A major objective of the Human Rights Act (HRA) was to bring about a culture of rights in the UK. Its introduction fore-grounded questions about the use of rights to advance social justice issues and was the impetus for this research. At about the same as the Act came into effect another law, Section 55, an antithesis of what the HRA promised, was passed which forced thousands of asylum-seekers into destitution. Section 55 became a major battleground pitting non-governmental organisations (NGOs) against the Home Office in a three-year long campaign, characterised by rancour and viciousness, unlike any in recent memory. The NGOs, with the new HRA as a key part of their strategy, defeated the legislation. This thesis, a bottom-up case study of rights at work, examines the role of rights in the campaign to assess (1) if rights brought about social changes and (2) is a culture of rights developing in the UK? The paper first considers the various theoretical frameworks on rights and social change and analyses various case studies of rights at work. Context is important; therefore, it also examines how asylum has come to be framed in present-day discourse, with an overview on the evolution of welfare as a coercive measure. The study, framed against current events of the day, concludes that while test-case challenges eventually defeated Section 55 welfare as a coercive measure continues. In short, the HRA has proven to be ineffective against illiberal policies and the development of a culture of rights, insofar as asylum is concerned, has stalled. And it has happened with deliberation by a government determined to be tough on asylum irrespective of the HRA.

The Babatha and Salome Komaise archives contain the legal documents of two Jewish women and their families, dating mostly from c. 94 C.E. to 132 C.E. The community that they attest lived in a small village which was first part of the Nabataean Kingdom but was later incorporated into the province of Roman Arabia in 106 C.E. The documents consequently provide invaluable information about a community’s experience before and after the creation of the province. The laws and traditions in evidence in the two archives are remarkable for their diversity, exhibiting elements of Jewish, Nabataean, Roman and Hellenistic law. This thesis examines this complex legal situation and considers the ways in which people coped with the array of legal options available to them. A ‘ground-up’ approach is adopted, focusing on the people involved in the documents’ creation and use in order to detail how different parties affected the working of law in the area. An overview of the individual documents is provided in The Survey of the Documents. The rest of the thesis is then structured according to the various groups that influenced their formulation and use: The Scribes, Legal Advisors, The Parties, The Alternatives to the Assizes and The Roman Officials. These various contributions are then brought together in the Conclusion to model how law operated in this particular community. The primary contributions of this study are therefore to Roman provincial and legal history, as well as the history of the Jewish people in the inter-revolt period.

This thesis explores the ways in which Islamic law and human rights interact within the work of women’s rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that advocate the reform of the Egyptian Personal Status Law (PSL) in the period between 2006 and 2010. The thesis shows the relevance of the human rights framework as well as the flexibility of Islamic legal discourse in the work of the NGOs. Drawing on both Islamic law and human rights enabled NGOs to develop a more gender-sensitive religious discourse, which supported their PSL reform demands. However the interaction between these two frameworks was largely affected by several important factors, which sometimes led NGOs to dilute some of their demands. These factors included the implications of the change in the form of Shari‘a as codified law under the modern nation-state; the Egyptian political context both internally and externally; the common local perception that human rights are a Western production and an extension of Western colonialism; the dominant religious but patriarchal discourse governing the PSL; the implications of activism through the NGO structure; and the personal religiosity of individual activists. The thesis explores NGOs’ PSL reform demands in depth bearing in mind these factors. It investigates NGOs’ discourse and shows its strengths and weaknesses. It shows that the interaction between Islamic law and human rights within NGOs’ work in this particular Egyptian context produced reform demands that were innovative and practically appealing on one hand, but epistemologically problematic in some instances, on another.

After the Enlargement of the European Union in 2004, around a million Accession State migrants arrived in the United Kingdom, with Polish migrants constituting the largest group. There is a growing body of literature focusing on their migratory patterns, networks, labour market performance, and identity. However, little has been said so far about the Polish migrants' relationship with law in the United Kingdom. This thesis asks: how do the Polish post-2004 EU Enlargement migrants form their relationship with the law, and what are the factors that affect this? It focuses on the intricacies of migrants' choices of `semi-legal' over legal status, subsequent legalization strategies, and the interpretations of legality they result in. Socio-legal integration has so far been viewed solely via state legal frameworks, following the traditional approach of the `law-first' perspective. This thesis argues that it is not the institutional arrangements and legal architecture alone that decide the nature of migrants' semi-legal relationship with law in the host society. A more comprehensive insight into the socio-legal integration of migrants is possible only when we combine in the analysis the interplay between the structural factors of the host country's legal environment, migrants' agency and the culturally derived values, attitudes, behaviour and social expectations towards the law and its enforcement. The thesis therefore makes a case for a `proper' recognition of migrants' legal culture in the study of their socio-legal integration. The thesis concludes that semi-legality, as an initial response to the legal environment is not static, but changing. As a result, migrants' socio-legal integration is extended in time and gradual. Migrants' legality could be discussed at two levels - at the behavioural level and at the level of a value. Changing status between the two poles of legality and illegality brings with it greater appreciation of legality as a value. This research presents a strong argument that the relationship between behaviour and attitudes to law could be meaningfully investigated in an applied domain of the new socio-legal environment.

