Social & Legal Studies

This article considers the ways in which social housing has in recent years become inextricably linked with the process of crime control. Drawing on case study research into the rehousing of sex offenders, the authors provide evidence illustrating why and how social housing management has become increasingly drawn into the fold of crime control. The article then highlights some serious but often neglected concerns stemming from the adoption by social housing management of more crime control responsibilities. Whilst protection of individuals and communities should always remain paramount, the article concludes with a discussion about the implications of what these processes may mean for social housing.

The judgment in the English Court of Appeal case of Re A ( Conjoined Twins: Surgical Separation) highlights forcefully the highly individualistic and abstract assumptions that commonly shape the deployment of rights discourse in liberal legal adjudication. Forced by the all-or-nothing nature of this discourse into a dilemma between perceiving of the twins as separate right-bearers or perceiving of the stronger twin, Jodie, as the singular right-bearer and of Mary, her weaker sibling, as a non-legal entity, the court chose the former option.

This article attempts to theorize on the Hong Kong legal profession by examining the changing positions and roles of lawyers in three episodes of Hong Kong's recent legal history: use of Chinese as a legal language, the right of abode issue and the right of audience debate. In developing an indigenous theory (or indigenizing western theories), I suggest, attention must be paid to the social context - the long use of English as the sole legal language in a predominately Chinese-speaking society, and the special social-political functions of law in defending Hong Kong from China and of being a source of legitimacy for the government - in which Hong Kong lawyers find themselves and which distinguish them from their western counterparts. Thus, the theoretical framework I develop is one based on the concept of professional project, with due recognition to the social-political functions of the law in Hong Kong. I also argue that the concept of 'social capital' could provide a crucial connection between a Weberian self-interested reading and a Durkheimian altruistic reading of Hong Kong lawyers. It is further suggested that the framework, though inevitably of limited applicability to other societies, may shed light on the role of lawyers in other countries where law has also assumed a particular significance as a source of legitimacy for government.

This article draws on an empirical study of community mediation to question the possibility and desirability of mediator neutrality. It argues that, although the notion of neutrality is central to discussions of adjudication and mediation, debate on the topic remains intellectually flawed and empirically problematic. Emphasis on the aspirational nature of neutrality encourages us to ignore the suggestion that rather than facilitating fair process and outcome the standard of neutrality could serve to exacerbate existing inequalities between disputants. When discussed in the context of mediation the ideal becomes even more suspect as mediation promises 'alternatives' to the inadequacies of court-based adjudication. This article explores the questions raised by a group of mediators who rejected the possibility and desirability of mediation in favour of a more reflexive approach to third-party intervention in disputes. It suggests that, rather than aspiring to the empty goal of neutrality, we should be debating the possibility of partiality as an ethical standard to govern dispute resolution.

Andrei Sawoniuk, a member of a Nazi-organized police outfit, led an operation in a small town in Belorus in 1942-3 to kill the Jews who had evaded the main Nazi massacre. He was found guilty, not of genocide or crimes against humanity, but of murder, according to the War Crimes Act (1991) in a trial in London in 1999. This article explores the ways in which the testimonies elicited were transformed from memoirs of the Holocaust by the rules and norms of the trial process into legally admissible evidence by the processes of cross-examination and of selecting what evidence was suitable to be considered by the jury and what was not. The extraordinariness of the events with which the trial was concerned accentuated the differences between memoir and evidence. The key witnesses in the trial found ways to circumvent the rules of the court and to speak directly to the jury.

Book reviews: Grisso, Thomas and Robert G. Schwartz (eds.), Youth on Trial: A Developmental Perspective on Juvenile Justice (reviewed by Anne Worrall); Goldson, Barry (ed.), The New Youth Justice (reviewed by Anne Worrall); Frynas, Jedrzej Georg, Oil in Nigeria: Conflict and Litigation between Oil Companies and Village Communities (reviewed by Amazu A. Asouzu); Nobles, Richard and David Schiff, Understanding Miscarriages of Justice: Law, the Media and the Inevitability of a Crisis (reviewed by Victor Tadros); Ballinger, Anette, Dead Women Walking: Executed Women in England and Wales 1900-1955. (reviewed by Jo Winter); Childs, Mary and Lousie Ellison (eds.), Feminist Perspectives on Evidence (reviewed by Christopher Nowlin); Dryzek, John S., Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations (reviewed by Colin Harvey); Thomson, Michael, Reproducing Narrative: Gender, Reproduction and Law 1998. (reviewed by Marie Fox)