All in Favour? Attitudes of Stakeholders and Drug Users Towards Judicial Alternatives

Different judicial alternative sanctions and measures exist on the three levels of the criminal justice system. These alternative sanctions and measures can be applied to a specific target group, namely drug users. The current study is a qualitative assessment of the application and execution of alternative measures and sanctions for drug users, based on semi-structured face-to-face interviews in which stakeholders (magistrates, judicial assistants and social workers) and drug users were asked for their attitudes towards these sanctions and the factors that influence them in their convictions and beliefs. In conclusion we can state that the interviews have increased the insight in the attitudes of decision makers, social assistants, judicial assistants and drug users towards alternative sanctioning. From the interviews we learn that there are strong similarities between the three profiles, which provide for a strong basis for the continued functioning of alternative sanctioning.

Of Mines,Mining, and Imagining: Rights without Society?

As a polyvocal discipline that integrates studies of law in society, socio-legal studies should have no problem accommodating civil liberties and human rights. Numerous methodologies and frameworks present themselves as illuminating, troubling, and critiquing conceptions and experiences of rights. Legal analysis of human rights is nevertheless often abstract and highly technical. But what if socio-legal analyses of rights were not available? What would be lacking? Using a personal situated methodological approach, I explore the Journal of Law and Society's back catalogue to reflect on what civil liberties and human rights might be without socio-legal studies.     

Who’s Afraid of Property Rights? Rights as Core Concepts,Coherent, Prima Facie,Situated and Specified

Natural property rights are widely viewed as anathema to welfarist taxation, and are pictured as non-contextual, non-relational and resistant to regulation. Here, I argue that many of the major arguments for such views are flawed. Such arguments trade on an ambiguity in the term ‘right’ that makes it possible to conflate the core concept of a right with a situated or specified right from which one can read off people’s actual legal entitlements and duties. I marshal several arguments demonstrating this conflation. In particular, I examine the right to free speech, where contextualization and responsiveness to the requirements of other rights are assumed as a matter of course. I conclude that the existence of one natural right does not foreclose the existence of other natural rights. Arguments for or against welfare rights must be assessed, at least to some extent, independently of the assertion of a natural property right.     

Share and Share Alike? Hedge Funds,Human Rights,and Owning Enterprise in Britain

This article explores the meanings of ownership and shareholding in the context of the 2007 run on Northern Rock, its subsequent nationalization in 2008, and the resulting legal challenge brought by former shareholders. Drawing on evidence from a range of sources outside traditional legal and official doctrine, and from original empirical research, it focuses on the perspective and voices of local small individual shareholders in relation to shareholding, bank failure, and government responses to financial crisis. It tells the story of these individual shareholders against differing conceptions of share ownership rights and responsibilities, and from various angles, to show the many different subjectivities of corporate shareholding and ownership of enterprise of which orthodox legal and economic models take scant account. It concludes on a note of historic persistence in demand for proprietary shares in banking institutions, despite the differing levels of understanding and tolerance of equity risk among shareholders that our research reveals.     

The Portuguese Parliament and Public Opinion: A Case for Reform?

During the past decade, the Portuguese political system has been under close scrutiny. As in other Western democracies, the topic of citizens' dissatisfaction with democratic institutions has been at the centre of a wide debate amongst public opinion and politicians. This debate has focused on parliament and parliamentary reform has often been seen as a way of enhancing parliament's image. However, as this note will show, there is no clear evidence that the Portuguese are dissatisfied with this institution. Indeed, this is still an under-researched area. Why is there an assumption that the Portuguese parliament has a negative image? And why should this have consequences for parliamentary reform? In the context of the creation of a Portuguese Election Study, this note aims to raise questions for future research on this topic. The note will look into the concept of legislative support, assess the evidence available on the Portuguese parliament's popularity and suggest indicators that would help to clarify the Portuguese views on this. It will also explore the connection between legislative support and the role of parliament, to enquire whether popularity indicators can make a case for parliamentary reform.     

Punishment and Rights in European Union Citizenship: Persons or Criminals?

While European Union (EU) citizenship has traditionally been key to limiting criminalisation at national level, over recent years crime has become a criterion to distinguish between the good and the bad citizen, and to allocate rights according to that distinction. This approach has been upheld by the EU Court of Justice (CJEU) in its case‐law, where crimes show the offender's disregard for the societal values of the host Member States, and deny his/her integration therein. This article argues that citizenship serves to legitimate criminal law. The Court outlines two—counterposing—types of human being: the law‐abiding citizen and the criminal. The article shows the legal unsoundness of the Court's approach. It does so by analysing and locating the case‐law over a crime–citizenship spectrum, marked at its opposing ends by Duff's communitarian approach to criminal law, on the one hand, and Jakobs' criminal law of the enemy, on the other.     

A Survey: Children’s Rights Post Termination of Parental Rights and Pre-Adoption

This survey of the statutory provisions and case law of all 50 states and the District of Columbia includes the rights of children to parental support, inheritance, and familial association remaining upon termination of parental rights. A majority of states terminate all the child’s rights at the time parental rights are severed. However, a number of states by explicit statutes or statutory construction have determined that a child’s rights to parental support survives termination of parental rights. This survey examines the prevailing law in each state and suggests statutory reforms to protect the legal status and rights of children.     

Post-Marxism and the Politics of Human Rights: Lefort,Badiou, Agamben,Rancière

Recent histories of human rights have shown that the turn to human rights as a form of politics occurred as a placeholder for utopian energies at the end of history, coinciding with a retreat of the organised left, the abandonment of the theme of revolution, and the pluralisation of political struggles. This essay examines the way that radical continental theory has responded to the political hegemony of human rights by focusing on ‘post-Marxist’ thought. Examining the work of four influential critics of human rights—Claude Lefort, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacques Rancière—I argue that post-Marxist thought provides two very different approaches to the political possibilities offered by human rights. The first retains a fidelity to the revolutionary critique of rights by rejecting the language and conceptuality of human rights as too deeply implicated in the liberal political order that needs to be resisted. The second acknowledges the limitations of human rights while arguing that they also offer important tools for democratic political struggle. The essay draws upon these analyses to consider the contemporary political meaning of human rights. It argues that the latter of these strategies is problematic because we now face a radically different political conjuncture to the one in which the politics of human rights first emerged: human rights have played an important role in the project of post-historical reaction; the political space in which the politics of rights once made sense has collapsed; and we have seen substantial political upheavals in the wake of the crisis of capitalism.     

Did Drug Courts Lead to Increased Arrest and Punishment of Minor Drug Offenses?

Drug courts were implemented nationwide during the 1990s to expand alternatives to incarceration for individuals with substance use disorders that were charged with nonviolent felonies or misdemeanors. Although these courts were publicized as a facilitator of treatment and alternative to incarceration, researchers and advocates have suggested that this approach may have unintentionally intensified law enforcement focus on casual drug users and individuals with minor substance dependency. The primary objective of this study was to determine whether there is evidence that drug courts systemically increased the arrest and punishment of misdemeanor drug use and possession by conducting a series of panel data analyses among more than 8,000 city and county jurisdictions while controlling for economic, demographic, and nationwide law enforcement trends. Analyses in this study provide evidence that local police increased their attention toward minor drug offenses in jurisdictions where drug courts were implemented across the nation.