The history of legal aid and community justice across the United Kingdom

Dr Emma Marshall, University of ExeterDr Stephanie Dropuljic, University of Exeter On the 15th of May 2026, we held a workshop to bring together different groups with an interest in the history of legal aid, including charities, practitioner groups and academics. The idea originated from conversations we had in our office about how histories of access to justice draw attention to the significance of contemporary legal aid schemes: Emma researches legal aid policy and its effects on communities in England (see…

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Latest Issue: Social & Legal Studies (2026) 35(4)

Articles Laura Victoria Rakotomalala, Caring or Complaining? Emotional Management and Performative Legal Consciousness Among Undocumented Domestic Workers in Belgium Pedro Mouallem, Managing Crises, Crafting a Market: Legal Form and Political Dynamic in Brazil's Banking Market Reconstruction (1994–2002) Sarah Lajeunesse, Cultural Rights in Motion: Legal Invisibility, Forced Migration, and the Limits of Universality Yijia Liu, The Best Interests of the State: How Racialised Fear Steered the Hague Child Abduction Convention Away From Children's Interests…

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On Housing, Power, and the Intellectual Joys of Publishing

Serde AtalayFaculty of Law, Lund University ‘Housing and Social Control: Reassessing the Protection Asymmetries of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights’, published in Social & Legal Studies about a year ago, is my first international peer-reviewed research article. As such, it holds not only a special place in my academic portfolio, but also in my intellectual growth as a researcher.

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Latest Issue: Social & Legal Studies (2026) 35(3)

Articles Maybritt Jill Alpes, Truth-Claim Capital at Borders: The Role of Trust in the State at a Regional Human Rights Court Qian Liu, Challenges Faced by Lawyers Representing Chinese Immigrants in Canada: Understanding Lawyer-Client Relationships Through Legal Consciousness Asma Atique, Ethel Tungohan, Megan Gaucher and Harshita Yalamarty, ‘Flying Grannies’ and Human-Capital Citizenship: Care in Humanitarian and Compassionate Cases…

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The Importance of Community-Partnered Research to Improve Legal Responses to Gender-Based Violence

Jane PalmerDepartment of Justice, Law and CriminologySchool of Public Affairs, American University When I was in my doctoral program in the early 2010s, I read a 2005 law review article called ‘The Second Wave: An Agenda for the Next Thirty Years of Rape Law Reform’ by Ilene Seidman and Susan Vickers. The article stuck with me. The concepts within it felt radical – albeit necessary – to me as a long-time anti-gender-based violence activist, a survivor of sexual assault, a former social worker who worked with victims and perpetrators, and a Ph.D.

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Persecuting Queerness: Can gender-based persecution encompass non-heterosexual and non-conforming gender identities at the Rome Statute?

This post will analyse the facts of the case and whether Gender-Based Persecution, especially through the concept of gender under the Rome Statute, can encompass non-heterosexual and non-conforming…

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Colonial Control through Housing

Jessie Hohmann, Faculty of Law, University of Technology SydneyThalia Anthony, Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney The colonisation of Australia has been characterised by policies and laws that enforce the social control of First Nations people, not only as a historical fact, but as an ongoing practice. Carceral, welfare, social security and education policies continue to structure First Nations lives, despite sustained resistance and resilience.

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Half Measures and Missed Opportunities: Reflections on law reform and drug policy in Canada and implications for socio-legal research

Liam MichaudYork University and University of Windsor Our 2024 article, “The Law is too Grey”: Liminal Legality and Moral Injury in Encounters with Drug Law Enforcement, published in Social & Legal Studies 34(1), examines the experiences among people who use drugs following the passage of Canada’s Good Samaritan Drug Overdose Act. The article was based on the findings of a community-based research project with people who use drugs in Ontario, led by the…

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The Courtroom as Four Landscapes: Reflections on Terrorism Trials Through Ethnographic Research

Tasniem Anwar, Vrije Universiteit AmsterdamMachteld Aardse, Visual Artist In the summer of 2025, I visited a conference in beautiful Bologna and gave a presentation based on my article “the courtroom as four landscapes”. During the Q&A, a colleague from the audience commented that it seemed that I was rather sympathetic to the terrorists in my research, and asked whether I would be equally critical had it been right-wing extremists in my study.

