Dozens of local authorities across England are piloting automated note-taking tools, often called 'digital scribes', in social care assessments and other interactions. These artificialintelligence-enabled technologies automatically record, transcribe and summarise assessment meetings into standardised templates, promising a reduction in administrative burden and more time to focus on interpersonal interactions. While research has begun to explore staff attitudes towards these tools, public perspectives remain heavily underexplored. This article details findings from a survey experiment with 1,127 carers in England, examining attitudes towards these automated note-taking technologies. The article compares perceptions of automated versus manual note-taking and of fully automated systems versus those with human review ('human in the loop') and investigates demographic differences in attitudes. We draw on these data to set out a fourfold typology of attitudes: 'enthusiasts', 'cautious adopters', 'pragmatists' and the 'resistant'.

Dozens of Local Authorities across England are piloting automated note-taking tools – often called ‘digital scribes’ – in social care assessments and other interactions. These AI-enabled technologies automatically record, transcribe, and summarise assessment meetings into standardised templates, promising a reduction in administrative burden and more time to focus on interpersonal interactions. While research has begun to explore staff attitudes toward these tools, public perspectives remain heavily underexplored. This paper details findings from a survey experiment with 1,127 carers in England, examining attitudes toward these automated note-taking technologies. The study compares perceptions between: automated versus manual note-taking; fully automated systems versus those with human review (‘human in the loop’); and investigates demographic differences in attitudes. We draw on this data to set out a four-fold typology of attitudes: ‘enthusiasts’, ‘cautious adopters’, ‘pragmatists’ and the ‘resistant’.

Informal land markets are treated in terms of the processes and practices of transaction, access and ownership that exist outside of or in opposition to the formal mechanisms entailed by state law and regulation. Notwithstanding wider debates in urban studies on the problematic dichotomy of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’, we suggest the place of law and legality in underwriting such institutions and arrangements around land has been undertheorized. This article complicates how the basic categories of state law and regulation on the one hand and non-state norms, rules, customs and practices on the other are used through an examination of an ostensibly informal land market in Maputo, Mozambique. We introduce and apply the socio-legal concepts of scale, jurisdiction and temporality for offering a more complex picture of (in)formality: that while this land market is prohibited at one scale of state law it is simultaneously enabled at another. We find that the state remains surreptitiously involved in this prohibited market by way of local neighbourhood authorities and their informal practices that, officially, have no role in urban land sales, management and administration. Through this move, in turn, we reveal significant accountability implications and questions around the delivery of equitable governance of urban land and communities. As a contribution to the study of informality in urban land governance, we suggest that actors with jurisdiction in this local scale of state law should become seen as subject to the same normative demands for legal accountability as the official institutions of urban land management and administration, and within better systems for public accountability of all actors in the urban land sector.

The front-line of the welfare state is increasingly not a letter, phone call or face-to-face visit, but an online user-interface. This 'interface first' bureaucracy is a fundamental reshaping of social security administration, but the design and operation of these interfaces is poorly understood. Drawing on interview data from senior civil servants, welfare benefits advisors and claimants on the UK's flagship Universal Credit working-age benefit, this paper is a detailed analysis of the role played by interfaces in the modern welfare state. Providing examples from across the Universal Credit system, it sets out a five-fold typology of user-interface design elements in the social security context: (i) structuring data input, (ii) interaction architecture, (iii) operative controls, (iv) prompting and priming, and (v) integrations. The paper concludes by considering the implications of an 'interface first' welfare bureaucracy for future research.

This article examines the process of seeking social care needs assessments under the Care Act 2014 in England through the lens of procedural fairness theory. Drawing on interviews with 21 individuals with experiences of needs assessments, we identify the ‘process qualities’—the factors rooted in the literature on procedural fairness—that matter most to people navigating this critical front-line component of the social care system. Our analysis reveals two themes: the importance of ‘dignified treatment’ and system ‘proactivity’, each underpinned by a set of process qualities. These qualities for the former—personalization, empathy, and voice—are well explored in the literature on person-centred care. However, the latter—responsibility taking, dependability, transparency, assistance, and availability—are neglected in current research on experiences of the Care Act 2014. Drawing on these process qualities, we set out the potential for future research grounded in procedural fairness theory in social care.

This article shows, through a study of hosts' experiences of the UK's Homes for Ukraine scheme, the ways in which sponsoring refugees can impose burdens on sponsors by virtue of the state's administrative processes. Specifically, it shows how sponsors incur learning, compliance, and psychological costs from administrative burdens and that these burdens are encountered both directly, through their own engagements with public bodies, and vicariously, through the experiences of their guests. The article thus makes a significant contribution to the understanding of the ground-level experience of refugee sponsorship while also expanding the burgeoning theory of administrative burden by demonstrating the relevance of burdens experienced vicariously.

This article responds to the general neglect of legal culture in the study of climate mobilities. It presents a case study of climate mobilities in an unplanned settlement in Maputo, Mozambique, exploring how legal culture influenced residents' decision-making processes as they navigated climate-related risks in their daily lives. We demonstrate that legal culture can facilitate climate mobilities. However, we argue that the role of legal culture in enabling climate mobilities is potentially very complex. Our case study uncovered a nuanced 'ecosystem' of land laws in Mozambique, comprising two official systems - formal and informal. Despite their contradictory substantive content regarding land rights, these systems functioned symbiotically, allowing residents of unplanned settlements to mitigate the effects of climate risks. This apparent paradox is explained through the analytical lenses of jurisdiction, scale and temporality. We also argue that this 'ecosystem' of land laws can only fully be understood within the broader context of Mozambique's political economy, which attracts foreign investment and promotes urban development, often at the expense of those living in unplanned settlements. Future research into the significance of legal culture for climate mobilities must not only be attuned to the plurality of legal orders in play but also consider the scales and temporalities through which they operate. Furthermore, they must also interrogate the interplay between law and broader political, economic and social contexts.

