Leon Petrażycki and contemporary socio-legal studies

AbstractThe 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.</jats:p

Digital Open

An exhibition featuring artworks from multi-media artists David Cotterrell, Nayan Kulkarni and Patricia MacKinnon-Day.The exhibition is a satellite programme to the Grosvenor Museum's Open Art Exhibition

The Functional Approach in Comparative Socio-Legal Research: Reflections Based on a Study of Plural Work Regulation in Australia and Indonesia

This article examines the potential use and limits of Zweigert and Kötz’ classical functional approach in comparative law for an empirical socio-legal research project. The project involves a comparison of the formal labour laws and informal norms and institutions which regulate restaurant work in the cities of Melbourne, Australia and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The article argues that the functional approach is a necessary but incomplete method for overcoming the many issues of comparability between the two research sites; the method requires both extension of its analytical steps and explicit explanation of its limitations

Prepare your indicators: Economics imperialism on the shores of law and development

This article explores the influence of economics on the demand for, and deployment of, indicators in the context of the World Bank's investment climate campaign. This campaign is characterised by an emphasis on marketisation, mathematisation and quantification, which are respectively the normative, analytical and empirical approaches of choice in mainstream economics. The article concludes that economics generally, and indicators in particular, have brought a certain discipline and energy to the field of law and development. But this ‘progress’ has often been at the expense of non-economic values and interests, and even of our ability to mourn their loss

Aesthetic Distance

Aesthetic Distance is David Cotterrell’s third solo exhibition with Danielle Arnaud. After two years of negotiations between the Wellcome Trust, Imperial War Museum and Ministry of Defence, David Cotterrell was invited to observe the Joint Forces Medical Group at Camp Bastion in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Focusing on these experiences and their inevitable aftermath, Cotterrell produced a new body of photographic and video work. Two films explore the transport and treatment of casualties during a Major Incident. In Serial Loop the sound of a continuously arriving and departing Chinook helicopter accompanies images of a bleak and wasted landscape. A fire rages in the distance while antiquated ambulances lumber along to take wounded to treatment areas. Green Room gives an alternative vision of the same event. Medics wait for their assigned patients, their bodies and faces concentrated on the tasks to come over the next four hours, like actors preparing to go on stage. A series of photographic works, Sightlines, Principals and Supernumerary are arranged as diptychs and triptychs. Shot in the Operating Theatre, these images reference painters famous for their use of chiaroscuro. The lighting and formal arrangements caught in the artist’s lens for a moment distract the viewer’s gaze, suggesting the sublime beauty within horror, the human scale compassion in the face of destruction. A further series of images, Gateway, documents the handing over of casualties as they pass from Camp Bastion to Selly Oak, Birmingham. Transferred from one plane to another in the middle of the night on Kandahar’s airstrip, the wounded are sedated and virtually unaware of their journeys. The grandiose scale of the planes belies the absolute fragility of their human cargo, soldiers who may take years to recover from wounds sustained in the fraction of a second. Cotterrell’s work for the exhibition reflects on a brief period of time in Helmand Province, in which two British soldiers died, 29 were wounded in action, 74 were admitted to the field hospital, 71 Aeromed evacuations were recorded and an undisclosed number of civilian, insurgent and Afghan National Army soldiers were treated. This material was developed by David Cotterrell during a period of research commissioned by the Wellcome Trust. Cotterrell's work was enabled by the Ministry of Defence, who facilitated his stay at Camp Bastion in November 2007, and was further supported by the RSA, who invited him to stay in Kabul for a month in early 2008 in order to view an alternative aspect of Afghanistan

Challenging homophobic bullying in schools: the politics of progress

In recent years homophobic bullying has received increased attention from NGOs, academics and government sources and concern about the issue crosses traditional moral and political divisions. This article examines this ‘progressive’ development and identifies the ‘conditions of possibility’ that have enabled the issue to become a harm that can be spoken of. In doing so it questions whether the readiness to speak about the issue represents the opposite to prohibitions on speech (such as the notorious Section 28) or whether it is based on more subtle forms of governance. It argues that homophobic bullying is heard through three key discourses (‘child abuse’, ‘the child victim’ and ‘the tragic gay’) and that, while enabling an acknowledgement of certain harms, they simultaneously silence other needs and experiences. It then moves to explore the aspirational and ‘liberatory’ political investments that underlie these seemingly ‘common-sense’ descriptive discourses and concludes with a critique of the quasi-criminal responses that the dominant political agenda of homophobic bullying gives rise to. The article draws on, and endeavours to develop a conversation between, critical engagements with the contemporary politics of both childhood and sexuality

Why Jurisprudence Is Not Legal Philosophy

peerreview_statement: The publishing and review policy for this title is described in its Aims & Scope. aims_and_scope_url: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=rjpn20peerreview_statement: The publishing and review policy for this title is described in its Aims & Scope. aims_and_scope_url: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=rjpn20peerreview_statement: The publishing and review policy for this title is described in its Aims & Scope. aims_and_scope_url: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=rjpn20peerreview_statement: The publishing and review policy for this title is described in its Aims & Scope. aims_and_scope_url: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=rjpn2

What Is Transnational Law?

Is it important to conceptualize transnational law and “map” it as a new legal field? This article suggests that to do so might help both juristic practice and sociolegal scholarship in organizing, linking, and comparing disparate but increasingly significant types of regulation. To explore the idea of transnational law is to raise basic questions about the nature of both “law” and “society” (taken as the realm law regulates). This involves radically rethinking relationships between the public and the private, between law and state, and between different sources of law and legal authority. Taking as its focus Von Daniels's The Concept of Law from a Transnational Perspective and Calliess and Zumbansen's Rough Consensus and Running Code (both 2010), the article considers what approaches may be most productive, and what key issues need to be addressed, to make sense of broad trends in law's extension beyond the boundaries of nation-states.</jats:p