In this thesis I explore how ageing, gender and sexuality intersect to influence equality in later life, in relation to older lesbian, gay and bisexual individuals and non-labelling individuals in same-gender relationships (LGBN). In particular I argue that temporality and spatiality shape uneven outcomes in later life by informing the discursive and performative production of ageing, gender and sexuality, which in turn influence access to resources, recognition and representation in older age contexts. Taking a feminist socio-legal perspective, my thesis addresses four questions: 1) How are the lives of older LGBN individuals framed in regulatory contexts?; 2) How do these regulatory frameworks inform ageing LGBN subjectivities and kinship formations?; 3) What are the main concerns of older LGBN individuals in relation to ageing?; and 4) How are the lives and concerns of older LGBN individuals represented by activists working on their behalves? To address these questions, I analyse the regulatory contexts relevant to LGBN ageing (Chapter Two). Methodologically, I expand understandings of ageing, gender and sexuality in later life through utilising qualitative data from interviews with older LGBN individuals and activists working on their behalves (Chapter Three). I analyse data from these interviews to consider: LGBN ageing subjectivities (Chapter Four), kinship constructions (Chapter Five) and anticipated care futures (Chapter Six), and to explore activists’ representations of older LGBN individuals’ lives, issues and concerns (Chapter Seven). In the final chapter I consider the implications for social policy and future research (Chapter Eight).

This thesis aims to examine the complex relationship between Sharia law and the Saudi Arabian copyright law. It focuses on the implications of the inconsistencies between the law governing intellectual property rights imposed by the TRIPs agreement and Sharia law in Saudi Arabia, specifically as regards copyright law. Original sources from the different schools within Sharia law are analysed in depth to assess their perspectives on conceptions of property, ownership, selling, punishment, grievances, legislation, the role of the judiciary, theft, piracy and how laws should apply to individual countries and obligations as regards international treaties. The compatibility between Sharia approaches to these topics and the TRIPs derived laws protecting copyright in Saudi Arabia is compared to reveal significant inconsistencies. The thesis argues that unique difficulties arise in applying TRIPs related laws in Saudi Arabia, where Sharia law is theoretically the sole source of law. TRIPs related laws which are almost identical in many areas to those in Saudi Arabia apply in Lebanon and Jordan, where, as the thesis shows, these difficulties do not arise as Sharia law is only one out of several sources of law. Thus the demonstration of the inconsistencies between Sharia and TRIPs imposed laws in Saudi Arabia provides a basis from which to demonstrate and explore the unique difficulties associated with applying piracy enforcement measures in Saudi Arabia which arise from these disparities. Questionnaires were handed out to different segments of the Saudi Arabian society addressing public perceptions of the adequacy and appropriateness of both Sharia and TRIPs related laws governing copyright in hindering piracy and whether having both laws could incur a negative impact. The findings derived confirm the argument of the thesis that given the inconsistencies between them, the application of both laws leads to undesirable consequences. Some suggestions to address these issues are put forward.

