Lawyers and their clients can talk in complete confidence, secure that the law protects what they say from being revealed to anyone. Priests can hear confessions with reasonable certainty that no court and no government will require them to speak of what they hear. But what about people who agree to help scientific researchers?In 1994 a Simon Fraser graduate student faced the threat of being required by a court to disclose information he had obtained in his research on assisted sui...

It’s refreshing that this book does not simply look to advances in technology and artificial intelligence as the cause or the future of the Great Legal Reformation. Through in-depth case studies and vignettes, Mitch Kowalski takes us on a tour to meet some of the trailblazers breaking the legal service provider mould, allowing us to eavesdrop on his conversations with them. This is not a glimpse into the future of how he and others might see the legal world developing as the Great Legal Re...

When a child-abuse scandal is uncovered at an unlicenced daycare in small-town Saskatchewan, it polarizes the community. Frann Harris, a rookie court reporter assigned to the trial the longest in Saskatchewan history starts to wonder if the scope of the alleged crimes is dwarfed by something even more startling: a botched police investigation and inappropriate courtroom procedures.Harris’ narrative alternates between the stories of child sexual abuse and whimsical recollections of ...

In this comprehensive review of urban ethnography, Steven Lubet encountered a field that relies heavily on anonymous sources, often as reported by a single investigator whose underlying data remain unseen. Upon digging into the details, he discovered too many ethnographic assertions that were dubious, exaggerated, tendentious, or just plain wrong. Employing the tools and techniques of a trial lawyer, Lubet uses original sources and contemporaneous documentation to explore the stories behin...

This innovative volume explores empirical legal issues around the world. While legal studies have traditionally been worked on and of letters and with a normative bent, in recent years quantitative methods have gained traction by offering a brand new perspective of understanding law. That is, legal scholars have started to crunch numbers, not letters, to tease out the effects of law on the regulated industries, citizens, or judges in reality.In this edited book, authors from leadin...

Law, Ethics and the Biopolitical explores the idea that legal authority is no longer related to national sovereignty, but to the ‘moral’ attempt to nurture life. The book argues that whilst the relationship between law and ethics has long been a central concern in legal studies, it is now the relationship between law and life that is becoming crucial. The waning legitimacy of conventional conceptions of sovereignty is signalled the renewal of a version of natural law, evident in d...

This new volume of Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance addresses issues of race and ethnicity within the law and law-related phenomena. Even in today's so-called multicultural, post-racial world racial and ethnic concerns prevail in many aspects of modern law. Contributors to this volume examine racial and ethnic disparities in sentencing and punishment; the continued problematic nature of the African American experience within the US system; the criminalization of immigrants; racial ineq...

Police response to incidents of intimate partner violence can be critical. This volume investigates the elements in the institutional, legal and organizational context that are relevant for police response to incidents in the realm of the private sphere and whether there exists a relation with the reporting of such incidents by victims. Addressing this complex question requires insights from research, policy and practice and, as such, any conclusions will have implications for each of thes...

Technologies like CRISPR and gene drives are ushering in a new era of genetic engineering, wherein the technical means to modify DNA are cheaper, faster, more accurate, more widely accessible, and with more far-reaching effects than ever before. These cutting-edge technologies raise legal, ethical, cultural, and ecological questions that are so broad and consequential for both human and other-than-human life that they can be difficult to grasp. What is clear, however, is that the power to ...

Would it be easy to imagine a court where justice is dispensed not by women and men wearing black flowing gowns but by ordinarily dressed, uneducated women? Muslim women living in slum communities of Mumbai took upon themselves the job of providing legal aid to other distressed women. Need for justice is as crucial as other needs, especially for women who face marginalization on a large scale. This book looks closely at the genesis of these groups, their history, their interventions, their mo...

Have you been refused legal aid and can't afford to pay a lawyer? Do you need to represent yourself in a civil law case and don't know where to start? You're not alone. Since the government slashed entitlement to legal aid in 2013 there has been a 60% increase in people acting as their own lawyers. Known as 'litigants-in-person' many people find running their own cases frightening, confusing and overwhelming. It doesn't have to be that way. Win Your Own Case cuts through th...