This paper draws from the wrongful convictions of women to interrogate the limits of dominant conceptions of wrongful conviction. Most North American innocence projects turn on a conception of demonstrable factual innocence. The paper argues that this focus is problematic as a matter of criminal law principle and presents particular difficulties for women. The paper identifies that family violence forms the primary context for both the conviction of women for violent crimes, and for women's wrongful convictions. Taking two key examples of family violence – child homicide and intimate partner violence – we illustrate that the prevailing focus on demonstrable factual innocence fits awkwardly with identified wrongful convictions in these areas, and argue that this focus may deflect attention from unidentified miscarriages of justice. We suggest that focusing on factual innocence undermines the criminal justice system's proper focus on state responsibilities, including the responsibility to protect women and children from harm, and the asymmetric burden of proof that applies in criminal cases.

The work of the Polish–Russian scholar Leon Petrażycki from the early decades of the twentieth century holds a strikingly paradoxical position in the literature of juristic and socio-legal scholarship: on the one hand, lauded as a supremely valuable contribution to knowledge about the nature of law and, on the other, widely neglected and little known. This paper asks how far Petrażycki's theories, expressed in writings by and about him available to an international readership, can provide insight for contemporary socio-legal studies – not as historical background but as living ideas. How far can his work speak to current issues and inform current debates? What obstacles stand in the way of this? Why have few international scholars engaged with his theories despite their rigour and originality? The paper starts from this last issue before addressing the others. It argues that Petrażycki's radical legal theory offers strikingly distinctive resources for rethinking issues about the role of law in multicultural societies, the nature of developing transnational law, and the significance of law as an aspect or expression of culture.

Long at the margins of international law, property is now among the key challenges facing international law- and decision-makers. A ‘shrinking’ planet and a polycentric international law regime provide the backdrop for contestation between different property concepts and claims. While presenting important commonalities in legal concepts and normative content, international investment law and international human rights law protect different and possibly competing rights, reflect different balances of commercial and non-commercial considerations, and embody different standards of legal protection. As the frontiers of natural resource extraction expand, natural resource investments can bring different property concepts and claims directly into tension. In this context, the articulation between investment law and human rights law influences the ways in which international law mediates competition for the world's natural resources, redefining the balance between public and private interests and reshaping spaces for the lawful exercise of state sovereignty.

Many cetaceans are borderline persons and, as such, have a right to life. This is partly a normative and partly a positive legal claim. While many philosophers agree that cetaceans possess limited moral rights, it can also be shown that most states already behave as though they possess limited legal rights. The most basic of these, the right to life, reflects shifting contemporary norms – especially given scientific evidence as to cetacean sentience, intelligence and autonomy – and the consolidation of customary international law. The recent decision of the International Court of Justice in Whaling in the Antarctic (2014) includes important obiter dicta to this effect and arguably suggests an avenue for future doctrinal development in this area. Nevertheless, while the cetacean right to life already exists, there are a number of obstacles that preclude its enforcement. Perhaps the most significant of these remain the traditional status of the world's oceans as a global commons and the weak sovereignty of international law.

The largely unfettered realm of hardware and software code offers limitless possibilities in expanding the use and influence of information and communication technologies. As transcendent technologies they are unrestrained by the divergent equivalence of human categories of difference such as gender, race and class, or conceptual binary oppositions such as good/evil, happy/sad, freedom/oppression. Whilst a material grounding in earlier forms of embodied social experience remains an essential precondition of interaction with virtual systems, it is suggested that the virtual world is in the process of transforming the real world or, at least, subordinating it as slave to the machine world. This shift has fostered an imbalance of power between human and the posthuman, and consequently the epoch of the machine is often alleged to be both modern miracle and monster. Just as at a human level, rational thought processes restrain ideas which are unruly and require control, ICT advancements have proliferated to the point where these technologies also need to be classified, constrained where necessary, and diluted into the real world in real time. In this current climate of endless technological transformation, along with the growth of mass surveillance technologies together with the expansion of regulatory state powers, it is clear that any further innovations cannot be left to market forces without first considering the groundwork for the development of an appropriate monitoring mechanism. Before an appropriate set of regulatory mechanisms can be explicated, it is first necessary to consider the nature of the evolving transgressive human–machine relationship and the possible implications for humanity in the modern hypermediated world.

In 2010, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) endorsed long-standing claims of the potentially discriminatory effect of the suspicionless stop and search powers within s.44 of the Terrorism Act 2000. This paper applies principles of social systems theory to propose an explanation for the empirically evidenced racial effect of the s.44 police powers. Through observations regarding communicative barriers apparent between the law-making and policing subsystems, the paper argues that each subsystem's understanding of the expectations of the other, pertaining to the nature and use of the s.44 powers, contributed to their deployment in a way that diminished the effectiveness of the safeguards intended to guard against their misuse. Mismatched subsystem expectations meant that the powers were implemented by the police without the statutory protections, the operational self-restraint, or the type of intelligence-led judgment expected by the legislature, giving rise to misuse of the powers and, in particular, their deployment in line with race-based profiles.

