Reinterpreting Law's Silence: Examining the Interconnections between Legal Doctrine and the Rise of Immaterial Labour

Recent years have seen a rise in immaterial labour in the United Kingdom and other developed economies. Sociological explanatory accounts of these developments focus primarily on economic drivers. Little, if any, inquiry has been made into the potential role of law. This article seeks to identify the aspects of law that may be constitutive of employer and worker perceptions of the acceptability (or otherwise) of employer demands for immaterial labour. Two key contributions are made. The first is a setting-out of a methodological approach to exploring the constitutive effect of law that emphasizes the internal operation of legal doctrine as critical to understanding its sociological implications. The second is the development of substantive knowledge on the potential role of law vis-à-vis the rise of immaterial labour.     

EXPLAINING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EMPLOYMENT AND JUVENILE DELINQUENCY*

Most criminological theories predict an inverse relationship between employment and crime, but teenagers' involvement in paid work during the school year is correlated positively with delinquency and substance use. Whether the work–delinquency association is causal or spurious has been debated for a long time. This study estimates the effect of paid work on juvenile delinquency using longitudinal data from the national Monitoring the Future project. We address issues of spuriousness by using a two-level hierarchical model to estimate the relationships of within-individual changes in juvenile delinquency and substance use to those in paid work and other explanatory variables. We also disentangle the effects of actual employment from the preferences for employment to provide insight about the likely role of time-varying selection factors tied to employment, delinquency, school engagement, and leisure activities. Whereas causal effects of employment would produce differences based on whether and how many hours respondents worked, we found significantly higher rates of crime and substance use among nonemployed youth who preferred intensive versus moderate work. Our findings suggest the relationship between high-intensity work and delinquency results from preexisting factors that lead youth to desire varying levels of employment.     

Judicial Waivers of Parental Consent for Abortion: Tennessee's Troubles Putting Policy into Practice*

According to the U.S. Supreme Court, minors seeking abortions are entitled to petition for relief from state‐mandated parental consent. To facilitate the actualization of this right, Tennessee included procedural mechanisms that go beyond those in effect in most states in its parental consent statute. This paper examines whether these additional mechanisms allow Tennessee to succeed where other states have failed. Our findings indicate that these mechanisms mitigate to some extent the sort of implementation failure observed in other states. However, the magnitude of this mitigation is not sufficient to establish that parental consent statutes can be implemented in accordance with Supreme Court requirements.     

THE EFFECTS OF DIRECTED PATROL AND SELF‐INITIATED ENFORCEMENT ON FIREARM VIOLENCE: A RANDOMIZED CONTROLLED STUDY OF HOT SPOT POLICING

Targeted policing has proven effective in reducing serious crime in areas where it is highly concentrated, but the enforcement mechanisms responsible for the success of so‐called hot spots strategies remain poorly understood. This study evaluates the effects of a 9‐month randomized controlled hot spots field experiment on firearm assaults and robberies in St. Louis, Missouri. Thirty‐two firearm violence hot spots were randomly allocated to two treatment conditions and a control condition. Directed patrols were increased in both treatment conditions, whereas the experimental protocol limited other enforcement activity in one of the treatment conditions and increased it in the other. The results from difference‐in‐difference regression analyses indicate that the intervention substantially reduced the incidence of nondomestic firearm assaults, with no evident crime displacement to surrounding areas, to times when the intervention was not active, or to nonfirearm assaults. By contrast, we find no effects of the intervention on firearm robberies. Less definitive results suggest that the certainty of arrests and occupied vehicle checks account for the treatment effects on nondomestic firearm assaults.     

Mais Médicos: Cuba's Medical Internationalism Programme in Brazil

In 2014, at the request of the Brazilian government and under the sponsorship of PAHO, the Cuban government sent 11,400 doctors to work in underserved areas. This article examines the origins and development of this programme, Mais Médicos. The significance of this programme is explored, as well as what it illustrates about south‐south cooperation as a whole.     

Constituency Congruency and Candidate Competition in U.S. House Elections

Research on candidate competition has focused on how much context matters in emergence decisions and election outcomes. If a candidate has previously held elected office, one additional consideration that may influence entry decisions is the relative degree of overlap between the candidate's current constituency and the “new” set of voters she is seeking to represent. Using GIS software, we derive a measure of the challenger's personal vote by focusing on constituency congruency between state legislative and congressional districts. Results suggest state legislators are more likely to run for a seat in the U.S. House if constituency congruency is relatively high.     

‘The rules are all over the place’: Mass Observation,time, and law in the COVID-19 pandemic

This article analyses practices of pandemic time making that surrounded the imposition and communication of laws restricting daily life in parts of the United Kingdom in spring 2020. With colleagues, we commissioned a Mass Observation Project directive in summer 2020, asking contributors about their everyday experience of time during the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyse how legal temporalities emerge across 228 responses. Initially, law making seemed belated, missing the disruptive temporalities of the pandemic. Once they arrived, pandemic rules were sudden, changeable, and confusing. Mass Observation writers forged clusters of improvised practices – tactics of anticipation – to cope with these unsettling temporalities. Meanwhile, the Hansard Society, the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments, and legal commentators argued that ‘fast-track’ pandemic law making was error ridden, putting the public at risk of unwitting criminal liability. Attentive to ‘polyrhythmic’ temporalities operating across fields of experience and action, our study underlines the contradictory qualities of apparently resonant constructions of legal time.