that traverse Walter Benjamin’s writings as the pivot of an anti-identitarian ethics committed to non-violent resistance. To gain critical leverage on Butler’s post-secular stance, my analysis turns to Talal Asad’s ‘Redeeming the “Human” Through Human Rights’ chapter from Formations of the Secular (2003), where he enunciates a disparity between a ‘pre-civil state of nature’ and the notion of ‘inalienable rights’ that informs the subject’s rights under secular law. In underscoring the secular state’s inability or refusal to ascribe sacredness to ‘real living persons’ over and against ‘“the human” conceptualized abstractly, or imagined in a state of nature’ as presumed by natural law, Asad indirectly articulates what is at stake in Butler’s explication in Parting Ways of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’. In this context, Butler unpacks Benjamin’s remarks about the sixth commandment’s non-coercive disposition and the inner struggle its provisional applicability prompts. A conception of ‘sacred life’ crystallizes through Butler’s emphasis on the open-endedness of this struggle, which encourages us to abandon a solipsistic investment in our own suffering in the process of acknowledging its eternally transient rhythm. I argue that Butler supplements this motif by drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s grounding of the political in cohabitation. My contention is that while ‘sacred life’ forms the backbone of Butler’s affirmation of civil disobedience, Arendt empowers Butler’s ethics to transcend Benjamin’s Jewish-messianic melancholy by radicalizing the passivity that refracts it.     

Law as a Parasitic Discipline

British university law schools are undergoing a radical change in the nature of legal research and scholarship. They were once dominated by pure doctrinal analysis but the new generation of legal scholars are either abandoning doctrinal work or infusing it with techniques and approaches drawn from the humanities and the social sciences. This essay argues that this change will lead to a greater ability to provide law students with a truly liberal education and will also enable the law school to take a much greater part in the intellectual debates to be found elsewhere in the university.     

A Reasonable Balance of Law and Sentiment: Social Order in Democratic Taiwan from the Policeman's Point of View

Taiwan's political democratization has engendered a contradiction in its legal regime: consolidation of rule of law at the macro-institutional level is matched by the persistent marginalization of legal authority in ground-level social practices. This article uses an ethnographic study of neighborhood police to explore certain practical and structural elements involved in maintaining this contradictory sociopolitical order. I examine some of the processes through which state authority is invoked and applied to the policing of public space, focusing on the ideals of legitimacy that animate these processes. The argument of the article is that historical and cultural factors embodied in contemporary Taiwan's "idea of police"—exemplified in the trope of a balance between reason, law, and sentiment—are crucial to understanding how solidification of the rule of law within state institutions is kept within the boundaries of a social sensibility that does not take law as the last word.     

Perceived police legitimacy: investigating its association with college-based informal social controls

Research has found that when private citizens view law enforcement as legitimate authority figures, they are more likely to obey laws and voluntarily comply with police demands. Although procedural justice has shown to be an important predictor of perceived police legitimacy, a recent line of studies has found other significant correlates of this outcome, including media exposure, ethnic identity and strain. To date, however, few studies have explored the role collegiate-based informal social controls play in predicting law enforcement legitimacy evaluations. Using questionnaire data from a convenience sample of college students, linear regression equations were estimated to explore whether Hirschi's four social bond measures predict the obligation to obey and trust in police constructs of police legitimacy. Across both models and even after controlling for procedural justice, respondent beliefs were positively correlated with these measures. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed.     

Executive impunity and parallel justice? The United Kingdom debate on secret inquests and inquiries

At the beginning of 2008, the United Kingdom Government rolled into the Counter-Terrorism Bill some controversial proposals to reform coronial inquest processes, namely clauses that would provide for "secret inquests". The provisions were heavily criticised both inside and outside Parliament, and took a rocky passage through both the House of Commons and the House of Lords before eventually being abandoned by the government. In 2009 the government again tried to introduce "secret inquests" with the Coroners and Justice Bill, instead ultimately succeeding in establishing what critics have termed a "parallel" system of justice through provisions around "secret inquiries". This move has been seen as subverting the principles of transparency and open justice in the investigation of contentious deaths. This article examines the government's efforts to introduce "secret inquests" and thereafter "secret inquiries" in the context of the United Kingdom's coronial law and purpose, human rights obligations and the ongoing issues around sensitive intelligence, and examines the clash of laws that gave rise to the controversial proposals.     

