Recent Publications
CHRISTOPHER DECKER
The new edition of Modern Economic Regulation connects the most important insights from regulatory theory with real-world applications of economic regulation around the world. It comprehensively surveys the latest theoretical research and summarises the evidence on the effects of regulation, identifying policies that have been more, or less, effective in practice. In addition to five new chapters, covering behavioural economics and the regulation of rail, aviation, payment systems and digital platforms, all chapters are fully updated to reflect current issues such as the impacts of digitalisation, decentralisation and decarbonisation on economic regulation. The new edition features discussion questions at the end of each chapter intended to cement the reader’s understanding of the most important themes and insights from each chapter.
FLORIAN GRISEL
This article examines how social capital affects the resolution of disputes by focusing on English Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, sometimes described as ‘Wikipedia’s Supreme Court’. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, the article contends that the Committee not only examines the merits of the claims made by the disputants but also, and more crucially, considers the position of each disputant within the community of editors in its decision-making process. In doing so, the Committee does not simply decide or arbitrate disputes but also seeks to attenuate their impact on Wikipedia’s social fabric. This data allows us to revisit sociological debates on the role of social capital, by revealing the ways in which well-connected individuals employ it strategically to obfuscate their noncompliance with norms, thus leading to what the author calls ‘dispute cancellation’.
BEÁTA HUSZKA
This article draws on an EU-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie research project which assessed the agency of national minorities through court cases and mapped legal mobilization patterns in Central and Eastern Europe. This involved investigating the situation of minority rights through the lens of litigation and legal mobilization by focusing on the Roma and Hungarian minorities in Romania and the Roma minority in Hungary. This article focuses on the Hungarian minority and is based on extensive fieldwork that the author carried out in Romania, involving civil society activists, politicians, researchers, attorneys, church lawyers and antidiscrimination specialists. It concentrates on the property restitution process for Hungarian minority churches in Romania which has been neglected in the academic literature, both with regard to ethnic minorities and property restitution. The article argues that it constitutes an important aspect of the implementation of minority rights, while also illuminating some crucial aspects of property restitution and the (dysfunctional) operation of the rule of law in Romania.
AGNIESZKA KUBAL
Between 2015 and 2023, Poland’s authoritarian drift reshaped its judiciary, with judges increasingly turning to the European Court of Human Rights – not just as interpreters but as direct applicants challenging government actions. This article explores how judges’ legal consciousness evolved through dynamic interactions with legal professionals, activists and civil society. By framing this shift within relational legal consciousness, it highlights how law and politics intertwine in times of crisis. The piece offers fresh insights into how judges navigate liminal spaces of legal uncertainty, redefining their roles amid political upheaval and using human rights law as a tool of resistance.
DOMINIK KRELL
The study of Islamic law is complicated by the multitude of languages used across the Muslim world and the complexity of both contemporary and premodern legal texts. This chapter is part of an innovative volume designed to help researchers and students bridge the language gap by providing commented translations of Islamic legal texts from a wide range of languages, thereby reflecting the diversity of Islamic law. Krell’s contribution focuses on a text by Ibn Khunayn, one of the most prominent Saudi jurists of recent decades. In this text, Ibn Khunayn describes how the Saudi legal system is rooted in the sources of Islamic law and how royal decrees issued by the Saudi king are incorporated into the religious legal framework. The text illustrates how he draws upon works from various historical periods, demonstrating that, for him and other contemporary Saudi jurists, the validity of a legal argument is independent of its historical context.
BETTINA LANGE
How should abstracting water from the natural environment be reformed in order to provide a balance between the protection of habitats while also securing sustainable access to water for future generations? This article makes a case for a sliding scale of legal protection for abstractions that seeks to match the strength of legal protection to a range of factors, including how critical the abstraction is to business use, and how environmentally beneficial the abstraction is. It also argues for ‘bubble licensing’, namely promoting exchanges of water between abstractors, not just through trading, but also through reciprocity exchanges and bartering.