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Latest Issue: Social & Legal Studies (2026) 35(2)

Articles Priscilla Akua Vitoh, Global Frameworks, Local Realities: The Myth of Land Formalisation in Women's Access to Bank Finance Ignacio Riquelme Espinosa and Isidora Urrutia Steinert, From the Street to the Courtroom: The Material Bridge Between Law and Everyday Life Sophie Xiaoyi Liu, Relational Legal Consciousness in the Context of Hate Crime Laws Ayah Omran-Randall, Do Judges Obstruct the Legislative Reform to Combat Honor Violence?

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Social & Legal Studies, Editors’ Choice Award 2026

The Social & Legal Studies Board announces the winner of its annual Editors' Choice Award...

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Emilios Christodoulidis (3rd September 1963 – 3rd February 2026)

We mourn the passing of our dear friend and colleague, Emilios Christodoulidis, distinguished legal theorist who, for many years, was an active editorial board member for Social & Legal Studies. I first met Emilios over thirty years ago, when we were both graduate students at the EUI in Florence. Emilios was there as a visiting PhD student from Edinburgh to work, in particular, with Gunther Teubner on law and systems theory, something that was to be central to his work for the rest of his life.

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Diluting legal social control over asylum-seekers at Spain’s borders

“The problem is that I am blocked here. I can’t go further or back. And it hurts”. These were the words of Ben, an asylum-seeker who, like many others, managed to cross the barbed wire fences separating Morocco from Melilla, only to discover that the police prevented him from moving to the Iberian Peninsula. As the reader may know, Ceuta and Melilla are two Spanish exclaves in Northern Africa that have become a symbol of the “fortification” of Europe.

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Kudoboard for Emilios Alexandros Christodoulidis | Kudoboard

Collaborate to create a unique, online memorial. Add memories, photos, or videos; invite others to contribute; visit online anytime and print it out as a book of remembrance.

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Now Available: Social & Legal Studies 35(1), February 2026

The latest issue of Social & Legal Studies is now available!

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Nature and Transitional Justice: On Journeys, Castles and Connections

During this time, I also increasingly started to question why the field of transitional justice – and indeed my own scholarship on transitional justice – has paid so little attention to more-than-human worlds. As Killean and Newton highlight, ‘transitional justice mechanisms have rarely engaged with the harms inflicted on Nature’. Relatedly, I wanted to find out whether my own desire to feel a greater sense of connectedness to more-than-human worlds, and to extend care to them, could be fulfilled, at least in part, through my work on transitional justice.

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Decriminalised into Invisibility: Section 377, the BNS, and the Penal Hierarchy of India’s Transgender Rights Act 2019

From a queer-theoretic perspective, these legal moves exemplify how law reorganises the field of grievability; certain harms are made legible as grievous, others as minor, and others not at all.

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Empirical Research with People Experiencing Homelessness in Australia: Challenges Faced and Lessons Learned

By the end of the project, we had undertaken 164 interviews with people experiencing homelessness across the 10 locations. We obtained a rich dataset that detailed their interactions with police, courts, corrective services and the social service system. Some of the stories were heartbreaking, and some were inspirational and uplifting. We could not have achieved this without the hard work and dedication of the staff of our partner organisations. It also would have been more difficult to obtain ethical clearance for the research without them. Their involvement meant that participants were respectfully interviewed by highly skilled professionals. Participants had their legal needs met, and appropriate referrals were made to address any social and emotional concerns that arose during the interviews.

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Why legal culture matters for climate mobilities – and what our Maputo research reveals

Climate change is increasingly shaping where and how people live. Rising sea levels, flooding and coastal erosion are already forcing difficult decisions about whether to stay put, move temporarily, or relocate altogether. These movements are often described as climate mobilities. Much of the existing research explains them in environmental, economic or social terms. In our recent article in Social & Legal Studies, we argue that something else also matters in important ways: legal culture.

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Comparing legal responses to criminal exploitation: insights from Scotland and England & Wales

The inspiration for this event came from a chance meeting with Alicia in London last year at the launch of the Defendants as Victims Report by Dr Kate Leader and Dr Ailbhe O’Loughlin. We quickly found ourselves deep in conversation about how our respective jurisdictions handle legal matters related to modern slavery and human trafficking (MSHT).

