On Moving the Table: Reflections on an Author-Meets-Reader Session

Through a commentary on the enriching experience of receiving feedback through the Brewing Legal Times author-meets-reader session in February 2018, this piece reflects on the intellectual generosity and scholarly labour that makes such sessions an important form of academic social reproduction.     

Legal Form and Temporal Rationalities in UK Work–Life Balance Law

Abstract

This article attempts to crack open the temporal assumptions in the goal of ‘balancing’ work and family, as it is mobilised in UK law. Within studies of gender and labour, ‘balance’, as a concept and a politico-legal objective, is worthy of much more scholarly attention than it has received to date. In the UK context, balance is understood as a means of achieving equilibrium, both at the level of the labour market and within the context of unpaid care. Specifically, mobilising the short horizon of a ‘reckonable present’, balance creates a paradigm or topos through which dilemmas of value and care can be played out and resolved. The specific qualities of the UK's right to request flexible work, for its part, indicate that law's temporal qualities can have specific regulatory functions, shifting scale and reframing responsibilities. By looking closely at legal technicalities, we can discern much about the conceptual logic that affects many of us through influential regulatory strategies. The political imperative of analysing work–life balance might, in this way, require us to return not only to time, but also, strangely, to legal form.     

Time and technique: the legal lives of the 26-week qualifying period

This paper aims to bring an appreciation of legal form, technicalities, and legislative drafting to growing interdisciplinary literatures on time and governance. Scholarship across politics, geography, science studies and anthropology continues to trace the productive force and specific qualities of diverse temporal horizons. At the same time socio-legal scholars increasingly focus on the work of making and negotiating law, engaging with the dogged, everyday work of legal experts and bureaucrats. Yet little attention has been paid, to date, to the work of legislative drafters. This paper follows the ‘legal lives’ of qualifying periods on family-friendly employment rights. As examples of legal technicalities that work with time, qualifying periods form an important part of the regulatory structure that separates precarious workers from ‘regular’ employees in UK law. Drawing on documentary research and interviews with policy experts, union activists and legislative drafters, this paper focuses on the formal qualities of qualifying periods, arguing that these legal technicalities conjure time and legal form as inextricable. Whenever law becomes relevant to conversations about time and governance, we could usefully pay attention to the idiosyncrasies and controversies occupying legal form and legislative drafting.     

Wench Tactics? Openings in Conditions of Closure

Picking up the question of what FLaK might be, this editorial considers the relationship between openness and closure in feminist legal studies. How do we draw on feminist struggles for openness in common resources, from security to knowledge, as we inhabit a compromised space in commercial publishing? We think about this first in relation to the content of this issue: on image-based abuse continuums, asylum struggles, trials of protestors, customary justice, and not-so-timely reparations. Our thoughts take us through the different ways that openness and closure work in struggles against violence, cruel welcomes, and re-arrangements of code and custom. Secondly, we share some reflections on methodological openness and closure as the roundtable conversation on asylum, and the interview with Riles, remind us of #FLaK2016 and its method of scattering sources as we think about how best to mix knowledges. Thirdly, prompted by the FLaK kitchen table conversations on openness, publishing and ‘getting the word out’, we respond to Kember’s call to ‘open up open access’. We explain the different current arrangements for opening up FLS content and how green open access, the sharedit initiative, author request and publisher discretion present alternatives to gold open access. Finally drawing on Franklin and Spade, we show how there are a range of ‘wench tactics’—adapting gifts, stalling and resting—which we deploy as academic editors who are trying to have an impact on the access, use and circulation of our journal, even though we do not own the journal we edit. These wench tactics are alternatives to the more obvious or reported tactic of resignation, or withdrawing academic labour from editing and reviewing altogether. They help us think about brewing editorial time, what ambivalence over our 25th birthday might mean, and how to inhabit painful places. In this, we respond in our own impure, compromised way to da Silva’s call not to forget the native and slave as we do FLaK, and repurpose shrapnel, in our common commitments.     

“It’s Another Way Of Making A Really Big Fuss” Human Rights And Women’s Activism In The United Kingdom: An Interview With Tania Pouwhare

Following the “Encountering Human Rights” conference in January 2007, Emily Grabham interviewed Tania Pouwhare, a women’s rights activist working at the Women’s Resource Centre in London. Their discussion engaged with the professionalisation of activism, funding constraints and New Labour policies and their impact on immigrant women. Against a background of financial insecurity and huge demand for their services, many women’s organisations in the United Kingdom struggle to use human rights law to advance women’s rights. Nevertheless, the rhetoric of human rights remains powerful within women’s activism, and law remains relevant as a potential form of ‘direct action’ and “another way of making a really big fuss”.