This body of work examines law’s response to non-genetic families. I have always centred the experience of family formation and family life such that I have traversed and linked distinct legal sites and doctrines, examining access to family formation avenues, models for legal recognition of families once formed and, latterly, legal responses to information sharing and broader kinship practices among genetically related individuals in childhood and later life. In doing so I have made a major contribution to a body of scholarship centring ‘lived lives’ in the exploration of family, relationship and reproduction law at its broadest, incorporating comparative analysis across closely related jurisdictions, attention to and integration of sociological data, and a focus on responsive practical reform outcomes. As an important part of my focus upon lived lives I have brought a continual awareness of gender to the unpacking of ‘gay and lesbian’ equality claims and reform movements to analyse the differential position of women and men in relation to parenting and paid labour, and latterly to build a framework of analysis that bridges heterosexual/same-sex family formation issues (papers 1, 2, 3) to examine links and resonances across ‘reproductive outsiders’ or non-genetic family forms (papers 3, 4). The sweep and reach of this approach makes an original contribution by stepping out of doctrinal and jurisdictional silos to examine the impact of law upon, and the unmet legal needs of, non-genetic families through the life cycle. Throughout these works I have contributed to analysis and debate about the role of ‘the eternal biological family’ in law, specifically engaging in the inter-relation of developing social notions of genetic essentialism, father’s rights and recognition of non-genetic family forms, in legal regimes governing family relationships. I have been one of the leading thinkers in the area of ‘functional family’ developing a clear articulation of how these ideas, drawn from psychology and sociology were mapped across into legal regimes recognising informal relationships (paper 1), examining the limitations of ‘functionality’ when in conflict with genetic parenthood (paper 2) and going on to build a framework for understandings of legal parenthood in non-genetic families as involving a dynamic interaction of intentionality and functionality (paper 2 and 3). In my work on ART and surrogacy I have built upon a body of feminist work on relational theory, agency and resonant choice. I have applied this approach to argue for the centring of an understanding of the interests and needs of parties in ART as part of a web of relationships rather than as isolated and oppositional rights (papers 6, 7, 8). In particular I have made original contributions to understandings of the human embryo in law not as an entity worthy of recognition in its own right, but as an object of unique value to the woman who created it, including on occasion as an imagined relation (paper 6); in directing attention to lateral rather than simply linear genetic links in ART law and policy (paper 6, 7, 8); in looking at how the views of parents shape and interact with those of offspring in seeking information on genetic relatives (paper 8) and in understandings of the significance of the numbers of potential genetic relatives (paper 7). In this area I have made important contributions to unpacking policy rationales and examining the largely ignored evidence base concerning family numbers and identity disclosure regimes (papers 7, 8) and concerning the experiences of surrogates in the development of laws governing surrogacy parentage and payment (papers 4, 5). I have argued for a nuanced and attentive notion of relatedness in law, incorporating the diverse and changeable understandings of the significance of genetic links (traversing a wide range of meanings from information source to family member) that individuals in non-genetic families formed through ART have expressed (papers 4, 5, 6,7, 8). Taken together, this is a body of feminist socio-legal work on the regulation of family relationships, assisted reproduction, genetics, kinship in law. Through this work I have made an original contribution to both scholarly thinking and legislative and policy frameworks responding to the needs of non-genetic family forms.

The new terrain of increasing interaction between national and supranational legal systems within the European Union presents new challenges for conventional approaches to police accountability and transparency. Each EU Member State is responsible for policing within its jurisdiction, and the EU institutions are increasingly responsible for enhancing the conduct of police cooperation between the Member States. The thesis explores the challenges of reconciling national approaches in the international sphere by conducting a critical analysis of ‘how and to what extent national legal and administrative norms on police accountability and transparency are informing the concept, design and operation of EU cross-border policing instruments’. Building on the work of Peter K. Manning, Geoffrey Marshall and David Bayley amongst others, the thesis develops a pragmatic typology of police accountability through which to view the evolution and adequacy of national and supranational approaches. The typology contains three key dimensions, namely codes, co-option and complaint. Using the typology to critique conventional approaches in the UK, Ireland and Denmark, the thesis identifies legal and procedural anomalies and challenges at both the national and supranational level since the traditional elements of police accountability were originally formulated within the confines of national legal, political, historical and cultural constraints. Employing the typology to both elucidate problems and suggest methods of internalisation, the thesis argues that the EU should follow the lead of the Member States’ legislatures by seeking to regulate a wider range of policing processes through more expansive procedural ‘codes’ which facilitate police discretion and co-option. The thesis shows that it is not sufficient for the EU to prioritise its post-Lisbon policy of ‘co-decision’ in order to remedy its democratic deficits but that it must oversee the establishment and enhancement of parliamentary committees, inspectorates and other oversight bodies in the interest of police accountability. A number of recommendations are made for police reform at both the national and supranational levels to this end. More particularly, the research indicates that additional treaty changes are needed beyond the Lisbon Treaty in order to adequately reconcile national and supranational approaches to police accountability. I am grateful to the Irish Research Council for supporting this research by the award of a Government of Ireland Research Scholarship.

