Based on ethnographic research in Bhutan and among Bhutanese living in Nepal, this thesis examines the reach of law in everyday life in contemporary Bhutan. Drawing on inter-linked themes of social values drawn from Buddhist teachings and the importance of morality, power and legitimacy, I examine popular discourse of and about law. It contributes to current arguments in socio-legal studies and anthropology concerning the reach of law in contemporary societies and its significance in everyday life. Furthermore, my thesis represents the first ethnographic account of law and society in Bhutan. It makes a valuable contribution not only to our understanding of Bhutan, but also provides an ideal opportunity to examine everyday conceptions of law as the Bhutanese State promotes legal change that draw on non-indigenous models. The thesis considers the impact of the creation of a modem, independent judiciary and recent changes in legal education and the increasing amount of legislation and secondary regulations. However, the everyday construction of law, as well as the meanings and uses to which law are put, raises problems. Therefore, I turn to examine how ordinary people create and develop a sense of the law by focussing on the development of legal consciousness. To do this, I look less at the formal legal processes of the law than at the narratives about law from a number of Bhutanese. These narratives focus on the importance of community values and notions of morality and legitimacy, which simultaneously draw on a prevalent authoritative public discourse concerning social behaviour and individual re-interpretations and resistance within the broad framework of the discourse. I examine the interrelationship between these various features, which evoke, on an individual level, a sense of "legal consciousness" and I develop how this informs daily life. This interrelationship highlights the dynamism of the process and the fluidity of ideas and adaptability to changing needs and relationships of power. This approach allows for an examination of law situated within, rather than separate from, everyday life in order to analyse the fragmentary and often inconsistent use made by individuals of the legal orders and forums available to them.

Medical guidelines on the same medical condition differ between England and the Netherlands. These guidelines are referred to as evidence-based because they are supposedly based on a systematic searching for and appraisal of medical studies to drive recommendations for appropriate care for specific clinical circumstances. This comparative study interrogates what causes these differences and similarities between guidelines and tries to uncover the mechanisms behind the development of medical practice guidelines. Four case studies, on lower back pain and on type 2 diabetes in both countries, are used to provide a detailed empirical account of the development of medical guidelines. Interviews with guideline developers are combined with a detailed analysis of available guideline documents. The overarching finding of this thesis is that medical evidence plays a more limited and nuanced role in guideline construction than might be expected and that guidelines are manifestations of professional (self-) regulation. Importantly, the research also finds that institutions shape guidelines in a multitude of ways. This study has endeavoured to add to a more nuanced understanding of evidence within the literature: conceptualising evidence as part of a process of a social and institutional construction. This construction is used within a collaborative and communicative process aimed at creating 'objective facts'. Contrary to existing scholarship, this thesis argues that evidence merely informs the understanding of members of guideline groups while a range of economic, cultural, institutional, and political factors, that together form cognitive frames, provide the driving force behind the development of guidelines. Institutional factors have shown to be essential elements in guideline development, influencing all aspects of development through institutional cultures of practice. This study concludes that calling guidelines evidence-based is an important rhetorical instrument, which helps to conceal and legitimize some of the normative choices that are inherent in guideline making.

This study examines the role of law in the constitution and contestation of state power in African history. Using Zimbabwe as a case study, it analyses legal struggles between Africans and the state, and amongst Africans themselves between 1950 and 1990. In doing so it intervenes in a number of scholarly debates on the relationship between law, state power and agency in African history. Firstly, I examine the role of law in constituting state power by exploring the interplay between legitimation and coercion in long term perspective. Secondly, I interrogate legal centralism as an approach to understanding developments in the legal sphere in African history and make the case for legal pluralism as a more appropriate approach. I argue that during the period under study, Zimbabwe witnessed a process of evolving legal pluralism characterised by the mutual appropriation of forms, symbols and concepts between state law and the ‘customary law’. Thirdly, I contribute to the debate on African legal agency by demonstrating that its significance went beyond the utility of the law in specific social, economic and political struggles. I argue that it also gave expression to emergent political imaginaries, shifting ideas of personhood and alternative visions of the social and political order. Lastly, I argue that, by undertaking a historical examination of legal struggles, this study provides a useful foundation from which to analyse contemporary legal struggles in Zimbabwe and in Africa more generally. The findings presented here caution against being drawn in by the apparent novelty of contemporary legal struggles. In addition, they suggest the means by which human rights discourse in Africa might be reinvigorated.

