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Established as the leading British periodical for Socio-Legal Studies, The Journal of Law and Society offers an interdisciplinary approach to contemporary socio-legal issues.

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Current Articles

Browse our current articles in the Autumn 2026 issue

Public Perceptions on the Self-Defence Claims of Domestic Abuse Victim-Survivors, Vanessa Bettinson, Northumbria University, Nicola Wake, Northumbria University and Thomas Crofts, University of Hong Kong

This article explores public understandings of self-defence claims in fatal and non-fatal domestic abuse cases. The topic is of contemporary interest following the government’s rejection of proposals to introduce a bespoke defence for domestic abuse victims who use force against their abusers based on the inaccurate claim that the defence of self-defence is adequately accessible to them. Evidence shows that the application of self-defence is highly gendered, and access to it is limited in these cases. We present findings of a study which asks the public whether self-defence would and should be available in domestic abuse-based vignettes. Revealed is support for greater access to self-defence claims by domestic abuse victim-defendants than currently exists and a need for public education about the dynamics of coercive and controlling behaviour. We highlight the significance of contextual factors arising in focus group discussions and their alignment with the theory of social entrapment.

Reimagining notions of public governance through the commons: the role and boundaries of prefigurative legality, Margherita Pieraccini, University of Bristol

This article contributes to the emerging scholarship on prefigurative legality by prompting critical questions on the boundaries of prefigurative legality itself. The article does so by reviewing two selected experiments for creating urban commons in Italy. Both experiments have engaged creatively with the law, developing two different legal models. However, it is not clear whether such models can be considered examples of prefigurative legality. The uncertainty is due to the fact that the assessment depends on which features we, as analyst, emphasise when discussing prefigurative legality. This brings us to investigate how different features of prefigurative legality might connect with strands of existing socio-legal scholarship, prompting more general reflections on prefigurative legality’s place within the field of socio-legal studies.

The Medico-Legal Autopsy: (Medical) Science, Expertise and Death Investigation, Imogen Jones, University of Leeds School of Law

This article sheds important new light on the hybrid space between medicine and law in which medico-legal autopsies are situated. By examining original empirical data obtained during interviews with pathologists, I reveal a web of authority claims both within the profession and in its relationship to law. Drawing on the sociology of medicine, I note the importance of ‘expert’ status to both the pathologist’s identity and their contribution to law. This is constituted via a combination of trained technical skills and tacit knowledge. However, I note the way that these pathologists framed their conclusions as ‘opinion’. This, I argue, reflects both the ambiguity inherent in clinical judgement and is a device to limit credibility damaging challenges, especially during legal adjudications. It may therefore be that a gap exists between law’s desire for facts and the contribution that these professionals can, and are willing, to contribute toward achieving that end.

The Pre-Dispute Phase Up Close: Experiences from Visitors of Dutch Legal Aid Centres, Anne A.A.Janssen, Sonja Bekker and Bos Kees van den, Utrecht University, Department of Law

Given indications of rising challenges for marginalized citizens in the pre-dispute phase of civil procedures, we studied this phase up close at Dutch legal aid centres using the framework of Felstiner et al. on naming, blaming and claiming. Interviews were conducted with 116 visitors of Dutch legal aid centres. We asked them when and why they came to the legal aid centre. Respondents shared questions related to naming their justiciable issue and blaming the opponent. Interestingly, respondents who needed help with blaming the opponent were not necessarily able to name their justiciable issue in legal terms. Our findings highlight (a) the iterative character of the naming and blaming stages and that respondents in both naming and blaming stages were able to legally articulate their issue in only very general terms. Furthermore, (b) our findings show the multifaceted role of legal aid centres in supporting marginalized citizens in effectuating their rights.

Is there a ‘right’ to use Welsh in prison?, Gregory Davies, University of Liverpool and Robert Jones, Cardiff University

The use of the Welsh language is generally understood as a ‘right’ in contemporary Wales. While this right is often lauded as one of Welsh devolution’s defining achievements, the sufficiency of current protections is contested. This article contributes to the debate by focusing on the prison context, where the question of Welsh language rights is particularly complex. Drawing upon interviews with Welsh-speaking former prisoners, stakeholders with experience of monitoring Welsh language provision in prison, and documentary analysis, we subject the ‘rights’ label to empirical scrutiny. We find implementation gaps in official policy across the Welsh prison estate, scepticism among former prisoners towards existing protections, and limited oversight. The article concludes that while Welsh-speaking prisoners may have ‘rights’ in a broad sense, these rights guarantee little in practice. Entirely contingent on the goodwill of prison authorities, and weakened by constitutional complexity, they are a stark reminder of Welsh devolution’s limited progress.

