Abstract In October 2022, the Swedish government announced a series of reforms in the field of migration policy, including a proposed legal obligation requiring all employees in public institutions, including healthcare professionals, to report people living as undocumented migrants in the country to the authorities. This article examines the intense public debate that followed, focusing on the interventions of physicians, their collectives, and medical organizations. In their responses, physicians protested by invoking their primary duty to provide care, the heightened vulnerability of undocumented patients, and the erosion of trust that such legislation would entail. In doing so, they rejected the intrusion of bureaucratic law, and what the social movement termed Angiverilagen (the ‘Snitch Law’), into clinical spaces, and instead oriented themselves towards the perceived moral compass of their profession. Through their collective resistance to the proposed legislation, we argue, physicians came to articulate an alternative normative order grounded in professional ethics: a legal communitas.
Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of street-level bureaucracy and the evolving role of prosecutors under institutional pressure, this article offers an empirical contribution to the literature on 'crimmigration'. It interrogates how prosecutors interpret their role within human-smuggling cases and how these interpretations affect the criminalization or protection of migrants. The findings suggest that excessive criminalization may stem not only from broad legal definitions but also from the ways in which prosecutors understand and enact their role in practice. The article further contends that promoting a more magisterial prosecutorial role - characterized by legal autonomy, normative deliberation, and a rule-of-law-based weighing of interests - can foster a more balanced and rights-compliant approach to human smuggling. Such an orientation, it suggests, better aligns prosecutorial practices with international and European legal standards, and may help to counter the overreach of criminal law in migration governance.
Social security claimants in the United Kingdom are drawn into a climate of accountability. The blend of law and administration means they can be required to explain actions and expose choices to judgement. Claimants can not only be held accountable for ensuring their possession-and labour-based resources are factored into claim decisions but also for ensuring they represent these resources accurately and use them appropriately. In short, they can be accountable for what they have and do. The paper is important for laying bare a framework and offering new perspectives on accountability and regulation. It shows that those with authority are endeavouring to find ways of holding the less powerful to account and suggests regulatory accountability contributes to a displacement of traditional accountability.
Recent years have seen mounting concern about the use of rap music as evidence in criminal proceedings, alongside an ever-increasing number of cases involving 'rap evidence'. Yet, while rap music is widely recognized to be highly prejudicial as evidence in court, little is known about how 'prejudicial effect' is, or should be, conceptualized and addressed in these cases. This article unpacks the meaning of prejudicial effect in criminal trials, offering a broad interpretation that encapsulates epistemic (accuracy) and non-epistemic (fairness) concerns, interrogates how the social and cultural context of rap music can make it 'unduly prejudicial' as evidence, and explores how the appellate courts approach the prejudicial effect of rap evidence. The article proposes more informative directions to jurors and advocates for legislation to restrict the admissibility of rap evidence, emphasizing the importance of assessing evidence in its proper social and cultural context.
This article investigates how Danish academics participate in, interpret, and reproduce debates on the legal and normative regulation of Muslims in Denmark since the early 2000s. Through a thematic analysis of journal articles and public dissemination outputs authored by Danish researchers, it explores the social production of legal knowledge and scholars' positioning in relation to mainstream Islamophobic discourse. The study finds that positionality statements are largely absent or superficial, while identity-prejudicial stereotypes, pre-emptive silencing, and epistemic objectification are widespread. Academic accounts frequently omit Islamophobia as an analytical concept, which marginalizes the lived experiences of Muslims and obscures the religious and racial dynamics of law. Consequently, the findings suggest that Danish academic discourse systemically distorts the collective understanding of laws and regulations affecting Muslims by perpetuating testimonial and hermeneutical injustices.
Our research combined statistical data, interviews, and geographic information system (GIS) tools to map social welfare legal aid 'deserts' in England and Wales. This novel mixed methodology enabled us to explore the spatiality of unmet legal aid need. We show that provision may be spatially uneven even where provider offices do exist, indicating that some legal desert areas have gone unidentified (absolute shortage), that contracted provider offices may not in fact be undertaking any legal aid work even when surrounded by areas of likely legal aid need (obscured shortage), and that certain types of provision may be unavailable even where other types are available, while few areas have provision for multiple legal problems (partial shortage). These findings call into question the commonly used dichotomy of met and unmet legal aid need. We argue that our findings demonstrate that a market-based scheme alone cannot meet the need for legal aid provision.
This article explores the legal consciousness of bereaved people in contact with the coronial system in England and Wales, drawing on an interview-based empirical study. Informed by socio-legal scholarship on relational dimensions of legal consciousness and citizens' mobilization of the law, the article analyses the relationships within and through which bereaved people mobilize the law of the inquest in pursuit of change. Three key relational approaches to mobilization are identified: the bereaved act for others, including the deceased, wider family, and other bereaved people; they act collaboratively with others, including family, friends, and professionals; and they act upon others in challenging professional and institutional practices and wider structures deemed to be implicated in the death. This study represents the first application, as far as we are aware, of the concept of legal consciousness to the coronial jurisdiction. It thereby contributes to understanding of the dynamic and interactive co-creation of legal consciousness in high-stakes legal encounters.