The scholarly consensus on the political foundations of independent constitutional review – that it invariably stems from electoral and inter-branch competition – has been weakened by recent empirical discoveries which demonstrated that constitutional courts in a number of authoritarian states are actually more activist than previously assumed. This dissertation examines this phenomenon using the case of Hong Kong, an authoritarian polity first under the sovereignty of Britain and then of China. It is widely believed that the competence of the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal – a cosmopolitan common law final appellate court – to strike down legislative and executive acts, and its ability to induce the regime’s compliance with its rulings, is intrinsic to the Basic Law, just as it is in liberal democracies. Nevertheless, two interrelated anomalous phenomena – the Court’s repeated issuance of activist rulings with near-complete impunity, and the continuing forbearance of China’s foremost constitutional authority, the National People’s Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC), faced with the Court’s aggressive assertions – necessitates careful explanation. This dissertation proposes an explanatory Constitutional Investment Theory, which highlights the similarities between “investment” in constitutional review and investment in financial assets, to explain the activation, consolidation, and ascendancy of independent constitutional review in authoritarian settings. It shows how strong incentives to signal its ideological commitment to the “One Country, Two Systems” scheme, both internationally and domestically, first drove the NPCSC to acquiesce in the Court’s self-aggrandisement; how internal divisions within and external opposition to the Hong Kong regime have rendered retaliation a costly option; and how the Court’s strategic resolution of the Basic Law’s ambiguities has encouraged continuous political investment in its jurisdiction and autonomy. Altogether, these have contributed to the formation of a dynamic equilibrium of constitution control, under which the Court and the NPCSC dynamically developed their own jurisprudence within their respective bailiwicks.

This thesis examines the regulatory landscape relating to private orphanages, both foreign and domestically run, in China, and the formal and informal relationships between such homes and government which structure this space of order. Part A introduces the contextual factors shaping the gradual socialisation and privatisation of charitable activity generally, and the child welfare-specific social, economic and cultural dynamics influencing the emergence of private orphanages. Parts B and C set out the ethnographic findings of field-work examining the practical operations of private orphanages, and a theoretical analysis of the various interactions occurring with government orphanages, and local and central officials. It is shown that the ostensible government monopoly on institutional care of orphans, established in law and policy and consistent with the objective of maintaining tight control over civic organisations and religious-based and foreign-led activities, is belied by a proliferation of private orphanages emerging to address gaps in state welfare provision. This has led to the emergence of a delicate balance between top-down official discourse, rhetoric and law, and bottom-up pragmatic considerations. Further, the prima facie 'missing role' of the state in law, regulation and policy-making is contradicted in practice by evidence of a complexity of highly paternalistic state-orphanage relationships occurring beyond the normative framework of official laws and policies. Such extra-legal state-society interaction is characterised by informal, flexible and paternalistic negotiations with local officials, and mediated by structures of power and capacity. 'Law beyond government' and 'government beyond law' are central features of the multidimensional maintenance of this space of order, and point to several defining points of distinction of law as a cultural notion in the Chinese context, including a marked preoccupation with legitimacy over legality and paternalistic discipline and discretion over impartial adjudication.

The central argument of this work is that the level of aggression of judges sitting in vulnerable courts is a function of their attempt to protect the institutional security of such courts. I argue that in contexts characterised by a lack of a culture of judicial independence, by high levels of judicial delegitimisation, and a high level of public visibility of judicial affairs, judges will attempt to simultaneously construct public support and avoid political conflicts with the Government. As a result, judicial decisions are driven by judges’ calculations of both the public’s reaction and the Government’s reaction to their rulings. I claim the level of aggression of judges’ interventions will increase when the Government's tolerance to decisions against its preferences was is higher and the public appears to be more supportive. I empirically test this theory using the case of Argentine Supreme Court Justices between July 2004 and September 2010. The findings confirm the theoretical expectations according to which judges are simultaneously concerned with the construction of public support and the avoidance of conflicts with the Government. In addition, my study shows three relevant patterns in terms of judicial behaviour. First, the Justices increased their level of aggression by using different modes of involvement when the public appeared to be more supportive and the Government’s tolerance higher during the period under study. Second, the decreased level of aggression occurred by altering the features of the same remedy in response to the political conditions in which decisions were issued. Third, existing legal constraints prevented Justices from being more aggressive.

