Through interviews with many of the most noteworthy authors in Law and Society, Conducting Law and Society Research takes students and scholars behind the scenes of empirical scholarship, showing the messy reality of research methods. The challenges and the uncertainties, so often missing from research methods textbooks, are revealed in candid detail. These accessible and revealing conversations about the lived reality of classic projects will be a source of encouragement and inspiration to those embarking on empirical research, ranging across the full array of disciplines that contribute to...

By taking up the challenge of documenting how human rights values are embedded in rule of law movements to produce a new language of international justice that competes with a range of other formations, this book explores how notions of justice are negotiated through everyday micropractices and grassroots contestations of those practices. These micropractices include speech acts that revere the protection of international rights, citation references to treaty documents, the brokering of human rights agendas, the rewriting of national constitutions, demonstrations of religiosity that make...

The international community created the Special Court for Sierra Leone to prosecute those who bore the greatest responsibility for crimes committed during the country's devastating civil war. In this book Tim Kelsall examines some of the challenges posed by the fact that the Court operated in a largely unfamiliar culture, in which the way local people thought about rights, agency and truth-telling sometimes differed radically from the way international lawyers think about these things. By applying an anthro-political perspective to the trials, he unveils a variety of ethical, epistemological,...

This broad-ranging history of moral regulation in Britain and the United States from the late seventeenth century onward, covers specific movements such as the Society for the Reformation of Manners, the Vice Society, sexual abuse and anti-pornography movements, and self-help movements. Hunt argues that the main impetus for moral regulations often stems from the middle classes, rather than those with institutional power, but most significantly they provide classic instances of the intimate link between the "governance of others" and the "governance of the self."

This book explores the relationships between matrilineal, Islamic and state law, and investigates the dynamics of legal pluralism, governance and property relationships.

This book 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. It addresses constitutional change, the assertion of constitutional claims by citizens, the formation of a strong civil society and non-profit sector, the emergence of economic law and the battles over who is benefited by the economic regulation, labor law and the protection of migrant and export labor, the rise of lawyers and public...

Mokhtari s book examines the changes in the human rights discourse in the United States and the Middle East after the maltreatment and torture of the U.S. captives in the Abu Ghraib and other prisons became public. Through the text analysis of speeches and news reports, as well as in-depth interviews with human rights NGO officials, she makes a thorough assessment that both credits and criticizes the NGOs. Mokhtari shows that human rights advocacy has been successful in pushing the U.S. courts and Congress to recognize the relevance of international human rights law."

How do Family and Medical Leave Act rights operate in practice in the courts and in the workplace? This empirical study examines how institutions and social practices transform the meaning of these rights to recreate inequality. Workplace rules and norms built around the family wage ideal, the assumption that disability and work are mutually exclusive, and management s historical control over time all constrain opportunities for social change. Yet workers can also mobilize rights as a cultural discourse to change the social meaning of family and medical leave. Drawing on theoretical...

Phil Clark explores the impact of the Gacaca community courts, the centrepiece of Rwanda's justice and reconciliation programme.

Using a conceptual framework, this 2007 book examines the processes of legal reform in post-socialist countries such as China. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of the 'field', the increasingly complex and contested processes of legal reform are analysed in relation to police powers. The impact of China's post-1978 legal reforms on police powers is examined through a detailed analysis of three administrative detention powers: detention for education of prostitutes; coercive drug rehabilitation; and re-education through labour. The debate surrounding the abolition in 1996 of detention for...