This reflection responds primarily to the papers on legal agency and state intervention, with brief comments on the two other papers. The concept of transformative equality, developed in jurisprudence under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), can promote a deeper understanding of the rights of persons with disabilities.1 In particular, it is useful to address power relations between disabled and non-disabled persons not only with respect to family members and medical professionals, but also in the institutions of law and the state.

Trials of complex fraud cases have raised numerous contentious issues in terms of procedural fairness and public resources expenditure. This paper examines the management of complex fraud trials through the lens of managerialism in the criminal justice system, analysing its effects upon procedural efficiency of the trial. The paper draws on qualitative data gathered from observations of insider-dealing trials, and interviews with prosecuting and defence lawyers and a trial judge. The findings reveal that, in practice, although dangers to procedural efficiency are constantly present throughout the trial, its successful management depends on a combination of factors vested in the actors involved and the strategies used. Whilst the increased efficiency of the trials is a reflection of managerial approaches in case management, this does not necessarily indicate a negative development in the area of the control of business misconduct, and managerialism may not be necessarily entirely undesirable in the criminal justice system.

This paper examines the relationship between law and compassion from the perspective of two diverse scholars. For philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, rejecting the idea homo homini lupus, there can simply be no organised society but for a primordial, unauthorised, human vocation for compassion (egoism and violence, for him, are nothing but attempts to repress this). Levinas, however, must be understood, as speaking of compassion not in the usual sense, that is as involving a human capacity for, and cultures of, empathy; he defines it, rather, in phenomenological terms, as an irreducible excess of affectivity for the ultimately meaningless suffering of another, beyond all theodicy and causality, whom one is ethically commanded to offer succour to as if s/he is a ‘higher’ and absolutely unique Other, prior to any comparison and judgment. General legal principles and rigorous rules, Natural Justice and positive law are equally ‘born’ of such an-archic, individuated, compassion for which one can only retroactively account. Justice is ‘born’ as one attempts to justify to third parties why one's care benefits some but not others; the paper argues that this perspective is preferable to prioritising empathic compassion over law for it binds compassion with responsibility. Turning to Giorgio Agamben, the role of compassion takes on a darker character; his historicised investigations of the ‘Western-Christian’ paradigm shows how the Greek and Roman legal principles of epieikeia and aequitas merged with the Christian postulates of God-dictated philanthropy and ‘divine economy’ (Gr: oikonomia), leading to – instead of ethical anarchy followed by with infinite responsibility (Levinas) – anomie, legal exceptionalism and social control via patronage and other biopolitical practices to spectacles of compassion. This suggests that what Levinas calls ‘ethical anarchy’ has been captured by economic rationality and endless processes of anomic management that are equally free of ethical constraints as they are from legal and political decision. With reference to contemporary examples from the ‘law and emotion’ debates, medical laws and humanitarianism, the paper asks the reader to ponder upon the importance, if any, of Levinas's thesis in a world where the expediency of managerial rationality, the secular heir of divine oikonomia, prevails over moral, legal and political principle.

It is no surprise that development institutions and actors have taken to indicators with such enthusiasm. Where indicators are both a form of knowledge production and simultaneously a technology of governance, they are a form of soft powers that allow such actors to set the standards for what it is to be developed in the twenty-first century. Such measures of civilisation have been dominant throughout a history of Global North–South encounters: measurement was central to the many forms of colonial control, from map-making to craniometry, to the global ‘discovery’ of poverty in the 1940s. This paper seeks to place development indicators in this colonial context by focusing on the issue of comparability or the global claim that underpins global development indicators.

The study of law and emotion is now established as a distinct field of study in its own right. In this respect, legal studies has shared in a wider ‘affective turn’ that has involved twenty-first-century social science in a new concern to explain the contribution of emotional feelings to human thought, motivation and behaviour. This development has been accompanied by a pronounced debate over how emotion should be rendered accountable within a rational frame of analysis. On the one hand, it is possible to portray this as being sustained by a movement to make us more emotionally literate and more sensitive to the ways people act and think through feeling. On the other hand, it might be interpreted as being rooted in a concern to make matters of emotion more amenable to rational discipline and the sanction of reason. In this paper, I contend that, where a focus is brought to the experience of ‘compassion’, the volume is raised on these conflicts of interpretation. I further argue that opposing and contested points of view on the experience and value of ‘compassion’ provide us with valuable insights into the wider dynamics of social and cultural change that have inspired the ‘affective turn’. These arguments are developed with reference to the social theories of Max Weber and Norbert Elias. Moreover, in taking note of Hannah Arendt's thinking on the cultural politics of compassion, I attend not so much to how the controversy of compassion might be resolved, but rather to its potential to awaken critical humanitarian concern. Compassion is hereby celebrated as an inherently ‘unstable emotion’ that brings debate to the condition and bounds of human care and social justice.

The paper aims to provide a critique of Shared Parental Leave (SPL) in the UK from a gender equality perspective, namely to assess whether SPL is capable of enabling more men to take leave in order to act as the main carer for their child. Leave policies in Nordic countries, where the rate of take-up by fathers is high, are also examined. It argues that SPL is open to legal challenge by fathers who do not meet the eligibility criteria, as the SPL scheme as currently drafted breaches the terms of the EU Parental Leave Directive and is also discriminatory on grounds of sex. The paper concludes that SPL is flawed as a policy. Whilst the UK government argues for a more equal division of childcare between father and mother, it seems unwilling to challenge the expectation that mothers provide the primary care for young children. Thus SPL will only be successful if the policy is reformed to include a higher rate of pay and a period of leave reserved for fathers.

