Social & Legal Studies

Legal executives are the third branch of the legal profession in England and Wales. While their professional body (ILEX) has made progress in recent years, they remain in a subordinate position to solicitors. Drawing on detailed interviews with legal executives in a range of settings, this article will argue that women legal executives experience a distinctive disadvantage in legal practice. Intersections of class, gender and professional power contribute to a highly unstable professional identity for legal executives, and one which is particularly acute for women. The dissonance between their ‘expected’ and ‘experienced’ professional identity reinforces their lack of engagement with ILEX. This article argues that the negative and gendered connotations of the professional identity of legal executives reinforce the hierarchies of legal practice.

In April 2005 amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 allowed adult children of gamete donors access to identifying information about their donor. Focusing on sperm donation as the most often used donated gamete in Britain, this article concentrates on the original decision in the legislation to secure donor anonymity in order to highlight the ways in which societal trends have shifted in favour of the importance of genetic fathers. This will involve discussing how anomalous this decision was in comparison to changes elsewhere in family law where genetic fathers-and genetic kin relationships-were being given increasing priority in regulating families living outside the heteronormative, married, nuclear family. The author discusses the impact of the new genetics in providing a rationale for the increasing emphasis placed on knowledge of genetic fatherhood for the ontological security of individuals, their well-being and identity. The article ends with a discussion of some of the implications for families living outside the heteronormative ideal of the increasing prioritization given to genetic fathers.

In this article I examine lesbians’ and gay men’s attitudes towards the legal recognition of same-sex relationships, using the theoretical framework of legal consciousness. I first provide a brief overview of the legal consciousness literature, before outlining some of the critiques of legal consciousness. Lesbian and gay legal consciousness is then examined through an analysis of qualitative responses to a large-scale online study of perceptions of and attitudes towards same-sex marriage and the legal recognition or regulation of same-sex relationships. Responses are analysed using thematic analysis to elaborate on five main themes within these data: formal equality, the relationship between legal and social change, the naming of legally recognized same-sex relationships, human rights discourse and citizenship claims. I argue that legal consciousness studies can help to interrogate the pervasiveness of discourses around formal equality and discrimination in the ways in which lesbians and gay men think about, use and position themselves in relation to law.

This article considers the prospects for effective regulation of emerging globalized industries by examining the effectiveness of the ‘smart regulation’ approach associated with the port state control enforcement regime for seafarers’ health and safety. Smart regulation seeks to generate incentive structures that promote proactive compliance by ship operators. Drawing on an international comparative study, which included extensive observation of ship inspections in India, Russia and the UK, it is suggested that the main reason why the hoped-for ‘market in virtue’ is only weakly present turns on the perceived and actual inconsistencies in the implementation of the regulatory regime. These contrasts exist cross-nationally, and are manifested in terms of differences in the local character of enforcement practice, and in levels of trust in national regulatory administrations. The strong overall regulatory framework, the political will to avoid damaging maritime accidents, and the well-developed system of port state control, all suggest that the shipping industry may be taken as a test case for the possibility of effective smart governance of a globalized industry. The limited gains achieved in this sector thus bode ill for effective future governance of other emerging globalizing industries.

This article examines the meanings of the crime scene in serial killings, and the tensions between the real and the imagined in the circulation of those meanings. Starting with the Whitechapel Murders of 1888 it argues that they, as well as forming an origin for the construction of the identity of ‘the serial killer’, initiate certain ideas about the relationship of subjects to spaces and the existence of the self in the modern urban landscape. It suggests that these ideas come to play an integral part in the contemporary discourse of serial killing, both in the popular imagination and in professional analysis. Examining the Whitechapel Murders, more recent cases and modern profiling techniques, it argues that popular and professional representations of crime scenes reveal more of social anxieties about the nature of the public and the private than they do about serial killers. It suggests that ‘the serial killer’ is not a coherent type, but an invention produced from the confusions of persons and places.