Bücher der Reihe Cambridge Studies in Law and Society

How do a legal order and the rule of law develop in a war-torn state? Using his field research in Sudan, the author uncovers how colonial administrators, postcolonial governments and international aid agencies have used legal tools and resources to promote stability and their own visions of the rule of law amid political violence and war in Sudan.

Empirically grounded in both Burmese and English sources, this book offers the first major study of the contemporary court system in Myanmar. Nick Cheesman calls upon legal and political theory to explain how and why institutions animated by a concern for law and order oppose the rule of law.

Drawing on theoretical frameworks from social constructivism and new institutionalism, this study explains how institutions transform Family and Medical Leave Act rights to recreate systems of power and inequality but at the same time also provide opportunities for law to change social structure.

Combining textual analysis of constitutions and historical reconstruction of formative social processes, Chris Thornhill examines the legitimating role of constitutions from the first quasi-constitutional documents in medieval Europe to recent constitutional transitions.

Focused on the turbulent upheavals of the 1990s and mid-2000s, this socio-legal exploration of the politics of urban water services assesses two modes of governance - managed liberalization and participatory democracy - that reflect tensions between water viewed as a scarce commodity and as an essential public good.

Since 2001, the Gacaca community courts have been the centrepiece of Rwanda's justice and reconciliation programme. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in Rwanda and nearly five hundred interviews with participants, this book's conclusions provide indispensable insight into post-genocide justice and reconciliation.

This study shows the impact of the ICTY on Bosnian society and its role in translating international law in domestic contexts.

Using an approach that combines anthropological and political analysis, this book examines the roles of military command, mystical powers, child soldiers, forced marriage and fact-finding in the Special Court for Sierra Leone, arguing that cultural differences have obstructed justice and that international justice requires a more multicultural approach.

The purpose of this book is to examine and discuss the violence perpetrated against women in politically conflicted or militarized areas. The voices of Palestinian women show how militaristic values and policies affect female victimisation and agency in conflict zones.

This book examines different hypotheses about Chilean judicial behavior before, during, and after the authoritarian interlude. The book explores arguments based on judges' personal policy preferences, social class, and legal philosophy, but contends that institutional features, grounded in the ideal of 'apoliticism', best explain judges' conservative and conformist conduct.

This book explores how notions of justice are negotiated through everyday practices and made to represent the real, the law. It takes on the challenge of mapping the growth of the rule of law criminal justice movement alongside a range of other justice formations and in that process explores the processes by which justice is made.

The WTO intellectual property and services agreements (TRIPs and GATS) form the global legal framework in which governments regulate trade in knowledge. In this book, Christopher Arup analyses the provisions of the agreements, examines closely their implementation and revision and assesses the future of the WTO as a global law-making institution.

Planted Flags examines how the war between Israelis and Palestinians is reflected, mediated, and reinforced through the material and symbolic creation of two tree landscapes.

As the Oslo Peace Process has given way to the violence of the second intifada, this book explores the continuing legacy of the Peace Process in the everyday life of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This is a unique analysis of the struggle to build a rule of law in one of the world's most dynamic and vibrant nations - a socialist state that is seeking to build a market economy while struggling to pursue an ethos of social equality and opportunity.

The Chinese police have powers to detain people without trial for considerable periods. These powers have been seriously abused and are the focus of domestic and international criticism. This 2007 book examines the development of these powers since the 1950s, and the policy contexts in which they have been used.

Existing approaches to the relation of law and society have for a long time seen law as either autonomous or grounded in society. Drawing on major theorists, this book is a radically new approach that sees law as both derived from and constitutive of its surrounding social and cultural context.

This is a sociological investigation of the history and uses of alcoholic beverages. It explores the notion of free will versus determinism and includes original research from the US, UK, Canada and Australia. It will appeal to readers in legal studies, criminology, sociology, psychology, social theory and the history of medicine.

This provocative book explores immigration law in Spain and Italy, and exposes the tension between the temporary legal status of most immigrants, and the government emphasis on integration. It demonstrates the connections among immigrants' role as cheap labor - carefully inscribed in law - and their social exclusion and racialization.

The Ritual of Rights in Japan rejects the traditional view that Japan is a nation where overt conflict and the assertion of rights are unacceptable. It examines both historical events and contemporary policy, in concluding that rights-based conflict is an important part of Japanese legal, political, and social practice.

Against the backdrop of South Africa's shift from apartheid, this book explores the role of late twentieth century constitutionalism in facilitating political change. This examination of South Africa's constitution-making process provides insights into the role of law in the transition to democracy.

The TRC was set up to deal with the human rights violations of apartheid. However, its restorative justice approach did not always serve the needs of communities at a local level. Based on detailed fieldwork, this book illustrates the impact of the TRC in urban African communities in Johannesburg.

Criminal Defense in China studies empirically the everyday work and political mobilization of defense lawyers in China. It builds upon 329 interviews across China, and other social science methods, to investigate and analyze the interweaving of politics and practice in five segments of the practicing criminal defense bar in China from 2005 to 2015. This book is the first to examine everyday criminal defense work in China as a political project. The authors engage extensive scholarship on lawyers and political liberalism across the world, from seventeenth-century Europe to late twentieth-century Korea and Taiwan, drawing on theoretical propositions from this body of theory to examine the strategies and constraints of lawyer mobilization in China. The book brings a fresh perspective through its focus on everyday work and ordinary lawyering in an authoritarian context and raises searching questions about law and lawyers, politics and society, in China's uncertain future.