Natural resources are critical to global value chains as minerals, good climate and fertile soil are commonly required for the beginning of the chain, with the consequence that any interruption in their supply threatens the chain's continued integrity. Trade in such resources provides a valuable source of income for resource-rich states. Yet exploitation of natural resources can result in their exhaustion and biodiversity loss, while their extraction can lead to environmental damage and human rights abuses, with the result that any positive contribution to sustainable development for resource-rich states is quickly undermined. Effective regulation is critical to maximise benefits and minimise potential harm. The WTO's rules seem ideally suited to allow the state to impose measures that militate against the overexploitation of the resource by corporations, whilst simultaneously ensuring that that regulation does not unnecessarily impede the flow of resources within the value chain. However, this paper will show that applying the WTO's rules to natural resource use in global value chains presents both substantive and normative challenges.

This paper aims at contributing to the evolving debate over the rights of the dead by providing it with concrete empirical socio-legal context. A pioneering study of succession disputes, conducted in Israel, exposes a gap between a prominent judicial promise to respect the wishes and guard the dignity of the deceased testator, and the actual action taking place behind this rhetoric. The findings reveal that the testator's dignity and wishes are trampled during testamentary procedures, when demeaning allegations about his or her mental and physical competence are allowed, and personal and medical information is exposed, and when the judge approves settlements that diverge from the testator's last will in the name of familial reconciliation, even though in most cases there are no nuclear family ties between the rival parties. These findings are discussed in the light of an original typology mapping the theoretical controversies over posthumous rights, to highlight some of the possible normative implications of the project for the law on the books and law in action related to property division after death.

Non-conviction-based (NCB) asset forfeiture is a relatively recent addition to law enforcement's armoury in the fight against organised crime in the UK. It allows for criminal assets to be forfeited to the State even in the absence of criminal conviction, the stated objective being to undermine the profit incentive of criminal activity. Until now, NCB asset forfeiture has principally been critiqued from a criminological point of view, specifically concerning the Packer models and the civil/criminal dichotomy – aside from this, however, it remains rather underdeveloped theoretically. This paper addresses this lack of legal theoretical engagement with NCB asset forfeiture by providing an initial contribution from a systems-theoretical perspective. This contribution makes use of systems theory's unique insights to critique the perceived ‘failure of law’ that gave rise to the NCB approach, and challenges the legitimacy of that approach in terms of procedural rights.

This paper proposes ‘inventive interventionism’ as a regulatory approach to incorporate substantive outcomes, stakeholder empowerment, effective disclosure and a global multi-stakeholder and multidimensional view of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and social disclosure. Inventive interventionism also applies new paradigms of regulation that recognise CSR as one of the proximate engineers of efficient public governance and ultimate sources of socio-economic development. The paper adopts a transnational and comparative approach to regulatory CSR and situates the voluntary and prescriptive approaches in the wider regulation debate. It draws on reflexive law, responsive regulation, institutional and other theories to demonstrate that existing CSR regulations in several jurisdictions are not representative of the law's multidimensional and multidirectional nature. Inventive interventionism reflects a functional approach to the law–CSR dialectic relationship and contributes to the development of an analytical framework for CSR and reforming its national and global regulatory environment.

States utilise international law to create opportunities within global markets for private transnational economic actors, such as multinational oil companies, to invest and/or operate within foreign jurisdictions. However, there is a lack of directly enforceable international mechanisms against these private actors when they cause environmental damage abroad. International law responses to this problem range from the establishment of international compulsory compensation schemes, the proposed expansion of the doctrine of state responsibility to include liability for private actors, and more recently through litigation in the home states of multinational oil companies. However, both international jurisprudence and US, Dutch and British domestic case-law reveal an ambivalence towards holding such private transnational economic actors legally accountable in their home state jurisdictions for violations committed abroad. Certain states (the US and France) that have suffered environmental damage from the activities of multinational oil companies have responded by reasserting their domestic regulatory powers to require immediate clean up and compensation, prior to domestic judicial litigation. Other states (Nigeria) are unable to achieve the same level of effective enforcement due to their weaker political and economic bargaining positions.

The legal consciousness of citizens receiving the law has been extensively explored but little attention has been paid to the legal consciousness of individuals applying the law. This paper draws on interviews with forty government officials in the Refugee Review Tribunal of Australia to address this concern, analysing how government bureaucrats think about law. In doing so, it identifies a series of underlying ideals informing the officials’ legal identification narratives. It presents a heuristic that positions bureaucratic legal identification in relation to broader moral ideals, demonstrating that as government officials’ identification with law increases so too does their idealisation of intellect and information processing. Conversely, as the officials’ identification with law decreases, their idealisation of experience and truth verification increases. These findings provide new insights into how law works in government, revealing bureaucratic legal identification as structured according to broader moral values, and thereby unearthing legal consciousness’ latent metacognitive dimension.

