Social & Legal Studies

This article charts the ideological and discursive trajectory of the minoritisation and criminalisation of Ahmadis in Pakistan, who self-identify as Muslims but are classified as a religious minority under the constitution. The law also prohibits Ahmadis from proselytising or using Islamic epithets. Following the Freudian notion of ‘narcissism of minor differences’, the article shows that Ahmadis, being profoundly similar yet different in one doctrinal aspect from mainstream Muslims, have come to represent a threat to the internal unity of the wider community. This difference has been mobilised by political forces and endorsed by the judiciary, including within the framework of liberal legality. Whilst recognising the limits of liberal law, the paper critiques the view that liberal law itself has led to the exclusion of Ahmadis. Rather, it shows that courts have stretched liberal canons and modes of reasoning to suit personal ideological motivations and populist agendas whilst validating discriminatory laws.

This paper reconceptualizes hierarchy as a constitutive force of the international human rights regime rather than a residual feature of interstate politics. Drawing on postcolonial, feminist, and critical legal scholarship, it argues that hierarchy permeates the material, normative, epistemic, symbolic, and institutional dimensions of international law, shaping who defines rights, whose claims are legitimized, and which subjects, harms, and forms of vulnerability are rendered visible or excluded. By proposing an integrated typology of five hierarchies, the article shows how law actively produces distinctions of authority, recognition, and subjectivity, mediating the translation of lived precarity into legal protection. From the liberal-individualist foundations of early rights instruments to the marginalization of collective, ecological, and intersectional claims, hierarchy structures the grammar of universality and the differential recognition of vulnerability across scales. International law's architecture not only mirrors inequality but reproduces it through classificatory mechanisms that privilege dominant epistemologies while silencing relational and slow-onset forms of harm. Moving beyond critique, the paper advances a reconstructive framework grounded in epistemic pluralism, relational justice, and decolonial engagement, reframing universality as a dialogical and historically situated process of co-creation.

In recent decades, many post-conflict and post-authoritarian societies have developed various non-judicial and quasi-judicial mechanisms beyond trials to deal with the consequences of mass atrocities. These mechanisms include truth commissions, local and national reconciliation processes, memory initiatives, apologies, conditional amnesties and reparations, among others. They not only represent distinct tools for addressing past injustices but also embody distinct theories of justice, including restorative, reparative, customary and historical justice. The article argues that the proliferation and coexistence of multiple theories of justice have made the field of transitional justice inherently pluralistic, moving it beyond a singular liberal-legalist tradition. The primary challenge is to examine how these theories of justice coexist, intersect and interact. Building on critical transitional justice literature, empirical findings, and informed by legal pluralism, this article does not propose a new overarching theory of justice. Rather, it aims to conceptualise a pluralistic theory of justice rooted in praxis and communities’ perceptions of justice. This framework seeks to reorient the field's theoretical foundation and more accurately capture the multifaceted nature of justice after atrocities by incorporating diverse knowledge systems and lived experiences.

Across courts and workplaces, appearance functions as a condition of institutional visibility. This article theorizes aesthetic governance as a sociolegal mechanism through which law regulates bodies by allocating perceptual attention under conditions of finite observational capacity and dense normative expectations. In rule-saturated environments, scrutiny cannot be evenly distributed. Aesthetic deviation lowers thresholds of attention, concentrates observation, and increases exposure probability prior to interpretation. Using the concepts of proxy criminalization and anticipatory governance, the article shows how formally neutral standards of decorum and professionalism encode visible difference as scrutiny-relevant and extend attention over time. Intensified observation amplifies minor deviations, increasing the likelihood that they become actionable even where interpretive standards remain neutral. By locating inequality at the level of exposure rather than judgment, the article demonstrates how differential enforcement can emerge without overt bias or formal rule change.