This thesis contributes new and unique perspectives on the post 2007-09 crisis reform agenda established in the European Union. The focus of the thesis will be specifically on reform of the regulatory and the supervisory framework aimed at mitigating the effects of systemic risk. The starting point will be a review of the literature on the concept of systemic risk which will demonstrate that its unpredictable nature requires a malleable regulatory response. In light of the suggested areas of concern by the pivotal ‘de Larosiere report’, analysis will be provided on the progress achieved so far. On the regulatory front, the systemic risk aspects of the various legislative measures introduced are assessed in terms of their relevance and potential effectiveness. The reformed supervisory framework under the new European System of Financial Supervision (ESFS) requires close scrutiny due to the transfer of power to centralised authorities. Although the reform should be considered a success in terms of reaching its objectives in a timely manner, some critiques and suggestions will be provided on how to carry the framework forward. The thesis will also argue that taking the framework to the next step may require testing the boundaries of European Treaties and its case law in relation to delegation of powers. The measured success of the new framework could however be jeopardised by the recent introduction of the first steps towards a banking union in the Eurozone. By creating a new supervisory dynamic within the EU, it will be argued that such a move raises the potential of creating a ‘two speed’ model of financial supervision in the EU. Additionally it risks polarising the supervisory debate between the European Central Bank and the Bank of England at the detriment of the EU.

In 1933 Canada enacted the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act with little consultation. Parliament described the CCAA as federal ‘bankruptcy and insolvency law’ but the Act provoked constitutional controversy because it could compulsorily bind secured claims, which fell under provincial jurisdiction. Even after the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the CCAA, the intended beneficiaries of the Act preferred not to use it. In the 1950s the Act fell out of use, and by the 1970s commentators considered it a ‘dead letter.’ But during the 1980s and 1990s recessions, courts ‘revived’ the CCAA through progressive interpretations of its few ‘enabling’ provisions. This helped justify debtor-in-possession reorganisation as a policy objective of Canadian bankruptcy and insolvency law. This thesis attempts to understand why this occurred. This study provides a theorised interpretation of CCAA history. I rely on concepts such as path dependence, interest groups and institutions to shed light on periods of stability and change in CCAA law over time. I bolster this with a socio-legal analysis that takes account of gradual changes in practice that often preceded and gave shape to formal reforms. This thesis shows that large secured creditors have been major drivers and beneficiaries of CCAA law. The Act originally extended provincial receivership reorganisations into federal law. In the 1980s-1990s courts facilitated ongoing access to the CCAA by recasting it as a debtor-remedy. In both instances the solvency of large secureds (financial institutions) highlighted the necessity of restructuring corporate borrowers, and prevailing social, economic, and political factors influenced the substance and mechanisms of legal changes. Despite its public stature as a ‘debtor-remedy,’ CCAA law continues to advance the interests of large secured creditors.

The recently institutionalised global Performers’ Rights Regime (PRR) aims to improve the economic position of those performers whose work can be audio-recorded and reproduced. This thesis asks whether the PRR achieves this aim. The thesis investigates this question through a case study of Sri Lankan vocalists. Vocalists in Sri Lanka are a significant constituent within the music industry, and they had hoped that the PRR would make their work more economically secure. However, this thesis finds that the PRR, as developed internationally and implemented in Sri Lanka, is predicated on a particular understanding of the role of performers and their relationships with other actors in the music industry; that this understanding of performers’ roles and relationships does not reflect established practices and relationships within Sri Lanka’s contemporary music industry; and that consequently the PRR fails to deliver the improved economic security that Sri Lankan singers had sought.