Since the 1980s, and mainly since the 1990s, studies in politics and law have adopted an economic attitude to explaining judicial behaviour. In contrast, this paper follows the individualistic approach by focusing on the role of individuals in bureaucracies in designing policy outcomes, using political entrepreneurship and new institutionalism as its theoretical framework. In describing a specific institutional change in Israel – the passage of the General Security Service Law in 2002 – I maintain that this institutional change is an equilibrium that resulted from the actions of empowered military bureaucrats acting as political entrepreneurs who sought to maximise their own political assets in the light of certain structural and cultural conditions, both local and international. The institutional arena was characterised by the inability of the government to function effectively (non-governability), enhanced judicialisation, the dominance of security issues in Israel, and the development of a unique shared mental model of alternative political culture. However, it was still open to changes based on new liberal attitudes about human rights. Thus, politicians influence and are influenced by a wide range of institutional norms and practices in a complex process of changes in institutional design.

The legal requirements of transracial adoption of children in England changed in 2014. An amendment to the law removed a requirement that due consideration be given to the ‘child's religious persuasion, racial origin and ethnic and linguistic background’. This change was motivated by the belief that to do so would increase the number of transracial adoptions and thus decrease the number of children in care awaiting adoption. The likelihood of this change being successful is examined through a combination of critical race theory and systems theory. The combination of these theories permits an investigation into the communications between the political, legal and child welfare systems. This paper offers an enriched evaluation of the interactions of the child welfare, legal and political systems that should be of use to those who work in those systems, as well as providing a basis for understanding why this legal amendment will not achieve its objectives.

This paper reflects on the conceptual approach adopted, in international practice, to the design and implementation of initiatives to promote the rule of law at the national level. It pays particular attention to the understanding, in international practice, of the relationship between the rule of law, democracy, human rights and development. It does so by looking especially at the practice of the UN, and taking into account many empirical and theoretical studies. After first examining the predominant paradigm in the rule of law field adopted by the international community until 2010, and the evolution of international practice thereafter, it concludes that the observance of the rule of law in a given country is determined by political and economic structures, cultural norms, institutions and laws. On this basis, and acknowledging the critical importance of the adopted concepts of rule of law, democracy and human rights, it finds the increasing recognition by the UN of the mutually reinforcing impact of these notions as adequate. This approach allows greater attention to be paid to several socio-economic and political issues that significantly affect the observance of the rule of law in many developing countries, the main recipients of the work of the international community in this field. Based on these findings, it indicates areas for reform.

This paper explicates the relation between vagrancy and public disorder, a relation constituted by a dialecticism that is at once (dis)continuous and (dis)connected. This relationship is important not only to appreciate the place of public disorder vis-à-vis contemporary urban public space and social life, but historical vagrancy as well. The paper examines the refashioning of vagrancy, paying attention to the semantic legal reformatting of its constitution and how this process permits the regulation of essentially the same historical problems and concerns by translating them into legally sound language, visible in the shift from vagrancy to public disorder. This shift was necessary not simply to preserve the vestiges of vagrancy, now conspicuous in public disorder, but for the preservation of the images of, and imaginations about, Law, including its claims to justice. Loosely taking its cue from the visual culture movement which pays homage to the place of images in the ordering of the social world, the paper invokes (and, then, conflates) the concepts of image and imagination and explicates the manner in which the images of, and imaginations about, Law spearheaded the transmutation of the legal category of vagrancy by re-imagining the vagrant, a re-imagining which itself was the product not just of the Law's imagination, but, imaginations about the Law as well. The paper concludes by locating the place of the image and imagination to propounding a narrative of, and about, Law.

This paper explores the implications of political risk insurance (PRI) in the regulation and governance of natural resources sectors in developing countries. Operating in a hybrid public–private sphere, PRI arrangements involve a more complex web of contractual and non-contractual relations than commercial insurance products, and parties to such arrangements are inserted into a much more intricate framework of legal and political governance, with correspondingly broader international and domestic implications. The paper argues that PRI represents a form of government rationality that provides a framework for organising and regulating the behaviour of actors involved in natural resource investments in developing countries. In natural resources projects where tensions regularly exist between the interests of the foreign investor, the host state and local communities, PRI arrangements can reframe the terms of engagement between these various stakeholders and redefine the host state's engagement with the broader international community.

This paper uses the last few decades’ developments in the area of shared parenting to explore power within the framework of autopoietic theory. It traces how, prompted by turbulence from the political subsystem, family law has made several unsuccessful attempts to solve the perceived problem of post-separation dual-household parenting. It agrees with Luhmann and Teubner that closed autopoietic systems’ developments are limited by their normative and cognitive frameworks, and also argues that changes which have occurred in family law show that closed social systems do not function in total isolation. It considers power as ego's ability to limit alter's choices. In our functionally differentiated society, with its recent proliferation of communication, power appears more diffuse and impossible to plot into causal one-way relationships.