With the expansion of the use of private prisons and detention centres worldwide and the increasing involvement of private actors in the provision of custodial services, this doctoral thesis considers life inside two private prisons in England. Using theoretically informed ethnography it evaluates the effect of responsibility on men imprisoned in two private prisons in England. Firstly, it briefly reviews the background and development of prison privatisation in England and Wales and considers the role and place of private prisons as part of a wider neo-liberal shift. Secondly, using qualitative data gathered inside two private prisons, it evaluates if these prisons, through their regimes, are trying to create responsible self-governing prisoners. The thesis reviews both, how regimes and practices in place in these two prisons attempt to forge responsible prisoners, and how individual men and groups of prisoners experience, feel about, cope with and assimilate penal messages of self-governance and responsibility. Finally, it questions both the impact of responsible prisoners for prisons and the impact of responsibility on prisoners and argues that, whilst there is a benefit to fostering environments in which prisoners are enabled to become responsible and self-governing, a careful balance must be maintained, as for some men the responsibility itself becomes characteristic of the "pain of imprisonment".

A perennial question amongst social movement strategists is to what extent movements can use the tools of the system they are struggling against in their efforts to change that system. Whilst this debate traditionally distinguishes between two camps – radical and reformist approaches – this thesis investigates one movement that breaks this mould. The thesis uses the example of Bolivia's Landless Peasants' Movement (MST) to intervene into renewed theoretical discussion about the possibilities and perils for such movements of using the legal system in the pursuit of systemic social change. Through its tactic of land occupation, the MST breaks the law by occupying unused land on large estates, whilst also invoking other laws stipulating that unused land must be redistributed to those who will work it. The thesis situates the MST's approach to law in the context of an intensified process of juridification in the neoliberal period, through which the logic and language of law increasingly have come to structure political debate and dissent, creating particular pressures for radical movements to engage with the law. Yet it also suggests that movements like the MST have developed subversive ways of engaging the law in response. By examining the MST's tactic as it interacts with this broader context of intensified juridification, the thesis clarifies and nuances the theoretical discussion by identifying how the particular conditions of political mobilisation in the neoliberal period bear on this theoretical debate. Moreover, by examining specifically how this movement's approach to law is differentiated from traditional radical and reformist approaches, and from other attempts to combine the two, the thesis reveals further potential options for radical movements seeking to engage the law. The thesis ultimately suggests that the transformative potential of law may not lie in employing the content of individual laws but in strategic manipulations of the contradictions inherent in the liberal legal form.