This thesis focuses on subnational corruption law enforcement in a new democracy: Indonesia. It seeks to understand temporal and spatial variation in corruption prosecutions in the post-Suharto era, and answer three core research questions: Why has the number of corruption cases steadily increased over the past twenty years? Why is there significant subnational variation in the investigation and prosecution of corruption? And why are some cases of local corruption investigated and prosecuted while others are ignored? The argument developed in the thesis consists of three inter-linked components: that corruption generates complex collective action problems for law enforcement; that ostensibly public law enforcement regimes in Indonesia are informally privatised public law enforcement regimes; and that, in the context of these hybrid regimes, the availability of resources and the formation of coalitions is critical to understanding when individuals and groups mobilise corruption laws at the subnational level. The project uses a mixed methods research strategy—combining qualitative case studies, formal game theoretic modelling, and quantitative regression analysis—to develop and provide evidence for the argument. The research strategy required twelve months of fieldwork in Indonesia. In total over one hundred interviews in Jakarta and Central Java were conducted, and a unique dataset of local corruption cases was coded for two additional provinces. The thesis's argument and methodological approach has implications for literature that spans the field of law and politics: the political economy of prosecution, theories of legal mobilisation, socio-legal studies, and studies of politics and power in contemporary Indonesia.

The Variable Child concerns the legal decision-making process in unaccompanied child refugee applications, and the role that conceptions of childhood play in the process. I examine when particular types of knowledge are drawn upon by legal actors, as well as the effects of the claim-making practices that create meaning, or truth effects, in legal decision-making. I identify how legal actors exercise discretion by investigating how facts are constructed with different ideas about childrens competence, abilities and knowledge. The Unaccompanied Child Refugee Evidentiary and Procedure Guidelines, which governs legal decisions, has embedded within it various, sometimes competing, conceptions of the child and childhood. These multiple notions create considerable discretionary space for refugee officers to make decisions about individual cases. My examination of legal decisions reveals a strategic use of vulnerable and/or responsible conceptions of childhood. Another strategy used to establish facts in these cases is to exclude the cultural differences of childhood both these practices are accomplished through employing several different knowledge moves. Refugee officers invoke vulnerable and/or responsible constructions of childhood to displace the impact of other/alternative constructions of childhood, namely Chinese ideas of parental relations. This avoids the potential for legal decisions to set standards for similar cases in the future. Childhood studies have documented how different axes of scholarly inquiry produce different understandings, typologies, and knowledges of the child and childhood. What remains understudied is how competing knowledges of the child and childhood are applied, negotiated, and formalized in legal decision-making. My study investigates how power relations constitute particular constructions of childhood, and the consequences these relations have for childrens lives. Unlike examining childhood as contextual, I document how variable understandings of the child and childhood are constituted, institutionalized, and normalized through the law. My study examines the complexities of legal decision-making, a process that is often black-boxed. I also trace which conceptions of childhood are drawn upon to substantiate legal claims, and how a social context for the child and childhood emerges. By examining the relations of law in the context of children, my work contributes to the growing area of childhood studies and socio-legal practices.

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This thesis explores the imagery of underworld justice, and its associated beliefs and practices, as they developed throughout Chinese imperial history. Certain elements of the Chinese imperial legal system, including judges and trials, and laws and codes, were borrowed by the Daoists and applied to their construct of the afterlife. Underworld justice beliefs and practices flourished throughout China's imperial past, and are still influential to some devotees in today's Hong Kong. Among the various questions that are explored, this thesis examines the place of underworld justice in the legal consciousness, or everyday law, of the devotees in contemporary Hong Kong. There are two dimensions to this thesis: historical and empirical. In the historical part, I trace the development of underworld justice beliefs and practices in imperial China. I analyse some of the characteristics and rituals of underworld justice, and relate them to the imperial laws and procedures upon which they were modelled. Such tracing allows us to discern the considerable overlap between the imperial legal system and underworld justice beliefs and practices. In the empirical part, I present data gathered at mainly three City God temples in Hong Kong. Such data involve conversations with Daoist and Buddhist priests, temple keepers and devotees. The data gathered not only shed light on the general state of City God veneration in contemporary Hong Kong, but also the influence of underworld justice on the devotees' understanding of law. The data reveal that the studied devotees regard underworld justice, which administers the law of karma, as superior to the state legal system. Hence, underworld justice is not considered as an informal dispute resolution process alternative to that of the state, but as a mechanism that can intervene in court cases, due to its being more authoritative.