SONIA MACLEOD AND FRANCESCA UBERTI
This article examines the efficacy and fairness of no-fault compensation schemes (NFCS) for adverse events following Covid-19 vaccination. Based on an international comparative study of vaccine injury no-fault compensation, the article analyses the rapid expansion of NFCS globally, focusing on three multinational schemes – COVAX, AVAT and UNICEF – created in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. After assessing the ethical rationales behind the creation of NFCS for vaccine injuries, the authors discuss how NFCS can meet accessibility requirements and ensure adherence to justice principles. The article highlights concerns regarding access, transparency and the need for improved public oversight of these schemes, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Finally, some recommendations are made for enhancing future pandemic preparedness and NFCS design.
JOE MCAULAY
This article examines the experiences of Queer male victims of male-perpetrated intimate partner violence (IPV), a population whose experiences have been largely understudied within the wider relationship violence literature. It does so through the lens of Nils Christie’s concept of the ‘ideal victim’. The author draws on evidence taken from an interview study with 40 Queer male victims of IPV conducted remotely over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. The findings demonstrate that victims often struggle to identify their experiences of relationship with larger cultural narratives of IPV which depict a highly feminised, weak and often stigmatised ideal victim. From these findings, it is argued that there is an urgent need to confront the public story of IPV and its related ideal victim to craft more inclusive public narratives of relationship abuse in which Queer male victims can find legitimacy and support for their experiences.
CAITLYN MCGEER AND NICOLE STREMLAU
This article discusses the issues which arose when conducting surveys with social media users in several African countries in order to gauge their definitional understandings of online hate and mis/disinformation, awareness of content moderation processes and flagging/reporting of issues. This raised challenges relating to how to conduct survey research in difficult-toreach places, some of which are affected by violent conflict, and within a limited budget. Social media platforms present unique opportunities for researchers to recruit participants in these contexts. These platforms show promise in reaching participants who would otherwise be unreachable, but they pose significant limitations as well. Given the goal of the research to reach social media users, the authors used Facebook to advertise the survey, drawing on the breadth of research on using the platform as a research tool and the fact that it has a large user base in the targeted countries. In this article, they explore the practicalities, challenges, and limitations of Facebook as a tool for survey research in African countries.
LINDA MULCAHY
Drawing on research funded by the National Institute for Health Research, this article looks at all the data that patients and their carers presented to the National Health Service (NHS) about their experiences of care in one year. This ranged from medical negligence claims, complaints, patient satisfaction surveys and NHS-sponsored social media outlets. Examining the different logics underpinning these systems for voicing grievances and praise, this article considers the shift in ideology from redress systems which challenge existing practice to risk management systems in which aggrieved patients are data providers. Returning to seminal law and society texts on the antecedents of disputes and reflecting on the data gathered, it argues that insufficient attention has been paid to the act of voicing as an independent act divorced from the claiming or complaining process.
FERNANDA PIRIE
In the modern state most laws enshrine practical social norms in a way that everyone can be aware of. Laws take a legalistic form, as generalising rules and abstract categories. But, turning to historical and ethnographic examples, we find legalistic rules that do not bear a neat resemblance to the details and disputes of quotidian life. This raises questions about their purposes and effects. This article examines some of the earliest laws ever made, in Mesopotamia, Israel and Rome. These consisted of ostensibly practical rules, yet they evidently enshrined grander social visions. Asking about the aspirations and purposes of the law-makers, the article examines the connections between the practical and the symbolic. An analogy with ritual performance suggests that even partial sets of laws may connect people with visions of justice and order, thereby garnering loyalty and helping to legitimise the aspirations of the law-makers.
NICOLE STREMLAU
This book explores how information and communications technologies are adapted, governed and reinterpreted in areas where the state has limited reach. It brings together an eclectic collection of cases from the favelas in Brazil to the border regions of Ethiopia and Somalia and markets in Thailand. In doing so, it teases out the broader arguments and logics about the ways in which diverse enabling environments for technology and innovation may evolve. It also considers the wide range of public authorities that may be involved in providing governance and security for such innovation, beyond the state. By looking at technologies and the rule of non-law in areas that are often seen as marginal or at the peripheries, from a profit and business perspective, this book reflects new insights back to more Western-dominated mainstream debates about law, technology and innovation.