A Corporate turn? Insights from Colombia, the World’s Contemporary Laboratory for Transitional Justice, Line Jespersgaard Jakobsen, University of Copenhagen

Corporate accountability remains marginal in transitional justice, despite growing evidence of economic actors’ complicity in armed conflicts. This article examines Colombia’s transitional justice system to explain the persistent exclusion of corporate responsibility. Drawing on Robert Cover’s concepts of nomos, narrative, and polynomia, it shows how state‑centric transitional justice scripts legitimize the omission of economic dimensions. Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) provides a revealing case: although it leads globally in judicial actions involving businesses, most complicit corporations remain untouched. Linking local practices to the global transitional justice script, the article argues that an internationally standardized nomos narrows transitional justice into jurispathic, state‑centred practices that confine knowledge, privilege law over politics, and cast economic actors as neutral. These entrenched normative structures hinder the practical translation of the emerging scholarly ‘corporate turn.’ Colombia’s experience thus exposes both the potential and the structural limits of integrating corporate accountability into post‑conflict justice.

Do impartial tax law experts exist? Legal academics’ restricted autonomy in a crowded field of experts, Helle Dyrendahl Staven, Oslo Metropolitan University and Marte Mangset, University of Oslo

In tax policy, expert advice abounds, often aligned with either state or market interests. But can there be impartial experts in tax law, and can academics play that role? Drawing on the sociology of expertise and domination, we examine the practices, valuation, and institutional autonomy of Norwegian tax law academics. We find no clear distinction between academics and other professionals in knowledge production or arenas of influence and limited institutional support for autonomy. However, an analysis of expert statements in the exit tax reform reveals diverse academic arguments, no systematic alignment with one type of interests, which indicate that they are not uniformly dominated by either the state or the market. We propose that boundary blurring and maintenance by actors across state, market, and academia legitimize an expert discourse that serves academics and state and market actors alike.

Forging Legal Communitas: Physicians’ Resistance in Media Discourses in Sweden’s ‘Snitch Law’ Debate, Josephine Greenbrook, University of Edinburgh

In October 2022, the Swedish government announced a series of reforms in the field of migration policy, including a proposed legal obligation requiring all public employees, among them healthcare professionals, to report undocumented migrants to the authorities. This paper examines the intense public debate that followed, focusing on the interventions of physicians and their collectives. In their responses, physicians protested by invoking their primary duty to provide care, the heightened vulnerability of undocumented patients, and the erosion of trust that such legislation would entail. In so doing, they rejected the intrusion of bureaucratic law, and what the movement termed Angiverilag (Snitch Law), into clinical spaces, and instead oriented themselves toward the perceived moral compass of their profession. Through their collective resistance to the proposed legislation, we argue, physicians came to articulate an alternative normative order grounded in professional ethics—a legal communitas.

Forthcoming Articles

Browse our forthcoming articles in the Winter 2026 issue

Narrative Power and Justice: Computational Insights into Indigenous-State Consultation Dynamics, Ronit Levine-Schnur, Renana Keydar, Noam Maeir

This Article examines how narrative power shapes recognition and legitimacy in state-led consultation procedures with indigenous communities. Analyzing two non-binding consultations involving the Bedouin community in Israel, the study applies a voice-centric computational methodology to over two hundreds of oral testimonies. Using topic modeling and statistical analysis, it reveals a persistent narrative divide: Bedouin speakers foreground historical narratives of communal land possession at rates more than eight times higher than non-Bedouin participants, while state actors rely predominantly on legalistic and procedural discourse oriented toward future governance. This divergence reflects competing conceptions of justice. For Indigenous participants, the past constitutes the foundation of their claims, and recognition of historical connection and dispossession is a prerequisite for negotiating future arrangements. The state, by contrast, largely brackets history in favor of formal legal entitlements and procedural frameworks that operate to the detriment of Bedouin claims. An analysis of the Commission’s final report shows that this legalistic framing is ultimately adopted as the Commission’s dominant narrative. By shifting analytical attention from speaking to listening, the Article advances socio-legal scholarship and offers methodological and policy insights for designing consultation processes that more meaningfully engage with and listen to indigenous voices.