The present paper argues that the Doing Business indicators, their legitimacy (their ability to be defended through some logic or justification arising from standards) and the wider notions of legitimacy (the standards) that they promulgate are all best understood as social or, better still, ‘econosociolegal’ constructions. It tracks their, primarily post-financial crisis, re-co-construction within and beyond the World Bank from servant of the private sector and discipliner of states to something approaching social champion. But it warns that the perceptions of legitimacy that have been generated by those indicators may well linger.

In a bid to promote consensus, this response article parses the subtle difference of meaning and emphasis that subsists between the various proponents of the new paradigm of legal capacity by closely reading four articles included in this issue of the Journal.

Does legislation that grants land rights necessarily ensure justice? The Forest Rights Act of 2006 (FRA) in India, a landmark social justice law, aims to enhance land security for forest peoples. Increasingly displaced by development and extractive industries that intensify impoverishment, indigenous peoples in India should, with the FRA, be able to protect their land, their livelihoods and their culture. Continued government violations of forest land rights in the name of development highlight that economically vulnerable populations lack the power to take advantage of legislation. I examine the tension of current indigenous land struggles in the context of the legal frameworks of the FRA and the neoliberal culture of India.

Many different indicators are used to monitor poverty and poverty-related deprivations. Two kinds of legitimacy worries may arise about any such indicator: one regarding its reliability as a measure of progress and another regarding the uses to which it is being put. This essay will touch upon both worries, beginning with the latter.

The endeavour to take jurisprudence seriously is addressed by Baghai, a sociologist, to those within her own discipline who fail to engage with the internal understandings of law, most particularly those exhibited within the discourse that accompanies appeal court decisions, namely the discourse that helps to establish and develop legal doctrine. In effect, the book is an appeal for sociologists to assign greater attention to legal doctrine as an object of study. But such an appeal can also be interpreted as a request for theorists who study legal doctrine to take sociology seriously – namely an invitation to legal theorists to bring sociology, or at least one version of it, to bear on their study of the evolution of doctrine. This proposal faces considerable resistance from those on both sides of this divide. Whilst Hart notoriously described The Concept of Law as an essay in both analytical jurisprudence and descriptive sociology, the analytic tradition that he sponsored has sought to augment its academic credentials by moving ever closer to philosophy rather than sociology. With the important exception of Brian Leiter's arguments for ‘naturalising jurisprudence’, the general drift of analytical jurisprudence has been towards a prioritising of philosophical methods over empirical insights. And the resistance to some rapprochement has not been limited to the philosophical side of the divide. The sociology of law has a long tradition of approaching the study of law in a manner that distances itself from the self-understandings of participants in the legal system (lawyers and especially judges). This transfers in turn into hostility towards the manner in which legal philosophy has engaged with those self-understandings, with its willingness to consider, at high levels of abstraction, whether law consists of rules, norms or principles. Rather than organising insiders' views into conceptual schemes, and then examining them for their coherence and consistency, legal sociology has generated its own facts and truths about laws and lawyers, principally using empirical methods (but also other methods) and contrasting these ‘truths’ with lawyer's self-understandings, treating the latter as an inferior form of knowledge either disconnected from reality or ideological rather than descriptive. It has also noticeably failed to engage with much of the central concern of legal philosophy – the attempt to identify law as a separate entity within society. Rather than considering the existence of law as a unity, it focuses instead on parts of law as examples of more general sociological categories, such as studying the legal profession within the sociology of professions or courts, legislatures and administrative agencies within the sociology of institutions or organisations.

Many constitutional questions in Israel are dealt with through the lens of the nation-state paradigm where the state is constitutionally associated with an ethnically and religiously defined majority group. Thus, many of the challenges that face Israeli society and the legal system are often presented as a result of an exceptionally antagonistic majority–minority relationship in a nation-state. This paper offers a novel way of analysing the Israeli constitutional regime using the framework of settler-colonialism. It argues that adding the settler-colonial lens will help better understand many features of Israeli constitutional law. Drawing on theoretical frameworks developed by theorists of colonialism, the paper explores a number of foundational aspects of Israeli constitutional law and demonstrates how they were shaped, and continue to be shaped, by settler-colonialism. The paper argues that settler-colonialism is one of the central features that animate Israeli constitutional law.

Whilst much of the literature focuses on debating polygamy as a harmful practice, the purpose of this paper is to consider a different form of harm by exploring judicial responses to this relationship and the women who engage with it. Over the years, the courts have been faced with numerous questions on the recognition and regulation of polygamous marriages. Commencing with an overview of existing literature on polygamous marriage, I situate and explain the post-colonial feminist-inspired conceptual framework that underpins my judicial discourse analysis of English case-law in this area spanning from 1866 to the present day. A post-colonial feminist lens exposes the racist, orientalist, imperialist and sexist attitudes permeating judicial language in relation to polygamy and its participants. These patterns of discourse subordinate women in polygamous marriages, leaving them in a vulnerable position. With time, these discourses seemingly fade but, through a closer reading of recent cases, it becomes evident that they are still present, albeit in a subtler form as a matter of public policy, morality and ‘good’.