‘It lets out all my demons’: Female young offenders' perceptions about the impact of alcohol on their offending behaviour

The paper reports on findings from 55 qualitative face-to-face interviews with young offenders, and observations of 41 youth offender panel meetings over an 18-month period taking place in two Youth Offending Teams in the Southeast of England. It discusses the perception of correlation between drunkenness and offending asserted by a high number of the female offenders and compares this to perceptions of male offenders, both in this research and from previous research studies. The research brings into question whether current interventions are effective and puts forward suggestions for capitalizing on the apparent greater willingness of female offenders to acknowledge the significant negative impact of drunkenness on their behaviour.     

Development Made Sexy: how it happened and what it means

This article examines the recent trend among Northern development organisations to represent development as sexy in awareness and fundraising campaigns. The article argues that the ways in which development organisations represent the global South and development work play an important role in the construction of social power relations between people in the global North and the global South. The representation of development as sexy is compared and contrasted to other representations of development that highlight scarcity and deprivation. The article argues that, although the representation of development as sexy avoids portrayals of poor people in the global South as helpless victims, it presents an image of development in which the most important form of agency is Northern charity.     

Fair trade slippages and Vietnam gaps: the ideological fantasies of fair trade coffee

Fair trade coffee sales have boomed since the late 1980s, making it one of the most recognised forms of ‘ethical consumerism’ in the world. Around the same time exports of lower quality coffee beans from Vietnam also boomed, launching Vietnam from an insignificant coffee exporter to the world’s second largest with historically unprecedented speed. These disparate projects have had significant impacts on thousands of farmers – with Vietnam’s new class of coffee producers representing three and a half times the number of coffee families certified by fair trade. Northern actors, however, have given far more public and positive attention to fair trade. This article will argue that this difference does not stem from a strictly objective appraisal of the relative merits and shortcomings of each project, but from the compatibility of fair trade with ‘free trade’ and its emotionally charged ideological fantasies. This includes unconscious beliefs and desires around individualism, voluntarism, democracy and the affirmation of the exaggerated power of Northern consumers – as opposed to the Southern agency and complicated collective action implied by Vietnamese coffee statecraft.     

Challenging the Ongoing Injustice of Imprisonment for Public Protection: James,Wells and Lee v The United Kingdom

The Government has recently abolished Imprisonment for Public Protection, a highly controversial form of indeterminate sentence. Yet, at the time of writing, nearly 6,000 inmates are still serving such sentences, all of whom will have to convince a Parole Board that detention is no longer necessary for the protection of the public. This paper evaluates recent European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence which considered the legality of post‐tariff detention in the absence of suitable rehabilitative provision. The Court held that there would be a violation of Article 5(1) if prisoners were held without access to such provision. Consideration is given to the implications of this ruling for those serving such sentences and, more broadly, to the impact it may have on risk‐based sentencing policies.     

Residential real estate brokerage services under attack in Canada

If Canada’s Competition Bureau gets its way, there will be greater competition in the residential real estate brokerage business, commission rates will fall and the public will have enhanced access to the Multiple Listing Service. To this end, the Bureau announced on 8 February 2010 that a notice of application would be filed with the Competition Tribunal challenging the way the Canadian Real Estate Association conducts business. The association filed its response six weeks later. Regardless of the ultimate outcome of this action, it is safe to say that the face of Canadian residential real estate brokerage services will never be the same. Commonwealth Law Bulletin editorial advisory board member Gavin Murphy explains.     

Applying Fairness Principles in Climate Change Nuisance Litigation

The tort of public nuisance has been used in two recent climate change cases, Connecticut v. American Electric Power Co. and Comer v. Murphy Oil, USA, to single out a handful of American companies with deep pockets and hold those companies liable for global climate change. This article examines why these suits contravene judicially established procedural and substantive safeguards—including “but for” causation, proximate causation, remediability, and liability allocation—that are meant to ensure that when the judicial system holds a defendant liable, it is fundamentally fair to the defendant to do so.     

Popular Punitiveness? Punishment and Attitudes to Law in Post-Soviet Georgia

Georgia is the only country in the post-Soviet region where incarceration rates significantly grew in the 2000s. Then in 2013, the prison population was halved through a mass amnesty. Did this punitiveness and its sudden relaxation after 2012 impact attitudes to the law? We find that these attitudes remained negative regardless of levels of punitiveness. Furthermore, the outcomes of sentencing may be less important than procedures leading to sentencing. Procedural justice during both punitiveness and liberalisation was not assured. This may explain the persistence of negative attitudes to law. The Georgian case shows that politically-driven punitive turns or mass amnesties are unlikely to solve the problem of legal nihilism in the region.