This article develops the concept of collaborative displacement to explain how legal intervention and private social mobilisation interact to produce spatial exclusion during periods of security crisis. Drawing on Critical Legal Geography and Critical Legal Studies, it argues that emergency legal measures may generate exclusionary consequences extending beyond formal legal sanction by legitimising suspicion, facilitating social mobilisation, and diffusing responsibility across public and private actors. The analysis centres on the case of Dr Dalal Abu Amneh, a Palestinian citizen of Israel whose arrest following a social media post after the 7 October 2023 attacks was followed by sustained harassment that ultimately forced her family to leave their home. Rather than resulting from a single legal decision, displacement emerged through the cumulative interaction of legal enforcement, public exposure, institutional practices, and informal pressure. The article introduces collaborative displacement as a socio-legal framework for analysing how democratic legal systems may reshape urban belonging and minority presence under conditions of crisis.

After a century of inertia, Canadian courtrooms have undergone rapid transformation for the past 6 years. The move toward digital and hybrid proceedings has exposed the deep spatial and temporal structures on which courts rely, while also reshaping how participants access justice. For people experiencing homelessness, long-standing challenges navigating the court system have intensified during this period of technological change. We argue that while modernization efforts and workarounds offered by outreach workers can temporarily mitigate some obstacles, they do not fundamentally alter the conditions that render the court system inaccessible to unhoused people. Drawing on interviews with 18 professionals who assist unhoused people through the court process, we use a chronotopic analysis to examine how court and street spacetime intersect in court proceedings, shaping legal participation. We show how spatio-temporal exclusions persist, and are in some cases reproduced, within hybrid court settings.

This study examines the mass closure of magistrates’ courts in England and Wales. It tracks how the closure policy was formulated, justified and operationalised by successive governments. An advanced managerialist truth regime redefined court buildings as financial assets, identifying multiple courts as ‘surplus’ or ‘inefficient’ and ripe for closure and sale. ‘Consent’ was fabricated through consultation processes, premised on predetermined outcomes. This policy was overlain with government pledges to switch to a tech-justice system, improving access to justice, achieving greater efficiencies and cost effectiveness. Our findings reveal how: court buildings were sold with scant regard to the adverse impact on court users; many of the remaining buildings were allowed to deteriorate; locally accessible justice was undermined and defective technologies failed to deliver. This study contributes to a research agenda that examines the deleterious consequences of sedimenting an advanced managerialist truth regime that is resistant to critique and shielded from scrutiny and accountability.

This article examines the subversive mobilities and vernacular legal navigation of Uzbek migrants in Finland and Sweden, highlighting their tactical responses to restrictive Nordic migration regimes. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2022–2025), including interviews, focus groups and digital ethnography, we explore how migrants with precarious statuses navigate legal ambiguity, administrative opacity and discretionary enforcement. Through informal knowledge networks, cross-border mobility and performative compliance, Uzbek migrants creatively reinterpret and circumvent institutional constraints. We advance the concept of subversive mobilities (Cohen et al., 2017) and introduce ‘vernacular legal navigation’ to theorise how migrants engage with law as a plural, culturally mediated field. These practices reveal tensions between formal legal frameworks and migrant agency, contributing to socio-legal and migration scholarship. By bridging strategic mobility and everyday legal consciousness, we re-theorise migrant agency as adaptive, relational and situated within the moral and bureaucratic complexity of European migration regimes.

Between 2020 and 2022, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Melbourne, Australia was known as the most locked-down city in the world. Communities experienced rolling and extended lockdowns differently, impacting access to various resources, including access to justice. This article presents the key findings of a study on the effects of the pandemic on migrant and refugee communities’ ability to access social and legal services in Melbourne which it frames as an issue of access to justice. The research highlighted that COVID-19 magnified existing barriers in the form of structural violence experienced by these communities – including racism, uncertainty, fear, distrust and isolation. The research also demonstrates that the pandemic importantly provided an opportunity to rethink old ways of working by centring community as a justice practice: not delivering services to but working with communities to meet their needs. We argue that collaborative work with communities was key to effective service provision but also a safeguard against structural violence. Through this participatory-collaborative model, the research reveals how structural violence is perpetuated when it decentres community needs and expertise, and how space can be opened up for change.

