Discussion Law & Society Review at Fifty: A Debate on the Future of Publishing by the Law & Society Association

This contribution presents a series of statements on the future of publishing by the Law & Society Review and the Law & Society Association generally. Framed by the first author's introductory and concluding comments are contributions by Halliday, Liu, Morrill, Seron, and Silbey. This debate, based on a LSR 50th anniversary panel held at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the LSA, is intended to open up a broader conversation among members of the Association. Positions by individual contributors can only be linked to them and not to the group of contributors.     

Legal Compliance in Street‐Level Bureaucracy: A Study of UK Housing Officers

Street‐level bureaucratic theory is now at a fairly mature stage. The focus on street‐level bureaucrats as ultimate policymakers is now as familiar as it is important. Likewise, the parallel sociolegal study of the implementation of public law in public organizations has demonstrated the inevitable gap between law‐in‐the‐books and law‐in‐action. Yet, the success of these advances comes at the potential cost of us losing sight of the importance of law itself. This article analyzes some empirical data on the decision making about one legal concept—vulnerability in UK homelessness law. Our analysis offers two main contributions. First, we argue that, when it comes to the implementation of law, the legal abilities and propensities of the bureaucrats must be taken into account. Bureaucrats' abilities to understand legal materials make a difference to the likelihood of legal compliance. Second, we must also pay attention to the character of the legal provisions. Where a provision is simple, it is more likely to facilitate legal knowledge and demands nothing of bureaucrats in terms of legal competence. Where the provision is also inoffensive and liveable, it is less likely to act as an impediment to legal conscientiousness.     

Baker & McKenzie's regular article tracking developments in EU law relating to IP, IT and telecommunications

This is the latest edition of Baker & McKenzie's column on developments in EU law relating to IP, IT and telecommunications. This article summarises recent developments that are considered important for practitioners, students and academics in a wide range of information technology, E-commerce, telecommunications and intellectual property areas. It cannot be exhaustive but intends to address the important points. This is a hard copy reference guide, but links to outside web sites are included where possible. No responsibility is assumed for the accuracy of information contained in these links.     

EU update: Baker & McKenzie’s regular article tracking developments in EU law relating to IP, IT & telecommunications

This is the latest edition of Baker & McKenzie's column on developments in EU law relating to IP, IT and telecommunications. This article summarises recent developments that are considered important for practitioners, students and academics in a wide range of information technology, e-commerce, telecommunications and intellectual property areas. It cannot be exhaustive but intends to address the important points. Additional commentary is also provided in relation to a few select areas of particular interest. This is a hard copy reference guide, but links to outside web sites are included where possible. No responsibility is assumed for the accuracy of information contained in these links.     

Institutional Racism in Bureaucratic Decision-Making: A Case Study in the Administration of Homelessness Law

This article reports findings from an ethnographic research project which investigated the influence of judicial review experiences on the decision-making processes of three heavily litigated local government agencies. The research focused on the administration of homelessness law in local government in England. However, the particular findings which emerged from fieldwork and which are discussed in this article concern institutional racism. 'Institutional racism', of course, is a much-used and contested concept and may refer to a number of sources of discrimination. The aim of this article is both modest and particular. It presents a case study of how systemic discrimination may be socially produced within the bureaucratic processes of organizational decision-making.     

What happened in Korea? Rethinking Korean history 1945–1953

Abstract

The Pueblo incident was a stunning reminder of the hysteria and racism associated with the word Korea in the U.S. In spite of Vietnam and the great changes that have taken place within American society, the U.S. government and the military had little trouble in resuscitating the spectre of “brainwashing” and torture. The most diabolical cunning was attributed to the Koreans, who had legally captured the Pueblo and its crew. But as though at the touch of a switch, the American media and much of the nation again began to call for blood as they had done in the years 1950 to 1953. It would be a mistake to underestimate the success of America's campaign of vilification against the Korean people and the Korean revolutionary movement. At times the phobia reaches absurd proportions.     

Recursivity in Legal Change: Lawyers and Reforms of China's Criminal Procedure Law

This article employs a new framework for legal change, the recursivity of law, to explain why China's criminal procedure law has cycled through numerous reforms between 1979 and 2008 without improving the conditions of lawyers' criminal defense work. The authors argue that Chinese lawyers' difficulties in criminal defense have deep roots in the recursive nature of the criminal procedure reforms. In particular, those difficulties were produced by interactions of the four mechanisms of recursivity (indeterminacy of law, contradictions, diagnostic struggles, and actor mismatch) in both lawmaking and implementation. The empirical analysis shows that these mechanisms are linked in pairs and in sequence. This logic of change offers an integrated interdisciplinary approach to the enactment and implementation of law in other times, places, and areas of law.     

Shadow Writing and Participant Observation: A Study of Criminal Justice Social Work Around Sentencing

The study of decision‐making by public officials in administrative settings has been a mainstay of law and society scholarship for decades. The methodological challenges posed by this research agenda are well understood: how can socio‐legal researchers get inside the heads of legal decision‐makers in order to understand the uses of official discretion? This article describes an ethnographic technique the authors developed to help them penetrate the decision‐making practices of criminal justice social workers in writing pre‐sentence reports for the courts. This technique, called ‘shadow writing’, involved a particular form of participant observation whereby the researcher mimicked the process of report writing in parallel with the social workers. By comparing these ‘shadow reports’ with the real reports in a training‐like setting, the social workers revealed in detail the subtleties of their communicative strategies embedded in particular reports and their sensibilities about report writing more generally.