Britain does not have a written constitution, which provides for a common assessment that it has no constitutional law. However, it actually instead provides a limiting case for considering the influence of courts and law in governance. For the courts have been involved in modifying both central and local government programs through statutory interpretation. The modifications that the courts have brought about have meant that the government has to take legal rules and courts into account in designing programs. The current limits on what the courts do have been part of the provocation for a movement in favor of a bill of rights in Britain.
Climate change is a wicked problem, a framework not often used in sociolegal studies. The problem is complex, not readily named, and not limited to one jurisdiction. Therefore, the places of law are multiple: human rights instruments, supranational tribunals, regional courts, and local governments and NGOS. Litigation concerning responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions has largely not resulted in favorable judgments, and the papers in this collection turn to other ways of conceptualizing law and courts in responding to climate change. Relevant legal strategies include environmental legal enforcement, but also changes in investment, and response to the many disasters that are related to climate change. The papers in this collection travel across jurisdictions, actors and problems to assess legal strategies concerning climate change. El cambio climático es un problema perverso, un marco poco usado en los estudios sociojurídicos. El problema es complejo, de difícil denominación, y no está limitado a una sola jurisdicción. Por lo tanto, el derecho tiene muchos espacios: instrumentos de derechos humanos, tribunales supranacionales, juzgados regionales y gobiernos y ONG locales. Los litigios sobre responsabilidades por emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero no han solido acabar con veredictos favorables, y los artículos de esta colección miran hacia otras formas de conceptualizar el derecho y los tribunales como respuesta al cambio climático. Estrategias legales importantes incluyen la aplicación del derecho, pero también cambios en inversiones y respuestas a los múltiples desastres relacionados con el cambio climático. Los artículos de este número navegan por varias jurisdicciones, agentes y problemas para valorar las estrategias jurídicas sobre cambio climático.
Casework in the United States in social welfare programs has been limited in what caseworkers can do, as what they do has been tightly structured by rules. Recently, scholars have argued that episodic assistance in disaster brings sympathy in public policy more than restriction. The sympathy after disaster brings new money, and individual assistance is in turn the subject of casework. This article relies upon interviews, observations, and government documents to assess how casework served displaced people after Hurricane Katrina. The article finds that caseworkers after Katrina were caught in a program that would end at some uncertain time, and with new and unclear rules that changed frequently, making the sympathy difficult to enact for many of the poorest people. Casework after disaster is episodic and convened by nonprofits and, after Katrina, paid for by a large grant and then written into statute. Assistance for displaced people is likely to continue, given the expectation of more disasters and rising sea levels. The question of how it is like or unlike other forms of assistance and what sympathy in policy means in helping displaced people is therefore likely to continue to matter.
Suppose you want to writeOf a woman braidingAnother woman's hair-Straight down, or with beads and shellsIn three-strand plaits or corn-rowsYouhad better know the thicknessThe length the patternWhy she decides to braid her hairHow it is done to herWhat country it happens inWhat else happens in that countryYou have to know these things-Adrienne Rich, "North American Time"Although Adrienne Rich tells us we “have to know these things,” we are often willingly blind to the rich stories of those with whom we are most intimate. You may braid someone's hair without knowing very much about her. You may even write about it, though the writing would rapidly become very dull. In this issue of Law & Society Review, the authors examine how legal regimes facilitate knowing (and ignoring) stories when making families. For people seeking to adopt a child in western national states, the law has sometimes made it easy not to know about who bore a child, why she is available for adoption, and why a family might have raised her one way rather than another—braiding her hair in cornrows or in plaits. Also, in intercountry adoption, children often arrive with no history available, a condition legal adoption allows and often facilitates. We need not know “what else happens in that country.” Recent scholarship notes the historical and cultural specificity of the practice of ignoring. Adoptees, mothers who have placed their children for adoption, and adoptive parents have all claimed a right to know their own or their child's history, sometimes for different reasons. Scholars have followed, explaining that creating an “as if” family, in which all of this knowledge is foreclosed, does not fit with the experience of families. Articles in this issue address three interlocking themes that question the practice of not knowing: the commodification of children and family in a market economy, contests over the framework of choice in the making of a family, and the identity of children.
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