Bücher der Reihe Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies

In this insightful collection, a broad range of scholars analyzes a core issue for socio-legal studies, what is understood by the 'socio' of the 'socio-legal'. Drawing from legal theory, cultural studies, and social policy, the collection's wide scope of themes and topics provides an important stock-take and analysis of the socio-legal field.

This book analyses how China has engaged in global IP governance and the implications of its engagement for global distributive justice. It investigates five cases on Chinäs IP engagement in geographical indications, the disclosure obligation, IP and standardisation, and its bilateral and multilateral IP engagement. It takes a regulation-oriented approach to examine substate and non-state actors involved in Chinäs global IP engagement, identifies principles that have guided or constrained its engagement, and discusses strategies actors have used in managing the principles. Its focus on engagement directs attention to processes instead of outcomes, which enables a more nuanced understanding of the role that China plays in global IP governance than the dichotomic categorisation of China either as a global IP rule-taker or rule-maker.This book identifies two groups of strategies that China has used in its global IP engagement: forum and agenda-related strategies and principle-related strategies. The first group concerns questions of where and how China has advanced its IP agenda, including multi-forum engagement, dissembling, and more cohesive responsive engagement. The second group consists of strategies to achieve a certain principle or manage contesting principles, including modelling and balancing. It shows that Chinäs deployment of engagement strategies makes its IP system similar to those of the EU and the US. Its balancing strategy has led to constructed inconsistency of its IP positions across forums. This book argues that China still has some way to go to influence global IP agenda-setting in a way matching its status as the second largest economy.

This book discusses the socio-legal tax state and its relationship to development, inequality and the transnational. Schumpeter examined the links between capitalism and taxation, arguing that fiscal pressures on governments led directly to the development of tax collection, and the burgeoning growth of capitalist economies.

This book contributes to current debates about "queer outsides" and "queer outsiders" that emerge from tensions in legal reforms aimed at improving the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer people in the United Kingdom.

The book concludes that incapacity benefit decision making is really about work: what work is, what it is not, who should do it, who should be compensated when work does not provide a sufficient income and who should be exempted from any requirement to look for it.

The book subjects the largely hidden phenomenon of benefit sanctions in the UK to sustained examination and critique. Each chapter ends with a paragraph that attempts to highlight the most salient points in that chapter, and the book ends with a short conclusion in which benefit sanctions are assessed against the chosen benchmark.

Drawing on new research material from ten European countries, Asylum Determination in Europe: Ethnographic Perspectives brings together a range of detailed accounts of the legal and bureaucratic processes by which asylum claims are decided.

Nobody's Law shows how people - who are disappointed, disenchanted, and outraged about the justice system - gradually move away from law. While previous studies emphasize the law's hegemony and argue that it's 'all over', Hertogh shows that legal proliferation makes it harder for people to know, and subsequently identify with, the law.

This book uses a case study of a low-cost home ownership initiative at the margins of renting and owning provided by social landlords - known as shared ownership - to challenge everyday assumptions held about the 'social' and the 'legal' in property.

¿The family justice system in England and Wales has undergone radical change over the past 20 years. A significant part of this shifting landscape has been an increasing emphasis on settling private family disputes out of court, which has been embraced by policy-makers, judges and practitioners alike and is promoted as an unqualified good.Mapping Paths to Family Justice: Resolving Family Disputes in Neoliberal Times examines the experiences of people taking part in out-of-court family dispute resolution in England and Wales. It addresses questions such as how participants¿ experiences match up to the ideal; how recent changes to the legal system have affected people¿s ability to access out-of-court dispute resolution; and what kind of outcomes are achieved in family dispute resolution.This book is the first study systematically to compare different forms of family dispute resolution. It explores people¿s experiences of solicitor negotiations, mediation and collaborative law empirically by analyzing findings from a nationally representative survey, individual in-depth interviews with parties and practitioners, and recorded family dispute resolution processes. It considers these in the context of ongoing neoliberal reforms to the family justice system, drawing out conclusions and implications for policy and practice.

Development in an Era of Capital Control investigates Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), a 21st century buzz word. Centred around the responsibility of business to give back to society, this idea is a departure from the traditional view that the responsibility of business is to make a profit.

Global economic factors and the changing contours of work and workplace relations have led to a reorientation of the social, economic, political and cultural environment within which labour law has developed.

Changing Concepts of Contract is a prestigious collection of essays that re-examines the remarkable contributions of Ian Macneil to the study of contract law and contracting behaviour.