Conventional top-down approaches to legal reform tend to overlook the contributions of social movements in legal change, often resulting in a gender-blind analysis. In response, I advance 'becoming legal' as an analytical framework to rethink legal change in terms of a bottom-up process encompassing informal proceedings as well as formal status changes. Enabling a gender analysis of legal change, becoming legal gives significance to often overlooked sites, agents, and practices. Rather than focusing on the widely studied experiences of Britain or the United States, I ground the argument in the first comprehensive analysis of feminist mobilization around abortion law reform in 1970s Italy. During this period, the Italian Parliament approved Law 194/1978, which still regulates abortion access in the country. Beyond traditional legal methods, I draw on original archival materials that span feminist records and parliamentary debates, and new oral history interviews with campaigners.
This article examines 218 Covid-19 vaccine-injured people's experiences of the process of seeking redress from the UK Government's Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme (VDPS). Moreover, it engages with the wider topic of how we can understand the government(s)' role in dealing with an 'emergency' (the Covid-19 pandemic) and the consequent (global) health crisis. Vaccine-injured individuals and communities perceive suffering health problems after Covid-19 vaccination as a 'tragedy', which requires an adequate response. However, the VDPS often does not meet their expectations, which fuels the vaccine-injured community's narratives around an emerging 'scandal' over inadequate redress provision for those who suffered adverse effects following Covid-19 vaccines. These perceptions and meaning-making are in stark contrast to the fact that the wider population is unaffected by these issues and are generally not aware of the harms suffered or of the VDPS.
Public inquiries operate as privileged instruments of sense-making, defined by a series of epistemological and methodological commitments. The Grenfell Tower Inquiry was established to uncover the truth of the fire in which seventy-two people died. This article interrogates the truth-seeking and truth-producing practices of the Inquiry. These shape the contours of the account of the fire that it has produced, predisposing it to particular forms of explanation whilst excluding others. We describe this as a process of prefiguration in which the scope and form of the Inquiry circumscribes and foreshadows its findings. This invites us to see the Inquiry as productive of the social reality it seeks to describe, raising important questions about how the Inquiry operated and its role in shaping public understanding of truth, accountability and justice in the aftermath of the fire.
The Grenfell Tower Public Inquiry investigated the causes of a West London residential fire that killed 72 people. Its Final Report makes some headline-grabbing criticisms about how post-2010 deregulation contributed to regulatory failures preceding the fire. Although the Final Report's criticisms are direct, they are also understated and limit the longer term role of the neoliberal project. Using the Public Inquiry's own data, this article supports the bereaved and survivors' view that the government operationalised explicit acts of omission to sustain an inadequate testing regime of cladding materials for decades before 2010. Adopting a critical criminological lens, the motivations for doing so are not obscure, but were embedded within neoliberal structures that require interrogation if the Grenfell Tower fire is to be understood and addressed.
The political rhetoric surrounding the Horn of Africa is perpetually framed through narratives of crisis, tragedy and emergency. These labels, rather than simply being used to describe instability, function as tools of governance to normalise dysfunction and entrench cycles of dependency. Drawing on postcolonial frameworks, the discourse interrogates how such crisis narratives obscure and ignore structural issues. Further, this sustains and promotes external authority, often rooted in colonial narratives of the region. The exploration of case studies, Somalia and South Sudan, highlighting how international interventions, often framed as peacebuilding or humanitarian efforts, reinforce the very 'crisis' it aims to address. The solution to decolonise this paradigm created by western interventionist economies lies in alternatives grounded in African epistemologies of governance that centre local sovereignty. In doing so, reimagining governance beyond 'emergency', towards sustainable political autonomy, rooted in localised political power, emerges as the primary, if not only, viable solution.
This paper considers how constructions of a 'housing crisis' have impacted on judicial consideration of the rights of applicants for social housing and homelessness assistance. Drawing on Bacchi's framework for appreciating problematisations (What's the problem represented to be?) and understandings of housing crisis, we examine how crisis is translated into three elements of the passage of homelessness law: decision letters, witness statements and judgements. This can lead to narrowing of interpretations of the rights of homeless people. Even when that is not the outcome, crisis is accepted as a 'fact' and embedded as the context for decision-making.
The fluoridation of public water supplies to improve dental health is often cited as an example of an 'intractable controversy' in public health, reflecting deeply held principles about rights and the public sphere. This article examines legal mobilization to prevent fluoridation in Britain, from the first pilot studies in the mid-1950s through to McColl v. Strathclyde in 1983 and the subsequent Water (Fluoridation) Act 1985. I argue that efforts to evade the objections of anti-fluoridationists helped to create an ambiguous legal position from the outset, generating an opportunity for campaigners to use the law to stop fluoridation schemes. I show that, despite there being no decisive legal judgments in their favour, the legal campaigns of anti-fluoridationists were remarkably successful in terms of their indirect effects. Finally, building on recent work that highlights legal mobilization by conservative causes, this historical case study offers insight into the rights claims of a politically diverse populist movement.
This article examines the transformation in the dominant understanding of freedom of association in Germany and the United Kingdom (UK) within the context of industrial relations liberalization. It argues that both countries have experienced a shift from collectivist to individualist interpretations of freedom of association, driven by a 'liberal script' that emphasizes individual autonomy and subjective rights. The study employs a comparative historical analysis to demonstrate how this reinterpretation manifests differently in each country's distinct institutional context. In the UK, the shift occurred through direct legislative reforms, whereas in Germany, it evolved through gradual jurisprudential reinterpretation.