Socio-legal research has traced the rise of hybrid legal regimes that combine punitive and welfare logic. This article advances this scholarship by theorizing what performative legality—legal practices where speech acts, rituals, and staged interactions shape subjects, but with the ultimate authority monopolized by state actors—does within such hybrid systems. I develop the concept of the Performative Submissiveness Catch to describe the paradoxical demand that individuals must perform both submissiveness (to qualify for help) and competence (to deserve autonomy), creating an impossible double bind that deepens dependency. By analyzing this double bind, the article demonstrates how hybrid legal regimes can entrench endless supervision and epistemic disqualification through performative practices. Drawing on ethnographic observations of Israeli child protection proceedings, I demonstrate how hearings become a form of collective performance, where judges and social workers portray “ideal parenting” to parents, infantilize them, and deny the structural role of poverty. The Performative Submissiveness Catch thus reframes child protection as a case study in how Child Protection Law constructs dependency, not only through sanctions, but through the very rituals of adjudication.

The study of the health impacts of incarceration has generated new ethical imperatives focused on mitigating the suffering of incarcerated people. The problem with this framing, however, is that it presumes a binary relationship between care and suffering, which does not align with the legal status of the prisoner who suffers through the right to be cared for. Drawing from a prison health care class-action lawsuit in the state of Arizona, this essay explores the ethical insights, critiques, and impasses posed by the prisoner's health care claim. Through an analysis of the prisoner's plea for care, this essay ultimately advances an ethics of unhingement, which unsettles the assumed opposition between suffering and care and self and other. An ethics of unhingement not only refuses the present arrangement of structural violence and suffering under the carceral state, but poses the question, how do we care about the ways in which we suffer together?

Emotion plays an increasing role in contemporary law and policy making. While it may sometimes appropriately motivate legislative action, it can also significantly interfere with justice and reasonable governance. Taking the punitive response to ‘reborn dolls’ in Brazil as a case study of a recent harmful sideway of emotion-based criminalisation, we contend that any emotion-based criminalisation must be socially understood, deconstructed and positioned against legitimate criminalisation criteria. Drawing on the scholarship on legitimate criminalisation, punitiveness, (gendered) legal moralism and the social harm perspective, such emotionalised criminalisation is, firstly, contextualised and, secondly, contrasted to the more reasonable type of governance that includes public sentiment as a relevant factor in the criminalisation process. It is further argued that similar cases of criminalisation are not only normatively illegitimate, but that they can also amount to ‘legislative harm’, which has tangible adverse consequences on the lives and human rights of many.

This article examines how China's Giant Panda National Park turns conservation boundaries into a redistribution of collective forest rights without expropriation. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, semi-structured interviews, and legal-policy analysis, the study traces how the park's boundary is ‘made real’ through territorial technologies: maps and markers, permitting and certification gateways, and remote-sensing-enabled audits. Two cases illustrate a dual mechanism of taking-like loss: (a) a de facto logging ban produced through permit withdrawal and routine refusal, blocking timber income and lawful conversion into emerging forest commodities, and (b) a certification freeze that prevents in-park forest rights from being documented and used as collateral, immobilising credit-dependent livelihoods and investment. Across both, an ‘audit horizon’ reshapes bureaucratic risk, making non-authorisation the safest default. Linking legal geography and takings analysis, it explains why substitutes, leasing, swaps, agreements, and welfare-forest conversion remain distributively thin, and it proposes clearer compensation triggers and calibrated, accountable permitting.

Where unions are weak and governance authoritarian, gig workers rely on everyday resistance rather than organizing. Taiwan is distinctive: both employees and the self-employed can unionize, and riders have formed unions, yet working conditions remain insufficient. Taiwan’s employment relations provide few worker-participation mechanisms, leaving terms of employment largely determined by employer-imposed rules without worker input. Platforms use consent, freedom and fear to make standard employment appear undesirable, limiting solidarity-based demands for re-employment. The employee–self-employed binary thus forces riders to choose between autonomy and protection. Drawing on Taiwan’s experience, labour-law reform should respond to riders’ demands by establishing countervailing mechanisms and participatory rights – information, consultation and codetermination – empowering them to challenge algorithmic control, curb subordination and secure genuine autonomy.