The Enclosure of London’s Canary Wharf: The Intertwined Lives of Local and Global Relations of Production, Negar Mansouri

This article investigates the transformation of Canary Wharf into a banking and finance district in the 1980s and 1990s as a ‘global event’ and part of the broader efforts to overcome the profitability crisis of British capitalism. The account illustrates the ways in which elevating the political economy of the ‘place’ over that of the ‘territory’ became crucial to the transition from post-imperial to global Britain, while exposing the British economy to the legally encased uncertainties of the neoliberal global economy. The article advances the argument that the law’s role in the privatization of public lands should be understood not just as ‘stabilizing’ the interests of capital but also in relation to capitalism’s secular crises and spatial uncertainties. The current restructuring of Canary Wharf, aimed at restoring the profitability rate,is similarly taking shape within the context of the ‘Long Downturn of Capitalism’ that has gripped the advanced capitalist core since the 1970s.

Can the subaltern speak through WhatsApp?: Unearthing the labour/knowledge of digital methodologies, Leila Ullrich

Prompted by the challenges that Syrian refugees posed to a qualitative WhatsApp survey, this article dissects what researchers and research participants actually do when they ‘produce’ knowledge through digital methods like WhatsApp. While many refugee participants saw the survey as an opportunity to express their views on social tensions in Lebanon, others launched more fundamental challenges to the abstractions of digital knowledge production. Drawing on Marxist-feminist standpoint theory, I propose ‘knowledge/life-making’ as a more embodied, relational understanding of knowledge production in the context of the digital and the decolonial turn in socio-legal research. Viewing knowledge as intimately connected to the everyday, reproductive work of ‘border crossers’ could help create more affective knowledge at a time when even qualitative researchers increasingly use digital methods and Artificial Intelligence. Such a reproductive perspective also highlights the potential of ‘border crossing’ as a resistive strategy of knowledge production from below.

Reconceptualising Access To Justice For Social Welfare Legal Problems: A Relational Framework, Sarah Nason, Peter Butcher, Sarah Closs-Davies and Lorien Jasny

This article reconceptualises access to justice for social welfare legal problems through a relational framework foregrounding interactions between formal advice services, informal community organisations, and the social networks through which people navigate everyday problems. Drawing on theories of social capital and relational governance, it adapts frameworks from development studies and health systems research to examine how community relationships shape advice-seeking and problem resolution. The article combines qualitative community mapping, interviews, and Social Network Analysis within case-study communities in England and Wales. The findings demonstrate that access to justice is shaped by the quality of bridging and linking relationships within communities, alongside the effectiveness of formal advice provision. While strong social networks can facilitate wellbeing and access to help, they may also reinforce exclusion, misinformation, or informal gatekeeping. The article argues for a relational understanding of access to justice, recognising the interdependence of formal institutions, informal organisations, and local social infrastructures.

Traces of Legal Orientalism: Racialized Othering and (Neo)Colonial Legacies in R (On the Application of TTT) v Michaela Community School, Rehana Parveen and Fatima Ashdash

This article critiques the controversial decision of the High Court R (On the Application of TTT) v Michaela Community School (hereafter Michaela) where a school’s ban on ritual prayers was upheld. Subjecting the case to postcolonial and critical race critique,, we contend that Michaela should be understood as a worrying and harmful manifestation of legal orientalism, a term that denotes how orientalist ideas and discourses are constructed in and reproduced through law. The act of legal orientalism represented by this particular case, and the racialized assumptions that it rests on and reproduces, revive (neo)colonial legacies through legal orientalist technologies of othering, knowability and unchilding. These legal orientalist technologies repurpose orientalist tropes regarding the inherent threat supposedly posed by Islam to Western civilization; selectively turn to militant secularism; dismiss and flatten the complexities of Islamic jurisprudence and unchild Muslim children in ways that simultaneously deny and vilify their religious and legal agency.