Despite its low profile, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency Act 2022 is the clearest legislative expression to date of what is emerging as a powerful critique of administrative law: that it inhibits good government rather than facilitating it. This critique must be taken seriously as a fundamental challenge to contemporary administrative law and, in particular, as an empirical claim as to the perceptions and effects of this body of law. Doing so requires administrative law scholars to embrace an empirical research agenda that investigates the impacts of law on government but also the perceived legitimacy of administrative law both inside and outside of government.

A focus on rights consciousness has become a mainstay of the socio-legal study of law in everyday life. Such research, much of it critical in orientation, generally uses people's sense of grievance as its starting point. The consequent risk is that we elide rights consciousness with a sense of injustice. This article argues that there is merit for critical studies of legal consciousness in keeping these two things separate, and that this represents a dimension of the critical approach to rights consciousness that is largely missing from the field. We present a study of rights consciousness in relation to the imposition of lockdown in the United Kingdom during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. We show that, despite regarding lockdown as a violation of basic rights, most people did not feel a sense of grievance. Furthermore, rights consciousness was influenced by a range of factors distinct from political orientation, most of which were within the sphere of governmental influence. In this way, governmental power was constitutive of the public's rights consciousness. Further exploration and assessment of when, where, and how this might occur should be part of the critical project of legal consciousness research.

While climate change adaptation research has increasingly focused on aspects of culture, a systematic treatment of the role of legal culture in how communities respond to climate risk has yet to be produced. This is despite the fact that law and legal authority are implicated in most, if not all, of the ways in which actors seek to reduce the risks posed to communities by climate change. Using a scoping review methodology, this article examines the intersection of climate change adaptation and legal culture in existing research. Overall, we find that the significance of legal culture for adaptation actions has been under‐explored. Yet, it is also clear that a focus on legal culture holds significant promise for our understanding of climate change adaptation. We set out a research agenda for the field, highlighting the ways in which a focus on legal culture may enrich existing key themes within climate change adaptation research.

a preoccupation with the intricacies of governance leads to the legal elements being margin-alised or washed out from the analysis … How does this approach, centred on the effectiveness by which public policy is implemented, differ from what students of public administration, public policy or public management do? What is the distinctively legal angle?

This paper identifies a form of non-compliance with COVID-19 lockdown restrictions in the UK: “creative non-compliance”. Here, individuals justify breaking restrictions as meeting the “spirit of the law” if not the “letter of the law”. Drawing on interview and focus group data collected between April and August 2020 in the UK, we outline this concept of “creative non-compliance”, detailing how: (i) our participants undertook a purposive construction of rules, (ii) balanced their behaviour against these aims, and (iii) how Government messaging informed these rationalizations. We conclude by outlining the implications of our “creative non-compliance” theory both for studies of compliance and rationalizations for deviant behaviour under the COVID-19 restrictions.

In March 2020, the government introduced a set of restrictions to ‘lockdown’ the United Kingdom in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the central purpose of which was to protect public health by both containing the rate of infection and protecting the NHS’ capacity to treat a potential influx of patients. These rules represented a profound interference with everyday life, but it was clear that this interference was experienced differently throughout the population. In this chapter, the authors draw upon an extensive dataset – constituted of national surveys, focus groups, and interviews – gathered during the first wave of the virus in the UK to provide an analysis of how this was experienced by women. The authors test the hypothesis that it may be that women are more likely to find certain rules that interfere with prior caring responsibilities more challenging than others, and argue that research examining compliance to individual rules might better highlight gender differences in compliance than overall compliance.

No one in the UK can receive state support for social care without first navigating a “needs assessment”. Local Authorities have wide-ranging discretion in this process, leading to substantial variation in the design and conduct of needs assessments across the country. Emerging evidence suggests that these differences matter – how a needs assessment is delivered impacts on a social care user’s satisfaction and engagement, as well as the accuracy of the assessment’s conclusions. Current work points to a smorgasbord of important factors: from timeliness and perceptions of practitioner competence, to face-to-face contact and being able to express oneself. Evaluating the role of these process issues has been a central concern of administrative justice research for decades, but the insights of this literature are yet to be adopted to evaluate needs assessment sin England under the Care Act 2014. Drawing on a scoping review of existing evidence, we argue that administrative justice theory provides a conceptual framework for evaluating Local Authority approaches to the design and administration of needs assessments (and by extension, other elements of social care decision-making processes). In doing so, we set out core themes within the scoping review dataset.

Thought on procedural fairness in administrative justice has traditionally focused on the relationship between public decision-makers and the person or group formally subject to the decision-making process. Yet, people who are not the direct subject of such processes but are, in various ways, able to access the experiences of others can also have salient and consequential experiences of procedural fairness. This article demonstrates empirically this phenomenon, which we label 'vicarious administrative fairness', and observes that it is vital to developing a fuller understanding of the sociology of administrative justice. In turn, this richer sociological understanding raises new questions about if and how institutions, including the law itself, ought to respond to it - not least as it calls into question the default, individualistic unit of analysis underpinning conventional thinking.

This chapter explores the justice of administrative decision-making through the lens of feminist jurisprudence. First, it suggests an alternative methodological approach to the development of theoretical models of good decision-making, one that is grounded in the voices and experiences of those who are the subjects of decision-making processes. Second, it argues that, by methodologically centring the voices of those seeking welfare assistance, new light is shed on the content of existing constructs of good decision processes, complicating the notion of participation as a decision-making value. The chapter draws on the feminist scholarship on asylum law, policy and practice that considers the experiences of asylum-seeking women.