Winner of the 2011 SLSA-Hart Socio-Legal Book Prize

Regulating Sexuality: Legal Consciousness in Lesbian and Gay Lives explores the impact that recent seismic shifts in the legal landscape have had for lesbians and gay men. The last decade has been a time of extensive change in the legal regulation of lesbian and gay lives in Britain, Canada and the US. Almost every area that the law impacts on sexuality has been reformed or modified. These legal developments combine to create a new, uncharted terrain for lesbians and gay men. And, through an analysis of their attitudes,...

Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow documents a powerful and under-researched form of urban governance that focuses on pedestrian flow. This logic, which Nicholas Blomley terms 'pedestrianism', values public space not in terms of its aesthetic merits, or its success in promoting public citizenship and democracy. Rather, the function of the sidewalk is understood to be the promotion and facilitation of pedestrian flow and circulation, predicated on the appropriate arrangement of people and objects. This remarkably pervasive yet overlooked logic shapes the...

How can we rethink ideas of policy failure to consider its paradoxes and contradictions as a starting point for more hopeful democratic encounters?

Offering a provocative and innovative theorisation of governance as relational politics, the central argument of Power, Politics and the Emotions is that there are sets of affective dynamics which complicate the already materially and symbolically contested terrain of policy-making. This relational politics is Shona Hunter's starting point for a more hopeful, but realistic understanding of the limits and possibilities enacted through...

This book comes at a time when the intrinsic and self-evident value of queer rights and protections, from gay marriage to hate crimes, is increasingly put in question. It assembles writings that explore the new queer vitalities within their wider context of structural violence and neglect. Moving between diverse geopolitical contexts the US and the UK, Guatemala and Palestine, the Philippines, Iran and Israel the chapters in this volume interrogate claims to queerness in the face(s) of death, both spectacular and everyday.

Queer Necropolitics mobilises the concept of necropolitics in...

We've seen it before, with asbestos-related disease, leukaemia clusters and lung cancer caused by cigarettes. There tends to be a lag between the emergence of environmental risks and chemical injuries, and their recognition and therapeutic treatment by medicine and the law. Law, Environmental Illness and Medical Uncertainty examines how our society governs new health concerns as they emerge, and the barriers that face new and uncertain theories seeking recognition in the law.

In this book, Tarryn Phillips focuses her investigation on the struggle over the...

Employing feminist, queer, and postcolonial perspectives, Global Justice and Desire addresses economy as a key ingredient in the dynamic interplay between modes of subjectivity, signification and governance. Bringing together a range of international contributors, the book proposes that both analyzing justice through the lens of desire, and considering desire through the lens of justice, are vital for exploring economic processes. A variety of approaches for capturing the complex and dynamic interplay of justice and desire in socioeconomic processes are taken up. But,...

This book develops a new framework for analyzing the spatio-temporal workings of law and other forms of governance. Chronotopes of Law: Jurisdiction, Scale and Governance argues that studies of law and governance can be reinvigorated by drawing on a bundle of quite heterogenous analytical tools that do not have a single provenance or a single political or normative aim but that work well in combination.

Analyses of legal temporality carried out by anthropologists and studies of law and space undertaken by geographers and legal scholars have proliferated in...

Protest, Property and the Commons focuses on the alternative property narratives of social centres, or political squats, and how the spaces and their communities create their own resistant form of law. Drawing on critical legal theory, legal pluralism, legal geography, poststructuralism and new materialism, the book considers how protest movements both use state law and create new, more informal, legalities in order to forge a practice of resistance. Invaluable for anyone working within the area of informal property in land, commons, protest and adverse possession, this book offers a...