Social & Legal Studies 

About: Social & Legal Studies is an academic journal published by SAGE Publishing. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Human rights & Poison control. It has an ISSN identifier of 0964-6639. Over the lifetime, 1183 publications have been published receiving 19651 citations. The journal is also known as: Social and legal studies.

Plural Policing and Democratic Governance

Abstract: This article asks how we might best come to terms with - and seek to govern - the multiplicity of institutional forms that are now involved in the delivery of policing and security services and technologies. I begin by documenting briefly the network of providers that constitute the policing field locally, nationally and transnationally, before specifying how the fragmentation and pluralization of policing has called radically into doubt a number of received (liberal) suppositions about the relationship between police and government. I then attempt - drawing constructively yet critically on recent theorizations of governance and ‘governmentality’ - to make sense of some contemporary reconfigurations of policing within and beyond the state, and tease out their implications for questions of democratic legitimacy. Finally, I outline the contours of an institutional politics for the regulation of policing that is both normatively adequate to the task of connecting policing to processes of public will-formatio...

Legal Pluralism: The Many Books on Europe's Many Constitutions

Abstract: The endeavour to project a constitution for the EU, although (it seems) irreversibly incapable of acquiring legitimacy through any activation of pouvoir constituant, has begun increasingly to rely on doctrines of legal pluralism. In this regard, it is possible to observe that an intriguing, subtle, and in itself telling, shift of paradigm is at play. In its initial construction, the doctrine of legal pluralism typically informed analyses focused on the sphere of private law, whose patchwork patterns of norm production these analyses expressly contrasted with the relatively monistic system of public law, formalized around the constitutions and formal codes of civil law promulgated under post-1789 states. Earlier accounts of legal pluralism specifically challenged the existence of public law as a predominant normative corpus, and they focused on examining the de facto public-legal functions of seemingly private-legal arrangements (Ehrlich 1989 [1913]: 330). Indeed, the interest in law’s pluralistic formation, assuming salience in the early 19th century, might be seen as an approach standing at the inception of a spectrum of distinctively sociological approaches to law, which were marked by a specific rejection of the static models of public-legal normativity characterizing constitutionalism in the strict and classical sense. At a general level, this private-law emphasis still persists in much of most important contemporary analysis of legal pluralism, which also opposes

Constructing the `Right To the City' in Brazil:

Abstract: While there has been a growing utilization of Henri Lefebvre's concept of the `right to the city', not much has been said about the legal implications of such a concept. This article discusses the main aspects of the legal construction of the `right to the city' in Brazil. Following a discussion of Lefebvre's contribution to the debate on urban politics, the article analyses the role played by the legal order in the determination of the exclusionary pattern of urban development in Brazil, as well as the role a redefined legal order can have in the processes of urban reform, socio-spatial inclusion, and sustainable development. Emphasis is placed on the main dimensions of the 2001 City Statute, the legal framework governing urban development and management, which recognized the `right to the city' as a collective right, followed by an introduction to the proposed `World Charter of the Right to the City'. As a conclusion, it is argued that, while a great deal has already been done to promote the materializa...

Jurisdiction and Scale: Legal `Technicalities' as Resources for Theory:

Abstract: Since the 1980s, critical studies of law and space have fruitfully explored the insight that law's mechanisms can be understood in part as mapping exercises. Existing work on law's scales (especial...

Governed By Law

Abstract: Another consequence of this development of bio-power was the growing importance assumed by the action of the norm at the expense of the juridical system of the law... I do not mean to say that the law fades into the back ground or that the institutions of justice tend to disappear, but rather that the law operates more and more as a norm, and that the judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical, adminis trative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory. A nor malizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centred on life. (Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, 1979: 144)