Legal pluralism in Ecuador: gender-based violence, Indigenous women, and processes of dispute resolution, Liliam Fiallo

This article examines legal pluralism in Ecuador during 2007–2017. By theorizing legal pluralism as a regime, it analyzes the articulation between its institutional design, formal and informal rules of coordination between jurisdictions, and actors’ legal strategies, discourses, and practices in gender-based violence cases against Indigenous women. The study draws on documentary analysis of seven judicial files involving the activation of ordinary and Indigenous jurisdictions that led to a jurisdictional conflict, alongside 43 interviews with Indigenous authorities, women leaders, victims, judicial officials, and policymakers. Rules governing legal pluralism enabled asymmetric legal interactions and jurisdictional disputes through which local power was contested. Indigenous women faced two constrained pathways: communal processes reproducing discrimination or punitive state frameworks limiting transformative reparations. These findings suggest that strategic legal mobilization reshaped institutional landscapes while reproducing colonial formations. Conceptualizing legal pluralism as a regime shifts the focus beyond state-centered accounts, foregrounding everyday negotiations and power relations.

‘Chucking Their Stuff into ChatGPT and Hitting Send’: AI Slop in the Administrative State, Jed Meers

Most research on AI in the administrative state focuses on its use by officials. This paper addresses a comparatively neglected issue: the impact of the use of AI tools by the public themselves. Drawing on a qualitative survey with over 500 UK civil servants, it argues that AI use by the public is increasingly disrupting the front-line of the administrative state. The argument is put in three parts. First, as the administrative state increasingly relies on text-based inputs, officials use correspondence as a proxy for individuals – a longstanding assumption of ‘autographic’ authorship that the diffusion of generative AI tools unsettles. Second, the problem can be characterised as ‘AI slop’: AI-generated correspondence with high volume and velocity that adopts a particular voice in interactions with officials. Third, this ‘AI slop’ causes three forms of disruption: to the signals officials draw from correspondence, to trust between officials and the public, and to systems ill-equipped to deal with it. The paper concludes by arguing that the status quo itself fails to adequately meet the needs of many people accessing services, and that systems need redesigning not only for a society with AI slop, but in ways that address the drivers of it too.

“To Trust or Not to Trust?” The Epistemic and Moral dimensions of[AM1.1] Distrust in Italian Commercial Mediations, Alessandra Minissale

This article challenges enduring legal and economic ideals portraying commercial disputes as based solely on monetary demands and governed by rational calculation devoid of emotions. Drawing on ethnographic observations of commercial mediations in Italy, it shows how distrust shapes decision making and interaction in individual-vs-business as well as business-vs-business conflicts. Combining sociological perspectives on epistemic and moral emotions with theories of status and power, the article conceptualizes distrust as an epistemic moral emotion shaping how disputants interpret facts, assign blame, and evaluate future cooperation. The analysis demonstrates that, in individual–business mediations, distrust is expressed through narratives of suffering and moral outrage that demand empathic recognition and moral validation, whereas in business–business mediations distrust centres on perceived violations of professional integrity, credibility, and prestige, prompting status defence and power reassertion. In this way, the article contributes to socio-legal studies on mediation, economic interaction and decision-making.

‘Living Mohammaden but a Dead Hindu’: Caste, Islam and the Juridical ‘Muslim’ in British Colonial Law-Making of the subcontinent, Ahmed Raza Memon

In this article, I explain how twentieth Century British colonial governance juridified the ‘Muslim’ Subject of its rule through a social anthropology of the religion of ‘Islam’ informed through its understanding of caste. Specifically, I argue how a racialised reading of Islam by British Jurists and Judges operates alongside and in conjunction with a social anthropology of caste in British India. Relying on historical sociology of law, interdisciplinary conversations on history and sociology of religion, caste and Islam in the subcontinent, this argument delves into the archival materials of colonial case law, reports of colonial officers and works of Indologists that formed racialised perceptions of Islam. By drawing into focus the historical juridification of Muslim subjecthood in colonial subcontinent through the intersection between race and caste –I reflect on the relationship between, caste, religion, Islam and contemporary conversations on citizenship in India, debates on Unified Civil Code and Islamophobia.