Criminal law as a security project

This paper asks how criminal might be understood as a security project. Following Valverde’s lead, it does this not by trying to define the concept of security, but by looking at the operation of the temporal and spatial logics of the criminal law. It looks first at the basic logics of time and space in conceptions of criminal liability and jurisdiction, before reviewing some recent developments which challenge these practices and what these might mean for criminal law as a security project

Jury Systems Around the World

Lay citizens participate as decision makers in the legal systems of many countries. This review describes the different approaches that countries employ to integrate lay decision makers, contrasting in particular the use of juries composed of all citizens with mixed decision-making bodies of lay and law-trained judges. The review discusses research on the benefits and drawbacks of lay legal decision making as well as international support for the use of ordinary citizens as legal decision makers, with an eye to explaining a recent increase in new jury systems around the world. The review calls for more comparative work on diverse approaches to lay participation, examining how different methods of including lay participation promote or detract from fact finding, legal consciousness, civic engagement, and citizen power

"It is not my intention to be a killjoy..." : objecting to a licence application : the complainers

This paper explores the constructed nature of legal complaints through the adoption of a socio-linguistic model with an emphasis upon pragmatics and elements of conversation analysis. When making a legal complaint, we posit that there is a conflict between effective communication and the uptake of politeness strategies. Furthermore, how complaints are ‘worked up’ in situ is a product of the arena in which such complaints are made. Through a textual analysis of the methods of complaining adopted by those who make representations to the licensing authority, for the purposes of objecting to a licence application, we show the tension between making oneself clear and being polite, and how complaints in different settings take different forms. We conclude by exploring the implications of our findings for legal processes—is it reasonable, for instance, to talk of ‘consistency’ in testimony if each complaint is worked up in situ—and for pragmatic theory more generally, i.e the applicability of Brown and Levinson’s politeness model for legal processes

The real ratio legis and where to find it : a few pragmatic considerations

The term “ratio legis” is an important term of legal practice. Thus, reflection over the general conceptual content of “ratio legis” may be a window through which practitioners could see the relevance of philosophizing about terms and arguments applied generally in legal practice. However, the primary question with regard to “ratio legis” is not conceptual, but existential: Is there any real ratio legis that can be discovered and described? The positive answer opens the door for further investigation over the term’s real conceptual content. I will argue, however, that the answer to this question cannot be positive and every qualification of something as the “law’s reason” is a creative activity. If it is so, then every instance of such a labelling (in which one says “The ratio legis of this legislative act is X”) is in need of further justification. The example of “ratio legis” shows that legal theorizing is profoundly a normative study of how we should, rather than of how we do, use legal terms (concepts)