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New Issue of Social & Legal Studies – vol. 34(6) December 2025

Social & Legal Studies (2025) 34(6) is out! Table of Contents Emma Marshall, ‘Reconsidering the Asylum Lottery: Refugee Determination and the Structure of Luck’ (Open Access) Bénédicte Stoufflet, ‘Between ‘I’ and ‘They’: Distributing Authorship for Evidence-Making: How Asylum Lawyers Construct Credible Accounts Before the French Court of Asylum Law’ Helena Tužinská ‘The Communicative Space: Painting the Evidence and Plausibility in Asylum Court Hearings…

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Dancing Law | Law Dancing: A conversation on ballet and law with Dr Maria Federica Moscati and Prof Marett Leiboff

The lawyer is not meant to have a body. We cloak ourselves in robes, in particular forms of uniform dress and all the rest of it, but we have a very happy time telling bodies what to do or not to do - abject bodies that don't conform, people whose bodies do things that they're not “meant to” – and happily regulating those people and their bodies, but we do it through what we're meant to do as lawyers, which is to practice techniques which divorce us and the things that make us.

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Persecuting Queerness: Can gender-based persecution encompass non-heterosexual and non-conforming gender identities at the Rome Statute?

This post will analyse the facts of the case and whether Gender-Based Persecution, especially through the concept of gender under the Rome Statute, can encompass non-heterosexual and non-conforming gender identities. Additionally, this post, with the aid of queer theory, will address that, at the trial and sentencing phases, the Trial Chamber will have to address LGBTQIA+ victims specifically. Finally, the post will argue that the “one size fits all” clause must not invisibilise real and concrete queer victims of gender-based persecution.

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“Climate (Im)Mobility: Legal and Policy Pathways to Displacement and Entrapment in the Global Climate Emergency” Reflections from the Southampton Workshop

On 9 June 2025, a hybrid workshop “Climate (Im)Mobility: Legal and Policy Pathways to Displacement and Entrapment in the Global Climate Emergency” was held at the University of Southampton with the funding support of the Social and Legal Studies journal. Thanks to their generous support, the organisers Andrea Maria Pelliconi, Sara Arapiles and Pratik Purswani convened the event, which brought together ten scholars to exchange ideas at the intersection of law, climate justice, sovereignty, and displacement…

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Family Reunification and Domestic Marriage Law: Implications of Legal Pluralism Beyond Borders

he unexpected ramification of these unregistered marriages is that they may also be a barrier for those seeking reunification with spouses abroad, notably those who have sought asylum abroad.

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Institutional racism? We need to talk about the UK government’s role in institutionalising racism.

Whatever the anti-racist intentions of well-meaning parliamentarians and campaigners, however, families have experienced FGM safeguarding policies as racism-in-action.

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Social & Legal Studies Editors’ Choice Award 2024

The joint winners of the 2024 Social & Legal Studies Editors' Choice Awards are .... Santer, K. O. (2024). Governing Through Scalar Elasticity: An Analysis of the Accountability Gap in Migration Control in the Central Mediterranean. Social & Legal Studies, 33(1), 3-20. and King, T. J., Shaw, J. D., & Kennedy, L. (2024). Documenting the Document: The Forensic Hospital Report and Its Knowledge Moves.

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Legislation as Disinformation

We studied the impact of such discriminatory legislation on vulnerable sections of society, in this case, inter-faith couples. We argue that the nature of these legislative developments and their role within the ideological framework of Hindu nationalism necessitates an urgent re-evaluation of the presumptions that underlie the characterization of India as a “democracy” in the contemporary period.

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Criminalising the ‘Other’

In this blog post, I want to further discuss the routineness, almost mundanity, of the mechanisms of criminalisation which can directly bear upon language minoritised peoples who come to be targets of criminal ‘justice’ intervention. I will write here about an Australian case of wrongful conviction in which language difference played a significant role.

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Anchoring justice at sea? Foreign aid to manage a fishy business

The sea opens opportunities to study socio-legal implications of rights and forms of justice. It is borderless and global, while most people rely on its resources. Despite concerns about climate change and marine extinction, economic interests often impede preservation and equitable resource distribution. The sea’s importance draws donors and parties like the United Nations (UN) to establish global rules and regulations for its use and exploitation.  

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