This book presents a political understanding of socio-economic rights by contextualising constitution-makers' and judges' decision-making in terms of Ireland's rich history of people's struggles for justice 'from below' between 1848 and the present. Its theoretical framework incorporates critical legal studies and world-systems analysis. It performs a critical discourse analysis of constitution-making processes in 1922 and 1937 as well as subsequent property, trade union, family and welfare rights case law. It traces the marginalisation of socio-economic rights in Ireland from specific, local and institutional factors to the contested balance of core-peripheral and social relations in the world-system. The book demonstrates the endurance of ideological understandings of state constitutionalism as inherently neutral between interests. Unemployed marches, housing protestors and striking workers, however, provided important challenges and oppositional discourses. Recognising these enduring forms of power and ideology is vital if we are to assess critically the possibilities and limits of contesting socio-economic rights today.

What explains the success of criminal prosecutions against former Latin American officials accused of human rights violations? Why did some judiciaries evolve from unresponsive bureaucracies into protectors of victim rights? Using a theory of judicial action inspired by sociological institutionalism, this book argues that this was the result of deep transformations in the legal preferences of judges and prosecutors. Judicial actors discarded long-standing positivist legal criteria, historically protective of conservative interests, and embraced doctrines grounded in international human rights law, which made possible innovative readings of constitutions and criminal codes. Litigants were responsible for this shift in legal visions by activating informal mechanisms of ideational change and providing the skills necessary to deal with complex and unusual cases. Through an in-depth exploration of the interactions between judges, prosecutors and human rights lawyers in three countries, the book asks how changing ideas about the law and standards of adjudication condition the exercise of judicial power.

About one-third of the world's population currently lives under pluri-legal systems where governments hold individuals subject to the purview of ethno-religious rather than national norms in respect to family law. How does the state-enforcement of these religious family laws impact fundamental rights and liberties? What resistance strategies do people employ in order to overcome the disabilities and limitations these religious laws impose upon their rights? Based on archival research, court observations and interviews with individuals from three countries, Yuksel Sezgin shows that governments have often intervened in order to impress a particular image of subjectivity upon a society, while people have constantly challenged the interpretive monopoly of courts and state-sanctioned religious institutions, re-negotiated their rights and duties under the law, and changed the system from within. He also identifies key lessons and best practices for the integration of universal human rights principles into religious legal systems.

Political and Legal Transformations of an Indonesian Polity is a long-term study of the historical transformations of the Minangkabau polity of nagari, property relations and the ever-changing dynamic relationships between Minangkabau matrilineal adat law, Islamic law and state law. While the focus is on the period since the fall of President Suharto in 1998, the book charts a long history of political and legal transformations before and after Indonesia's independence, in which the continuities are as notable as the changes. It also throws light on the transnational processes through which legal and political ideas spread and acquire new meanings. The multi-temporal historical approach adopted is also relevant to the more general discussions of the relationship between anthropology and history, the creation of customary law, identity construction, and the anthropology of colonialism.

Law reform in Pakistan attracts such disparate champions as the Chief Justice of Pakistan, the USAID and the Taliban. Common to their equally obsessive pursuit of 'speedy justice' is a remarkable obliviousness to the historical, institutional and sociological factors that alienate Pakistanis from their formal legal system. This pioneering book highlights vital and widely neglected linkages between the 'narratives of colonial displacement' resonant in the literature on South Asia's encounter with colonial law and the region's postcolonial official law reform discourses. Against this backdrop, it presents a typology of Pakistani approaches to law reform and critically evaluates the IFI-funded single-minded pursuit of 'efficiency' during the last decade. Employing diverse methodologies, it proceeds to provide empirical support for a widening chasm between popular, at times violently expressed, aspirations for justice and democratically deficient reform designed in distant IFI headquarters that is entrusted to the exclusive and unaccountable Pakistani 'reform club'.

Scholars have generally assumed that authoritarianism and rule of law are mutually incompatible. Convinced that free markets and rule of law must tip authoritarian societies in a liberal direction, nearly all studies of law and contemporary politics have neglected that improbable coupling: authoritarian rule of law. Through a focus on Singapore, this book presents an analysis of authoritarian legalism. It shows how prosperity, public discourse, and a rigorous observance of legal procedure have enabled a reconfigured rule of law such that liberal form encases illiberal content. Institutions and process at the bedrock of rule of law and liberal democracy become tools to constrain dissent while augmenting discretionary political power - even as the national and international legitimacy of the state is secured. This book offers a valuable and original contribution to understanding the complexities of law, language and legitimacy in our time.

This book argues that the shared adjudication model in which the state splits its adjudicative authority with religious groups and other societal sources in the regulation of marriage can potentially balance cultural rights and gender equality. In this model the civic and religious sources of legal authority construct, transmit and communicate heterogeneous notions of the conjugal family, gender relations and religious membership within the interstices of state and society. In so doing, they fracture the homogenized religious identities grounded in hierarchical gender relations within the conjugal family. The shared adjudication model facilitates diversity as it allows the construction of hybrid religious identities, creates fissures in ossified group boundaries and provides institutional spaces for ongoing intersocietal dialogue. This pluralized legal sphere, governed by ideologically diverse legal actors, can thus increase gender equality and individual and collective legal mobilization by women effects institutional change.