The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was set up to deal with the human rights violations of apartheid. However, the TRC's restorative justice approach did not always serve the needs of communities at a local level. Based on extended anthropological fieldwork, this book illustrates the impact of the TRC in urban African communities in Johannesburg. It argues that the TRC had little effect on popular ideas of justice as retribution. This provocative study deepens our understanding of post-apartheid South Africa and the use of human rights discourse.

The product of a collaboration between leading theorists in law and anthropology, this book develops an innovative analysis of legal practices. Specifically, it focuses on how law constructs persons and things, and develops new approaches to the question of ownership. These approaches are of particular value in understanding the cultural impact of biotechnology. At the same time, they illuminate the history of Western law, and develop thought-provoking comparisons between Western law and Islamic law.

Comparing welfare policies in the U.S. and Western Europe aimed at the "workless" population, this study notes that the European labor policies of welfare services offer the best method of bringing the socially excluded back into mainstream society. Despite differences in ideology and practice, Joel Handler argues that there are also significant similarities between the U.S. and the Europeans, especially in field-level practices that serve to exclude the most vulnerable. The author examines strategies for reform and concludes with an argument for a basic income guarantee.

Written by leading scholars, these case studies represent an unprecedented attempt to analyze the role of the law in the global movement for social justice. They combine empirical research with innovative sociolegal theory to shed new light on a wide array of topics. Among the issues examined are the role of law and politics in the World Social Forum; the struggle on the anti-sweeping movement for the protection of international labor rights; and the challenge to neoliberal globalization and liberal human rights raised by grassroots movements in India and indigenous peoples around the world.

There is an ongoing perception that public accountability in modern-day governance is in 'crisis', caused by globalization and the increasing power of private economic interests. This book responds to that idea, providing the most comprehensive survey to date of how different organizations hold persons acting in the public interest to account, and the various problems they face. The book shows how key issues, such as public-mindedness, democracy and responsibility, and structures, such as bureaucracy, markets and transparency, adopt radically different and sometimes contradictory...

This broad-ranging and innovative investigation explores the ways in which both authorities and individual consumers have defined and managed the pleasures and dangers of alcoholic beverages. It explores the question of free will versus determinism and how it has been challenged by ideas about addiction, morality and psychology during the past 150 years. This book is based on years of original research and draws on sources from the United States, UK, Canada and elsewhere and will appeal to readers in legal studies, addiction studies, criminology, sociology and psychology.

Human rights are now the dominant approach to social justice globally. But how do human rights work? What do they do? Drawing on anthropological studies of human rights work from around the world, this book examines human rights in practice. It shows how groups and organizations mobilize human rights language in a variety of local settings, often differently from those imagined by human rights law itself. The case studies reveal the contradictions and ambiguities of human rights approaches to various forms of violence. They show that this openness is not a failure of universal human rights as...

This volume focuses on the everyday social relationships through which international justice is produced. Using case studies from the International Criminal Court, the European Court of Human Rights, the UN Women's Convention Committee and elsewhere, it explores international justice as a process that takes place at the intersection of the often contradictory practices of applicants, lawyers, bureaucrats, victims, accused and others. With a sensitivity to broader institutional and political inequalities, the contributors ask how and why international justice is mobilised, understood and...

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 mistorical events and contemporary policy, particularly recent battles over AIDS policy and the definition of death--in concluding that rights-based conflict is an important part of Japanese legal, political, and social practice. This book describes a nation where rights have become weapons in battles over politics and policy, asserted by those seeking both individual remedies and social change.

Approaches to the relation of law and society have for a long time seen law as either autonomous or self-grounded in society. This book is a radically new approach that sees law as both derived from and constitutive of its surrounding social and cultural context. Drawing on the work of major theorists, this book examines the nature of law as it has descended from the Enlightenment, through to colonialism and now globalization. It is a significant contribution to legal philosophy, jurisprudence and socio-legal studies.