Law & Society Review

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LSR Writing Workshop in South Africa

Writing Workshop in Africa
Law & Society Review is co-sponsoring the inaugural Sociolegal Studies Early Career Workshop, held at the University of Cape Town (South Africa), 17-19 August 2017. Financial support is provided by the University of Cape Town and a 2017 Law and Society Association Small Grant award.
Why hold a writing workshop in sociolegal studies in Africa? Responding to a call among members of the Law and Society Association for more research in law and society by scholars living and working in the global South, this workshop is designed for advanced doctoral students and early career faculty in Africa.The workshop is purposefully small, to promote focused discussion, mentoring, and peer networking. The goal is to give a promising group of manuscripts the close attention they deserve from senior scholars and mentors, to help ready those papers for submission and publication.
Six participants and their papers have now been selected for inclusion into the inau…

LSR in Mexico City

The recent LSA meetings in Mexico City allowed the three co-editors and the book review editor, as well as the representative from the publisher, Wiley, to talk about the Law and Society Review (LSR). We covered journal business with Mexican spicy hot chocolate in hand. Look for more posts on this Blog summarizing recent articles, on writing manuscripts, and on opportunities to write book reviews.
Jeannine and Margot also met with a group of LSR Board Members over breakfast. We are grateful for the energy, expertise, and enthusiasm these scholars bring to our journal team. We invited posts to the blog from board members. (We invite them from everyone in the law and society community.) Board members suggested ideas for some virtual special issues. These issues allow us to gather already published articles. When we put those together, Wiley makes the articles freely available for a time. Susan represented the Co-editors on both the LSA Board of Trustees and the Publication Com…

Asking Who in Gang Violence Prevention

Tony Cheng
JD Candidate at New York University, School of Law
PhD Candidate at Yale University, Sociology Department

Who do violence preventers target to achieve violence prevention? Targeting is a process of defining what qualifies as relevant violence and selecting concretely on whom to focus efforts. Law enforcement are not the only ones making targeting decisions—non-profits are increasingly deploying credible street outreach workers (SOWs) who can build relationships with targeted gang members and channel prosocial influences. SOW-oriented programs have existed since the 1930s, but have gained new life with Cure Violence’s public health approach, which conceptualizes SOWs as interveners positioned to block the transmission of violence among the highest risk targets. Yet we know remarkably little about how SOWs build relationships and which strategies actually work. Program evaluations of Cure Violence replications have yielded mixed results, sometimes even revealing increased v…

Sanctuary

By Susan Bibler Coutin University of California, Irvine As campuses, restaurants, churches, and cities nationwide have adopted sanctuary policies to protect students, employees, customers, and residents from President Trump’s ramped up efforts to deport members of immigrant communities, it is worthwhile to consider how the lessons of the 1980s sanctuary movement might apply to today’s advocacy work.Between 1986 and 1988, I conducted participant observation within sanctuary communities in Tucson, Arizona and the San Francisco East Bay in California. At that time, sanctuary focused on obtaining refuge for asylum seekers who were fleeing U.S-funded wars in Central America.I attended sanctuary events, volunteered with the movement, and interviewed over 100 participants, leading to publication of my 1993 book, The Culture of Protest:Religious Activism and the U.S. Sanctuary Movement. Congregations that declared themselves sanctuaries during the 1980s were motivated by a sense of emergency. …

Questioning Disruption in the Counter-Terrorism Fight

By Martin Innes et al
In a brief article written for The Times Newspaper following the recent marauding terrorist attack near London Bridge, Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley who is the UK police service national lead for counter-terrorism, revealed that Khuram Butt, the alleged ring-leader of the attackers, had previously been targeted by several disruptions. In so doing, Rowley validated one of the central claims of our article published in the June edition of Law and Society Review, where we highlighted the danger of police and intelligence services becoming overly-reliant upon disrupting violent extremists.

Of course, our analysis had not predicted the specific details of the incident. But one of its central claims was that delivery of the Prevent strategy, part of the UK government’s wider counter-terrorism policy, was becoming heavily dependent upon a logic of disruption. Disruption is a form of prevention whereby interventions are designed to inhibit the possibilities of actio…

On Communicating Scholarship

By Susan M. Sterett

Authors want guides when revising. Jeannine, Margot and I almost always recommend that authors think again about how they make readers care. What does your work tell us about sociolegal processes? If readers are not interested in your particular topic or research site, why would they care about what you’ve written? Authors can always answer that, but they need to. Your data, for whatever kind of data you use, need a story.
You can tell that story in a different fashion in a blog post, which might reach students and draw a wider audience for your work. Everyone I’ve heard in the two meetings I went to over the last couple of days (discussed below) has urged that communicating research to a broader audience is crucial today.
At least within the United States, the question of how to make your work mean something to others has taken on greater bite. Funding cuts to agencies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundat…

Dispute Resolution Outside of Courts: What We Expect of Ombuds in the UK

Naomi Creutzfeldt, University of Westminster & Ben Bradford, University of Oxford
Our article in the 50th anniversary LSR no 4 explored how people in the UK think about ombuds services and what encourages them to accept the decisions reached during dispute resolution processes. Much empirical evidence points towards the importance of trust and legitimacy in generating acceptance of the decisions made by legal authorities. Moreover, people seem to be more attuned to the quality of the process concerned rather than the outcome it delivers. The procedural fairness of legal authorities – the extent to which they make decisions in an unbiased fashion and adhere to principles of dignity, respect and voice – has consistently been found to be a more important predictor of trust, legitimacy and decision acceptance than the outcomes they provide. This research has mainly taken place in the context of the police and courts. However, one reason for the importance of procedural fairness may be th…