This thesis probes the limits of concepts and practices in criminal law through an interdisciplinary analysis of vulnerability and gender, shown through the case study of women who act as drug mules and have been sentenced for drug importation offences in England and Wales. While this thesis critiques the current state of drug control and how international drug law characterizes drug trafficking as crime carried out by ‘evil’ and ‘greedy’ offenders, the enquiry is much broader because it questions role of criminal law in the severe punishment of drug mules. Discourses on the vulnerability of drug mules expose the difficulties of judging them solely as threatening traffickers and highlight the particular effects and situation of women participating in the international drug trade. Rather than accepting the victim-offender dichotomy given by legal categories, this thesis suggests that the ambivalent construction of drug mules’ legal subjectivity evinces a deep-seated contradiction in criminal law. The strict frameworks within criminal law labelling actors into either victims or offenders are ways in which the ambiguity intrinsic in human action and embodied social life are denied while shaping and perpetuating a heterosexist models of legal subjectivity. Drawing on phenomenology, critical theory, and feminist legal theory, the thesis offers a critique of legal subjectivity and the grounds of criminal law from the perspective of gender and vulnerability. Specifically, it maps the effects of disembodying legal personhood and notions of subjectivity in Western liberalism, noting in particular how they can lead to violent practices in law and politics which securitize physical and political bodies in pursuit of an ideal of invulnerability. Disembodiment is not only a modality of living which alienates embodiment from history, gender and relationality, but it also facilitates gendered forms of violence. While this project contests relations of invulnerability by rethinking embodied vulnerability, there are also important challenges for feminist scholars in foregrounding the body of women in criminal law. The interdisciplinary gender analysis presented here suggests that describing drug mules as vulnerable offenders alone cannot provide justice to these offenders because it can reify the logic of invulnerability. Thus, we need to understand what the modes of relations with the vulnerable body are and how these relationships to vulnerability are re-inscribed in legal, scholarly, and political discourse. Although vulnerability discourses can be totalized into existing norms of subjectivity in criminal law, namely feminized victims and masculinized agents, this project also gestures towards imagining vulnerability otherwise. This involves holding space for ethical ambiguity in the encounters between law and gender occurring in the context of neoliberal precarity and securitized drug policies.

The thesis examines the emergence and development of the financial capability project in the United Kingdom. It investigates how consumer financial literacy education came to be increasingly deployed by policy makers and financial regulators to govern financial markets and to protect consumers. The thesis focuses on and unpacks a number of different practices and processes that constitute and support the project on financial capability. It looks at some of the predominant discourses surrounding the legitimization of consumer financial education and explains the underlying rationale for this novel regulatory approach. To explore different configurations of regulatory techniques used to protect consumers, the thesis studies three sites where distinct financial capability initiatives were rolled out in the UK context. The first site unpacks the financial capability measure and documents in detail the financial knowledge practices that are used to define and determine what is considered to be high or low levels of consumer financial capability. The second site describes how the project on personal finance education was carried out in English schools. It interrogates the activities of Personal finance education group (Pfeg) – the principal promoter of financial school education – and exposes different ways in which Pfeg’s major financial donors have informed and shaped the UK’s national strategy on financial education at schools. The third site looks at the regulation of the provision of financial advice in the UK. It probes into the assumptions about consumer financial decision-making that form the basis and rationale for consumer protection and state intervention via the provision of financial advice. The thesis terms these sites as ‘edu-regulatory’ in order to illustrate how financial information, financial education and financial advice are utilised to govern consumer behaviour and financial markets. The analysis of three edu-regulatory sites shows that the underlying rationale for this novel regulatory approach is the democratisation of financial knowledge. The project on financial capability presupposes that greater consumer access to financial information, financial education, and financial advice equips consumers with knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary to govern themselves and financial markets. Borrowing ideas and findings from social studies of finance, the thesis cautions against this newly emerging approach to consumer protection. It argues that the project on financial capability promotes access to financial knowledge which is highly de-contextualised. This de-contextualisation simplifies consumer financial decision-making and ignores the socio-economic, cultural and political environment within which consumers make their choices. Despite grand claims about consumer empowerment that tends to accompany the financial capability project, the thesis highlights important limitations to such edu-regulatory techniques. It argues that consumer decision-making is highly complex and contextual, thus, financial knowledge gained as a result of financial capability programmes will always intersect with the environment. Consumer protection policies based on edu-regulation has the potential to shift regulatory focus from structural problems present in financialised, political economies to individuals. The financial capability project largely ignores the importance of these circumstances to financial decision-making processes. Instead, it mis-attributes them to consumers’ lack of understanding and their inability to successfully navigate the financialised world. The thesis suggests that consumer financial education fails to strengthen consumer protection or reduce consumer exposure to financial risks. The financial capability project contributes to further marginalisation of consumers who are the least capable of managing their financial and economic lives through mere information, education and advice.