论现代民法在“从契约到身份”运动中的困境与突破——以民法的终极价值为视角

“从契约到身份”运动的兴起,使现代民法陷入了困境。民法的终极价值是自由,这决定了民法在面对上述运动时,必须放弃社会正义的价值取向,而坚持自由这一终极价值。“从契约到身份”运动只能由以社会本位为本原的经济法加以规范。     

Law,language, and the power of ‘invisible threats’ of violence against women

Violence, and the threat of violence, is a pervasive feature of women's lives. From high-profile threats in politics to everyday harms such as domestic abuse, violence, threat, and intimidation control women's behaviour and silence their voices. Yet in many cases the pernicious and harmful effect of threat is not captured by the law. Drawing on the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and empirical research undertaken in Northern Ireland, this article analyses the ways in which both objective and ‘incorporated’ social structures generate invisible forces of fear and threat that the law does not see, but that women feel and structure their lives around. The article develops the novel conceptual tool of ‘invisible threats’ to capture threat as harm, to show the relation between threat and gendered (in)securities, and to challenge institutions of the law to respond better to invisible threats as perceived and articulated by women.     

法学教育中的法律伦理教育问题研究

从法律的内在价值要求、我国法治建设中存在的问题,提出法律伦理教育是我国法学教育不可或缺的重要组成部分.法律伦理包括蕴含在法律制度中的制度伦理与法律职业者在职业活动中的法律行为伦理即职业道德两部分.法律伦理教育的目标就是要把学生培养成为具有健全的法律伦理人格,有助于法律终极目标实现的"社会医生".这一目标的实现有赖于法学教育理念的重构和法学教学方法的转变.目前,开展法律伦理教育面临的障碍主要有思想认识上的偏颇,社会"道德滑坡"的大环境以及法律国家主义的影响等.     

Identifying Points of Contact and Engagement Between Legal and Environmental Education

This article explores the shaping and possibly reforming potential of ideas about sustainability in legal education by drawing up a scale of environmental education theories, arranged according to their propensity to transform radically university education. The article offers a critical analysis of current individualist strategies aimed at developing students' environmental skills, in particular that these hamper opportunities for universities to develop a broader and more creative agenda of social change. Applying ideas about how environmental education communities of practice develop, this article identifies some pockets of activity seeking to integrate ideas of sustainability into the law curriculum, including via environmental law and teaching Wild Law or Earth Jurisprudence. These issues form part of an on‐going debate about how well law students are being prepared for work in highly challenging social, environmental, and financial circumstances, against the backdrop of a broader question about ‘what are universities for?’     

Don’t Occupy This Movement: Thinking Law in Social Movements

Reflecting on the Occupy movement, particularly Occupy Wall Street, this article begins by addressing two major questions: how are social movements understood by legal academics; and how do social movements engage with law? Our aim is to present an alternative frame to understanding law and social movements. We draw on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy to explore law as both present and constituted in the coming together of persons in common which occurs in social movements. While the Occupy movement does engage with a form of law that is legislated and enacted through the government and legal system of a nation-state, the movement also forms and enacts law as part of its own processes. In this article we shift perspectives and attempt to think law within social movements. This involves a critical reading of some dominant approaches that explore social movements and law. Rather than situate our discussion within boundaries that seek to identify what is inside or outside a law and legal system that is determined and enforced by a nation-state (government and judicial system), our discussion of law involves a re-thinking of law. This law is part of a constant negotiation and it is involved in the dynamic processes of movements. Law involves establishing a limit and tracing this limit, but this limit is un-working itself as soon as it is constituted. The Occupy movements live law by existing not outside the law, but by rethinking the role and function of law in the movement and processes of community.     