A fresh theory on how individuals respond to inequalities occurring within their own communities. This original and insightful study draws on empirical research on the Santal people of Asia, examining power relations within social fields, and the state, to reveal a typology of power practices, and applies these to forced marriage in the West.

How do ordinary people experience and make sense of the informal justice system? Creutzfeldt shows that the everyday relationship that people have with the informal justice system is shaped by their experiences and expectations of the formal legal system and its agents.

Socio-legal studies have had an ambivalent relationship with the 'legal' - one of its defining aspects, but at the same time one that the discipline has sought to transcend or even leave behind.

An important collection examining how socio-legal studies and empirical legal research can be integrated into the law curriculum, looking at both core qualifying subjects and stand-alone socio-legal modules, and considering theoretical and methodological approaches combined with practical examples.

An inter-disciplinary, international collection that examines the mutual influences between law and culture through a series of sophisticated case studies showing how cultural phenomena are brought under legal regulation, how laws are resisted through cultural practices, and how those practices shape the way in which law is understood and applied.

Despite a popular view that trials are the focal point of the criminal justice process, in reality, the most frequent way a criminal matter resolves is not through a fiercely fought battle between state and defendant, but instead through a process of negotiation between the prosecution and defence, resulting in a defendant pleading guilty in exchange for agreed concessions from the prosecution. This book presents an original empirical case-study of plea negotiations drawing upon interviews with legal actors and an analysis of defence practitioner case files, to shine light on the processes and ways in which an agreed outcome is reached in criminal prosecutions, within the setting of a jurisdiction, like many others world-wide, which is suffering major shifts in state resources. Plea negotiations, also referred to as "plea bargaining", "negotiated guilty pleas" and "negotiated resolutions" are neither an alloyed benefit nor a detriment for defendants, victims or the criminal justice system generally, and like all compromises, this book shows how the perfect "justice" outcome gives way to the good, or just the reasonably acceptable justice outcome.

This highly topical collection of essays addresses contemporary issues facing Indigenous communities from a broad range of multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives. Drawing from across the social sciences and humanities, this important volume challenges the established norms, theories, and methodologies within the field, and argues for the potential of a multidimensional approach to solving problems of Indigenous justice.Stemming from an international conference on 'Spaces of Indigenous Justice', Indigenous Justice is richly illustrated with case studies and comprises contributions from scholars working across the fields of law, socio-legal studies, sociology, public policy, politico-legal theory, and Indigenous studies. As such, the editors of this timely and engaging volume draw upon a wide range of experience to argue for a radical shift in how we engage with Indigenous studies.

This highly topical collection of essays addresses contemporary issues facing Indigenous communities from a broad range of multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives. Drawing from across the social sciences and humanities, this important volume challenges the established norms, theories, and methodologies within the field, and argues for the potential of a multidimensional approach to solving problems of Indigenous justice.Stemming from an international conference on ¿Spaces of Indigenous Justice¿, Indigenous Justice is richly illustrated with case studies and comprises contributions from scholars working across the fields of law, socio-legal studies, sociology, public policy, politico-legal theory, and Indigenous studies. As such, the editors of this timely and engaging volume draw upon a wide range of experience to argue for a radical shift in how we engage with Indigenous studies.

Judicial authority is constituted by everyday practices of individual judicial officers, balancing the obligations of formal law and procedure with the distinctive interactional demands of lower courts.

How is religion, particularly non-Christianness, conceptualised and represented in English law?

Changing Concepts of Contract is a prestigious collection of essays that re-examines the remarkable contributions of Ian Macneil to the study of contract law and contracting behaviour.

How do ordinary people experience and make sense of the informal justice system? Creutzfeldt shows that the everyday relationship that people have with the informal justice system is shaped by their experiences and expectations of the formal legal system and its agents.

This book brings together a range of theoretical perspectives to consider fundamental questions of health law and the place of the body within it.

How should we understand sentencing decision-making? Despite huge efforts world-wide to critique, measure, and reform sentencing, why does it remain an enigma?This book argues that sentencing is an enigma because academic and policy thinking about sentencing is dominated by a set of taken-for-granted assumptions rooted in a paradigm which presumes autonomous individualism.Sentencing as a Social Process proposes a distinctive approach. Understanding sentencing as a socially-generated process allows us to rethink seemingly obvious binary categories, including: rules versus discretion; aggravating versus mitigating factors; and offence versus offender. Tata unearths the implications for classic policy conundrums, including: judicial independence and accountability; consistency and individualisation; the efficiency and quality of justice; and technology and judging.Scholars and students across a range of disciplines including criminology, criminal justice, socio-legal studies, decision-making and law will find this book stimulating and provocative.