This is a book about the improbable: seeking legal relief for pollution in contemporary China. In a country known for tight political control and ineffectual courts, Environmental Litigation in China unravels how everyday justice works: how judges make decisions, why lawyers take cases, and how international influence matters. It is a readable account of how the leadership's mixed signals and political ambivalence play out on the ground propelling some, such as the village doctor who fought a chemical plant for more than a decade, even as others back away from risk. Yet this remarkable book...

This collection of rich, empirically grounded case studies investigates the conditions and consequences of 'juridification' - the use of law by ordinary individuals as a form of protest against 'the state'. Starting from the actual practices of claimants, these case studies address the translation and interpretation of legal norms into local concepts, actions and practices in a way that highlights the social and cultural dynamism and multivocality of communities in their interaction with the law and legal norms. The contributors to this volume challenge the image of homogeneous and...

Using a power-knowledge framework, this volume critically investigates how major global indicators of legal governance are produced, disseminated and used, and to what effect. Original case studies include Freedom House's Freedom in the World indicator, the Global Reporting Initiative's structure for measuring and reporting on corporate social responsibility, the World Justice Project's measurement of the rule of law, the World Bank's Doing Business index, the World Bank-supported Worldwide Governance Indicators, the World Bank's Country Performance Institutional Assessment (CPIA), and the...

From the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib to unnecessary military attacks on civilians, this book is an account of the violations of international criminal law committed during the United States invasion of Iraq. Taking stock of the entire war, it uniquely documents the overestimation of the successes and underestimation of the failings of the Surge and Awakening policies. The authors show how an initial cynical framing of the American war led to the creation of a new Shia-dominated Iraq state, which in turn provoked powerful feelings of legal cynicism among Iraqis, especially the Sunni....

Prison studies has experienced a period of great creativity in recent years, and this collection draws together some of the field's most exciting and innovative contemporary critical writers in order to engage directly with one of the most profound questions in penology - why prison? In addressing this question, the authors connect contemporary penological thought with an enquiry that has received the attention of some of the greatest thinkers on punishment in the past. Through critical exploration of the theories, policies and practices of imprisonment, the authors analyse why prison...

Explores the proliferation of indicators and the resulting transformations in entanglements between social science, markets and politics in public life.

This book responds to debates about the place of Muslims in Western Europe by considering the way people draw on practical schemas.

Transnational Legal Orders offers an empirically grounded approach to the emergence of legal orders beyond nation-states that reframes the study of law and society.

This book explores the development of immigrant rights litigation over the past four decades in the United States and France.

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...