En France, entre les années 70 et fin 90, alors que la notion de crime raciste occupait fréquemment la sphère militante et médiatique, elle ne constituait pas une catégorie juridique dans la sphère judiciaire. La mésentente concernant le traitement des crimes racistes semble trouver son origine dans le fait que deux conceptions d’une même réalité ont pu coexister pendant une trentaine d’années : la réalité du groupe concerné par ces violences d’une part et celle émanant du droit étatique d’autre part. Alors que pour les premiers, le caractère raciste des violences ne faisait aucun doute, pour les parlementaires l’idée même d’un mobile raciste a régulièrement été rejetée. D’un point de vue législatif, il a fallu attendre l’année 2003 pour que la France adopte une loi permettant de prendre en compte l’intention raciste d’un crime. Depuis cette date, sous certaines conditions, le mobile raciste peut constituer une circonstance aggravante dans les infractions de type criminel. Cette thèse s’intéresse à ces deux vérités et aux circonstances qui ont déterminé leur existence. Elle vise notamment à interroger le rôle joué par le droit étatique dans la production et le maintien des catégories ethnoraciales par delà la politisation des violences qui en résultent. D’un point de vue empirique, l’enquête a consisté à confronter la parole des militants ayant dénoncé une double violence, celle provoquée par les agressions d’une part et celle induite par leur traitement pénal d’autre part, à un ensemble de sources archivistiques émanant des services du ministère de l’Intérieur et du Parlement. D’un point de vue théorique, les apports de la sociologie et de l’histoire de l’immigration ont été complétés en intégrant les réflexions des théories de l’ethnicité et de la Critical Race Theory. En définitive, cette recherche met en évidence le fait que l’universalisme républicain fait partie intégrante du processus de racialisation. En revenant sur les dispositions majeures de la politique d’immigration et sur la figure stigmatique de l’homme arabe, un premier axe s’intéresse à la manière dont le droit étatique a particularisé une catégorie d’individus en participant à la production des catégories ethnoraciales. Un deuxième axe vise à caractériser les crimes racistes qui ont été dénoncés entre les années 70 et fin 90. Un dernier axe enfin étudie la carrière juridique du mobile raciste durant cette même période. Il expose la manière dont la législation antiraciste a invisibilisé la question des crimes racistes et maintenu les catégories ethnoraciales en appliquant des règles universelles à des groupes qui ont auparavant été différenciés. / In France between the 1970s and the 1990s, while the notion of racist crime was frequently brought up in the activist and media fields, it was not a legal category in the field of justice. The disagreement regarding the treatment of racist crimes seems to find its roots in the fact that two different conceptions of a same reality could coexist for thirty years: thereality of the group that was primarily concerned by such violence on the first hand, and that flowing from the State law on the other hand. Whereas for the former, the racist component of the violence was out of doubt, the members of the Parliament regularly rejected the mere idea of racist motive. In legal terms, it was not until 2003 that France adopted a law allowing toconsider the racist motive of a crime. Since then, and only under certain circumstances, the racist motive can constitute an aggravating factor for criminal offenses. This dissertation investigates these two truths and the circumstances that led to their existence. In particular, this research seeks to interrogate the role that the State law played in the production andconservation of ethnoracial categories, beyond the politicization of the violence flowing from such categories. In empirical terms, the study compared the discourses of the activists that denounced this dual violence, that provoked by the aggressions and that of their penal treatment, to an array of archival sources from the Interior Ministry’s services and theParliament. In theoretical terms, this research completes the contributions made by the sociology and history of immigration by integrating the theories of ethnicity and Critical Race Theory. Overall, this dissertation sheds light on the fact that Republican universalism is an integral part of the process of racialization. Through the study of the main dispositions of theimmigration policy and of the stigmatic figure of the Arab man, a first part investigates the way the State law particularized a category of people by taking part in the production of ethnoracial categories. A second part seeks to characterize the racist crimes that were denounced between the 1970s and 1990s. A last part investigates the judicial career of theracist motive. It shows how the anti-racist legislation blinded the question of racist crimes and maintained the ethnoracial categories by enforcing universal rules to groups that were formerly differentiated.

Our criminal justice system works very hard to prevent criminals from harming other individuals; however, unfortunately mistakes happen. One wrongful conviction is one too many. There are multiple factors that can be assumed to be the cause of wrongful convictions. However, due to the lack of directly related research, the determents are not well established. The following research addresses wrongful convictions as a result of public defender representation. Through the process of theory construction, the research uses critical race theory and social disorganization theory to show the relationship between court appointed representation and wrongful convictions. A new theory is also established that is referred to as the partial load reduction theory. This theory establishes the relationship that exists between wrongful convictions and public defender representation and provides solutions as well as new avenues for future research.

The purpose of this study was to determine the attitudes and opinions of circuit court judges in Kentucky concerning the issue of pregnancy and substance abuse. A questionnaire was mailed to all 90 circuit court judges in Kentucky. The questionnaire, consisting of both a Likert scale and open-ended questions, dealt with concerns relating to the criminalization of pregnant substance abusers, fetal rights, state intervention in the case of pregnant substance abusers, and mothers rights. The ages of the judges, as well as their years of experience on the bench, were used to determine their attitudes on these issues. Results showed that older judges and more experienced judges were more likely to favor criminalization of pregnant substance abusers. Younger judges and less experienced judges, however, were less likely to favor criminalization of pregnant substance abusers.

Relatively low rates of homicide solvability results in law-abiding citizens being forced to co-exist with known murderers, which is detrimental to a community’s psyche. This condition happens disproportionately in neighborhoods where crime is high, cohesiveness among its members is weak, and the citizen/police relationship is little or non-existent. This research sought to understand this phenomenon by asking,” How can murder solvability rates improve in marginalized communities?” and employing four theoretical lenses. Using the city of New Orleans as a case study and holding Social Disorganization Theory constant, Spiral of Silence, Habitus, and Dramaturgy were utilized in an attempt to understand individuals who witness violent crime but do not come forward. From these theories, nine assumptions were formed, connecting the literature to this specific area of inquiry. Using a mixed methods approach both qualitative and quantitative data was collected within New Orleans from a variety of instruments: a survey (both web-based and in-person), a questionnaire and two deliberative forums. Utilizing the questionnaire and in conjunction with the Kettering Foundation and the National Issues Forum Institute (NIFI), this research was also able to quantitatively compare New Orleans data with data collected nationally by NIFI. While the data collected support all nine assumptions, five of the nine account for 82% of the data. Of these five, none originated from the Spiral of Silence theory, two originated from the Habitus theory, and three originated from the Dramaturgy theory.