by Roger Cotterrell, Queen Mary University of London, UK. ‘Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press....’. So proclaims, in some of its key words, the US Constitution’s First Amendment. What would a sociology of freedom of speech, a freedom so talismanic in US law, look like? The furore over [...]
By Helen Carr, Kent Law School, University of Kent Some argue that the collapse of Ronan Point which killed four people in 1968 following a gas explosion within the tower block marked the beginning of the end of the welfare state. Grenfell Tower may well have a similar place in history, the moment when the [...]
Dermot Feenan, Associate Research Fellow, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London, reflects upon images of law and justice in the Supreme Court of Mexico as the world’s leading socio-legal associations converge in Mexico City. Figure 1. Courtesy Mexican National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature As the Socio-Legal Studies Association joins with other law and [...]
By Ed Kirton-Darling* It is around 48 hours since the news of a fire at Grenfell Tower broke. My reactions in that time mirror those of friends on social media and the wider public – from horror, to grief, to support for hard pressed public services, to anger over whether this was an accident waiting [...]
by Dr Jessica Guth, Leeds Beckett University on behalf of the SLSA Executive Committee On the 25th April the Solicitors Regulation Authority announced that it was indeed launching the Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE) meaning that in order to qualify as a solicitor, candidates will need to: Have passed SQE stages 1 and 2 to demonstrate [...]
By Nuno Ferreira and Maria Moscati, University of Sussex The UK stands out in Europe for having school uniforms across the state school system. This has been a source of conflict in many instances, from cases involving cornrows as hairstyle to boys wearing skirts in Cambridgeshire and Sussex for being prohibited from wearing shorts [...]
Dermot Feenan, Associate Research Fellow, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London, and Founder and Convenor of the Law and Compassion Research Network, discusses compassion socio-legally. When I told a delegate at a recent SLSA conference that I would be presenting on compassion and law, the response was ‘what compassion in law?’ To cut a long [...]
Carly Lightowlers and Jose Pina-Sánchez, Centre for Criminal Justice Studies, University of Leeds Alcohol intoxication is a frequent factor in violent offending. Whilst the frequent coexistence of alcohol and violence does not evidence a universal or causal link, alcohol’s legal status and widespread availability mean alcohol intoxication (as opposed to drug intoxication) and related offending [...]
By Emma Jones, The Open University Law School As co-convenor of the new law and emotion stream about to be launched at the SLSA’s 2017 conference, this seems an apt moment for me to pause and reflect on where law and emotion scholarship stands today. Its origins as a field of scholarship can be traced [...]
by Jamie Atkinson, Manchester Law School, Manchester Metropolitan University Shared Parental Leave (SPL) was introduced for parents of babies born or children placed for adoption on or after 5 April 2015 (by the Shared Parental Leave Regulations 2014). SPL is a more flexible version of its predecessor and enables parents to share up to 50 weeks [...]