Legal education in France and England: A comparative study*

Abstract

Despite the fact that part‐time law students comprise a significant proportion of law undergraduates, there continues to be an absence of legal research that considers the experiences and aspirations of such students as a distinct group. Against this backdrop, it is argued that these students require further research and attention for a number of reasons. First, their location allows a consideration of the extent to which broader governmental objectives for higher education are being met within law schools. Second, the extent of their presence in higher legal education places an important obligation upon law schools to explore the specific needs of this cohort and to consider the extent to which part‐time law students can be legitimately subsumed into the undergraduate cohort in terms of resources and planning. Third, the legal ambitions of many part‐time law students require a fresh consideration of the expectations of the recruiting legal profession and the legal profession's commitment to broadening social diversity within its ranks. Finally, as the experiences of part‐time and full‐time students become closer, a proper analysis of part‐time law students may provide invaluable information as to how law schools could adapt to meet the needs of all students in the future.     

Theory and Methods of a Representational Approach to Understanding Social Movements: The Role of the EDSA Revolution in a National Psychology of Protest for the Philippines

Three studies used the symbolic theory of history and identity to examine the impact of social representations of the 1986 EDSA I ??People Power?? revolution on participation in subsequent protest social movements in the Philippines. Study 1 found that in 4 state universities scattered across the archipelago of the Philippines, the first EDSA revolution was nominated as the most important event in Filipino history, and formed part of a narrative moving from authoritarian to democratic rule. Study 2 employed a mixed convenience sample of university students and adults to show that a measure of historical fatalism, or cynicism about the ability of EDSA I to produce lasting social change together with low identification with the social movement predicted lack of passive behavioral participation in the social movement that overthrew President Estrada in the EDSA II revolution. The importance of removing Estrada (derived from an expectancy?Cvalue/cost?C-benefit analysis formulation) was the best predictor of active behavioral participation. Study 3 showed that historical fatalism was the best predictor of behavioral intentions to actively participate in an attempt to overthrow Estrada??s successor President Arroyo, whereas anger was the best predictor of passive behavioral intentions among university students. Results suggest an exhaustion of goodwill from Filipinos, who no longer believe that People Power can force positive change against endemic corruption in national governance.     

Lost in translation? Teaching law to non‐lawyers: Reviewing the evidence from social work

Abstract

This paper considers pedagogical questions surrounding the teaching of law to non‐lawyers. It draws on research into the teaching, learning and assessment of law in social work education. The research comprised a systematic review of international literature, a practice survey, focus groups with students and practice teachers, and two stakeholder conferences. The evidence suggests that law teaching in social work education is of particular interest in highlighting key dimensions of education practice that affect students’ learning. The paper provides some signposts towards research‐informed organisation of teaching, learning and assessment, and highlights important areas for further study.     

中国的法治进程与公众参与——以网民参与法律事件对法治建设的影响为例

中国走的是一条政府主导型的法治化发展道路,即在政府主导下强制性地完成社会制度变迁。在这一过程中,中国社会的法治发展条件也发生了根本性的变化。社会自身的发展、经济和社会生活的需要、公众的参与正在成为法治发展的动力。本文以时间为序,把中国的法治进程划分为初始起步阶段、加速发展阶段和平稳发展阶段,并以公众中极具代表性的网民群体作为分析范本,以当前网民参与法律事件为例,结合目前我国所处的法治阶段,分析了网民参与法律事件的性质和特征,以期进一步探讨中国法治进程和公众参与之间的互动意义。     

Creating Peer Sexual Harassment: Mobilizing Schools to Throw the Book at Themselves

This paper describes how peer-to-peer sexual harassment rapidly was transformed from an unremarkable reality of secondary school life into a serious social and legal problem. First, it shows how organizations and professionals served as an entry point for social change and legal mobilization. I argue that schools were quick to address peer sexual harassment because activists framed it as a moral and pedagogical issue that resonated with educators' deeply held professional values. Second, the paper shows how law and organizations developed endogenously. Without any legal mandate, schools created and institutionalized harassment policies. Courts then looked to these organizational practices to determine the content and scope of Title IX. In this way, schools literally "enacted" the law through their practices. This finding goes beyond previous work on endogeneity in that school policies influenced law at the level of doctrine, not simply at the level of meaning, enforcement, or application.