Around 3.3 million people are remand prisoners worldwide, and remand imprisonment affects an excess of 14 million people per year (OSF Justice Initiative, 2014). In Turkey, around 70 per cent of young prisoners are on remand in the newly emerging high security prisons called Children's Closed Institutions for Execution of Punishment (and adult prisons). The remaining 30 per cent are sentenced and received by an open type of prisons known as Juvenile Education Houses. The very specific nature of remand imprisonment occupies little space in imprisonment and penal theories and governmentality studies. Remand imprisonment is either considered as a bureaucratic phase in the prosecution system or approached and criticized within human rights violations (right to fair trial and presumption of innocence). In this thesis I argue that the language of human rights impedes critiques that explore and deconstruct remand imprisonment within penal culture and penal politics in Turkey. The stability in the high proportion and the emergence of high security prisons for remanded youth in Turkey lead the researcher to presume that youth remand imprisonment acquires roles within crime control, and social control that could be comprehended within a look through Turkey's governmentality that would draw a picture of its legal culture. So, this thesis explores the role(s) of remand imprisonment in the juvenile justice system in Turkey by situating remand imprisonment in the centre of penal politics. The essential conceptual tools of prison studies including 'labour/discipline', 'time' and 'space' are analysed in this thesis. The diversity of young defendants charged with drug dealing, crimes against property, bodily injury, murder, sexual offences, and political offences in Turkey calls for a comprehensive method of thought. By adopting a study of Biopolitics, as a method of thought (Foucault, 2007, 2008; Lemke 2001, 2011b, Dean 2010, Rose 1996), I scrutinize the roles of remand imprisonment in Turkey's penal politics in relation to Turkey's political economy, its sovereign power relations with the citizens and in relation to the knowledge production/adaptation in its criminal justice system. Within Biopolitics, 'as the politics of optimizing life of the population,' I consider both the relation between the political economy and penal culture as situated within a revisionist history of imprisonment (Rusche and Kircheimmer, 2003; Melossi and Pavarini, 1981; Foucault, 1977; Foucault 1980), and also discuss the manifestation of sovereign power (Agamben, 1998, 2005) of the state towards youth in conflict with the law. I investigate the mode of knowledge production and adaptation in the youth justice system. I specifically concentrate on the effect of the prevalence of the language of rights on youth remand imprisonment in Turkey, and draw on the sociology of human rights literature to aid my analysis. I approach human rights as a socially constructed language embedded in the liberalism movement of Enlightenment, and demonstrate its compatibility with the quest for security through spatial control, at times when social security remains weak. The primary data for this thesis comes from qualitative interviews, observations, and document analysis conducted in Turkish courtrooms and prisons, as well as production of statistical knowledge based on the Ministry of Justice data. Based on the idea that 'law in action' or 'law in context' (Nelken, 2001) can be different than 'law in the books', explaining the praxis and meaning of remand imprisonment calls for an interpretive understanding (Weber, 1978) of meanings different figures attach to their action. In this thesis I scrutinize what meanings and purposes these different actors attach to remand imprisonment by analysing the data generated from interviews with 50 young prisoners in 6 different prisons (Ankara, İstanbul, İzmir, Konya), as well as interviews with 38 youth justice professionals, constituted by prosecutors, lawyers, judges and social work officials, plus information from 65 hearings in three different Turkish courtrooms (Ankara, İstanbul, İzmir). Analysis of the data in governmentality demonstrates that remand imprisonment has evolved into a spatial crime control mechanism in the 'managerialist' conduct of the youth justice system. In this managerialist governmentality where professionalism over social security remains immature, the imagined self-sufficient, self-contained, invulnerable and decontextualized liberal, rational young defendant in the liberal rights discourse, is managed securely in the youth justice system through spatial control. Findings from this research demonstrate that youth remand imprisonment works as a first resort deterrence and control mechanism of security in Turkey, especially for those charged with offences related to drugs and property. The findings also show how youth remand imprisonment is rationalized and neutralized as sovereign power's expression of just desert, as remand imprisonment is not distinguished from prison sentence. The research data also fulfills an administrative control mechanism of evidence collection. So the diverse population of young remand prisoners are all 'managed' (Feeley and Simon, 1992; Bottoms, 1995) within the same regime of high security prisons that I call 'bureaucratic disposal resort'. This thesis adds a novel and needed contribution to the revisionist approach to imprisonment by analysing remand imprisonment as a crime control mechanism in Biopolitics through the country's political economy and its relations of sovereign power. Findings from the research provide an innovative platform to discuss the compatible relationship between the human rights discourse and the practice of remand imprisonment as a spatial crime control mechanism.