JLS

Indications of Goal Displacement Induced by Budget Cuts and Output Management: A Case Study of Regulatory Enforcement, Kees Huizinga

A case study was conducted at an enforcement agency in the Netherlands to explore whether it might be affected by goal displacement, and if so to gain insight into the possible origins of the phenomenon. The results indicate three distinct types of goal displacement, each of which appears to substantially impair the effectiveness of the agency in a specific way. It is made plausible that the combination of multiple, consecutive budget cuts imposed upon the agency and a strong culture of output management, have played a key role in generating goal displacement. In more general terms, the study shows the potential usefulness of a goal-displacement perspective in investigating the effectiveness of regulatory enforcement agencies.

“No buddy, I will not speak to the press, I am working!”: Criminal Justice and the Interprofessional Dynamics of Communication Production in the Chilean Public Prosecutorial Office, Isabel Arriagada, Marianne Gonzalez Le Saux, Javier Wilenmann and Felipe Aguila

The paper analyses the interprofessional dynamics of communication production in criminal justice. Through 26 in-depth interviews, the paper investigates the production of media information on prosecutorial work in Chile, tracking the relationships of internal communication agents, prosecutors, and external legal journalists. Previous scholarship has shown the success of police organizations to define the content of crime communication based on asymmetrical power relations with the media. In contrast, our study reveals that legal journalists can bypass attempts to control the flow of information from the prosecutorial office and impose extra-organizational goals. Lawyers dismiss the work of journalists, particularly those working as strategic communication advisors with prosecutors, but the asymmetric relationship between the criminal justice agency and the media plays in favor of external legal journalists. Our paper considers several explanations for this configuration, including inter-professional values, transactional relationships between journalists and prosecutors, and local legal culture.

Labour Law after Neoliberalism?, Ruth Dukes and Wolfgang Streeck

Over the course of the past 40 years, neoliberalism has all but destroyed the institutions that once civilised labour markets. In the wake of that destruction, labour law reform is being driven in some jurisdictions by a new kind of right-wing populist politics. What does this hold in store for work relations? Our investigation of labour law today begins with a brief look backwards to the pre- and post-war decades and to the ostensible depoliticisation of the law under neoliberalism. We then consider the possible emergence of a distinctly right-wing populist approach to labour law in countries including the USA, UK and Poland, drawing comparisons with German experience after neocorporatism. Lastly, we take a normative turn and consider what steps ought to be taken by a government intent on addressing class inequalities and restoring the kind of rights that postwar democracies once conferred upon workers understood to be industrial citizens.

Lawyers as Infrastructures: Mediations, Blockages and New Possibilities in Grassroots Movements, Heba M. Khalil

What roles do lawyers play when their own, subaltern communities are mobilising for justice? Drawing on the case of anti-eviction mobilisation of Al-Warraq Island in Egypt, this article investigates the infrastructural roles of community lawyers in grassroots movements. As their profession transformed into an underpaid, and under-valued occupation, masses of lawyers have become precarious professionals living through subaltern lives. Living amongst the poor with the elite knowledge of the law enabled community lawyers to forge new relations between the grassroots and the elites, the streets and the court, and farmers and the national media. Drawing on an ethnography of the movement, I posit that lawyers operate as social infrastructures: liminal subjects in uncertain times capable of generating new possibilities and social relations. As social infrastructures within their communities, lawyers shape the possibilities of action, enabling new modes of resistance, while blocking other avenues of contention.

Epistemic Emotions in Prosecutorial Decision-making, Nina Törnqvist and Åsa Wettergren

The article examines epistemic emotions as part of the emotive-cognitive processes of prosecutors’ knowledge-seeking and decision-making in preliminary investigation and court proceedings. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews and shadowing of prosecutors in Sweden, we show how emotions motivate and orient prosecutors’ inquiries and the fundamental role of the certainty-doubt spiral for doing objectivity. In conclusion, we discuss the centrality of emotions for conscientious and well-poised decisions in legal work. The study contributes to the field of law and emotion by exploring the epistemic quality of emotions, notably the certainty-doubt spiral, in legal work.

Epistemic Othering: The Interplay of Knowledges in Legislative Drafting, Kati Nieminen and Laura Sarasota

In this article we use the concept of epistemic othering to describe the subjectivation of people who have experienced debt problems in the legislative drafting process, and argue that the evidence-based policy paradigm, together with its participatory dimension, produce a potentially harmful subject-position for people who are considered vulnerable and irrational. By analysing the preparatory material of Finnish interest rate cap laws, we explore what is constructed as rational and possible in the legislative process, and how these modalities frame the use of expert knowledge. We argue that what is considered rational is constructed in terms of market logic, and what is construed as possible is heavily framed by law as knowledge. Together, market logic and law as knowledge form the preconditions for the use of expert knowledge. Ultimately, the way in which these three types of knowledges interact contributes to the epistemic othering of people who experience debt problems.

Speaking Up: Why People Dare to Sue the Government in China, Jongyoon Baik

Why do Chinese citizens file administrative lawsuits despite the low expectation of winning or the possibility of political retaliation from suing the government? Drawn from the author’s fieldwork interviews in 2019 with ordinary citizens who have had disputes with their administrators, this paper argues that Chinese citizens’ desire to have their voices heard trumps these obstacles. That is, through lawsuits, people want to face their administrators and make their case. An administrative trial provides such an opportunity for citizens to voice their discontent in the physical presence of the administrators, unlike other dispute resolution methods available in China. Administrative litigants value this rare chance, even though the rulings are less likely to be in their favor. By treating an administrative trial as a stage for citizens to stand up for themselves against the government, this article contributes to our understanding on political expressions under authoritarianism.

‘The Rules are All Over the Place’: Mass Observation, Time, and Law in the Covid-19 Pandemic, Sian Beyond-Jones, Emily Graham and Nadine Hendrie

This article analyses practices of pandemic time-making that surrounded the imposition and communication of laws restricting daily life in parts of the UK in spring 2020. With colleagues, we commissioned a Mass Observation Project directive in summer 2020, asking contributors about their everyday experience of time during the pandemic. We analyse how legal temporalities emerge across 228 responses. Initially, law-making seemed belated, missing the disruptive temporalities of the pandemic. Once they arrived, pandemic rules were sudden, changeable, and confusing. Mass Observation writers forged clusters of improvised practices – tactics of anticipation – to cope with these unsettling temporalities. Meanwhile, the Hansard Society, the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments, and legal commentators argued that ‘fast track’ pandemic law-making was error-ridden, putting the public at risk of unwitting criminal liability. Open to ‘polyrhythmic’ temporalities operating across fields of experience and action, our study underlines the contradictory or dissonant qualities of apparently resonant constructions of legal time.

Law, Language and the Power of ‘Invisible Threats’ of Violence Against Women, Catherine Turner and Aisling Swaine

Violence, and the threat of violence against women, is a pervasive feature of women’s lives. From high profile threats in politics, to everyday harms such as domestic abuse, violence, threat and intimidation control women’s behaviour and silence their voices. Yet in many cases the pernicious and harmful effect of threat is not captured by the law. Drawing on the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and empirical research undertaken in Northern Ireland, this paper analyses the ways that both objectified and incorporated social structures generate invisible forces of fear and threat that the law does not see, but that women feel, and structure their lives around. The paper develops the novel conceptual tool of ‘invisible threats’ to capture threat as harm, to show the relation between threat and gendered (in)securities and to challenge institutions of the law to respond better to ‘invisible threats’ as felt, perceived and articulated by women.

Legal Complexes and Legal Change in an Era of Globalization, Terrence C. Halliday