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Editorial to the Special Edition of the Journal of Legal Research Methodology on ‘Empirical Legal Research’
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Can Willing Migrant Sex Workers be Real Victims of Human Trafficking? A WPR Analysis of the Australian Modern Slavery Act Inquiry Report.
Get PDFUsing Bacchi’s (2009) What’s a Problem Represented to be? (WPR) methodology, this paper analyses the Hidden in Plain Sight: An Inquiry into Establishing a Modern Slavery Act in Australia Report to examine the deep-seated assumptions, historical ways of thinking, and the silences used to support the contemporary construction of the problem of human trafficking in the Australian sex industry. This paper will also focus on how the Report understands migrant sex workers and their association with trafficking. In doing so, the aim is to destabilise the taken for granted knowledges and truths presented in the Report. Finally, the paper will provide alternative ways of understanding migrant sex workers and trafficking in the sex industry that may broaden all victims’ access to Australia’s human trafficking response, irrespective of the industry they are located in
Old Ghosts/New Regrets: Drift and Fragile Life Trajectories in the Context of the Pandemic
Get PDFWith the onset of the pandemic, the precarious position of Roma communities in Bulgaria, particularly young people and their future prospects, seem bleaker than ever before, reaching new heights in terms of their insecurity. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, conducted prior to and post several lockdowns during the pandemic (2020-2021), this paper will place forward the argument that the crisis we are currently witnessing, the unprecedented levels of multi-faceted social marginalization and exclusion are intensified by ‘old ghosts’ that have haunted social policy for decades and the withdrawal of the state during the lockdowns will most certainly have a devastating impact – ‘new regrets’, one’s which cannot be overcome by simply providing access to the consumer market economy, the mantra on which the pathways towards revitalization are premised
Do We Want a Human First, and a Lawyer Second? Developing Law Student Empathy Through Clinical Legal Education
Get PDFIn the UK, the legal profession is increasingly acknowledging the importance of emotional intelligence and empathy in legal practice. Furthermore, research has demonstrated that soft skills such as empathy can be taught, and that these skills should be incorporated in legal education. This study uses the Basic Empathy Scale to examine whether law student participation in law clinic and tax clinic modules had any effect on students’ self-reported empathy levels. It is submitted that, in general, the students who worked in clinic experienced a statistically significant positive shift in their empathy levels. However, a few students who worked in clinic also experienced a decrease in their empathy levels, and the possible reasons for this are explored. In addition, this paper considers the impact of gender on students’ self-reported empathy levels
CLEO: Clinical Legal Education Organisation: Qualifying Work Experience Guidance for University Law Clinics
Get PDFIn order to help law clinics navigate the new regulations, a small working group from CLEO have put together this draft guide to the QWE. In developing this guide, we recognise that the new routes to qualification are controversial and we are not endorsing or expressing approval for these routes to qualification. As an organisation, CLEO is committed to developing clinical legal education as a rich and innovative method for teaching law. Legal education, in particular for undergraduates, is about much more than qualifying as a solicitor and indeed many law graduates do not go onto qualify as legal professionals. However, we are aware that many of our members will be offering qualifying work experience, or may be asked by senior management to offer qualifying work experience and we therefore want to develop guidance for our members to assist with navigating the new regulations. This guidance is to assist university law clinics only, when encountering a student’s claim for QWE
A Social-Legal Analysis of Reforms in the Regulation of Sex Work: The Case Study of End Demand Legislation in Israel
Get PDFThis article proposes an innovative approach to analysing legal and policy reforms in the regulation of sex work. Using the development of the Israeli 2019 Prohibition on the Consumption of Prostitution Act (hereinafter: End Demand Law) as a case study, we develop a socio-legal analytical framework which combines three elements: 1) the relationship between the “law on the books” and the “law in action” in the context of sex work policy – what are the distributive outcomes of the act? How is it implemented, who gets impacted by it, to which degree and why? 2) the importance of existing legal and policy baselines to evaluate new policy approaches. We argue that the baseline is key not only to understanding policy trajectories, but also to evaluating differences in perception of ‘End Demand’ legislation in different jurisdictions; 3) the lived experience of those affected by the policy. In our case study, sex workers are the population most directly impacted - we include their voices through interviews as well as secondary sources and focus on their perception of the law and its impact on their lives, options, livelihoods, and feminism.
Combining these three elements, our analytical framework is used to evaluate the dynamics of change in the regulation of sex work in the context of the Israeli End Demand Law - how it came about, which baselines it emerged from and which international influences affected it, but also how Israeli anti-prostitution governance feminists influenced the legislative and policymaking process. We pay equal attention to sex workers’ voices not only as the most affected population, but also as political actors, activists and aspiring governance feminists in the Israeli context, who were marginalised in the legislative process
LGBTQIA+ sex work in the time of Covid 19
Get PDFThis report extrapolates how gender, sexuality and the law intersect for queer and trans sex workers, within the conditions of the Covid-19 global health crisis. It reports on the outcomes of legal policy as they were adopted during the pandemic and examines which is the most damaging: the lack of legal rights, the criminalisation, or the dyadic relation of the two
Enhancing the Measurement of Sentence Severity through Expert Knowledge Elicitation
Get PDFQuantitative research on judicial decision-making faces the methodological challenge of analysing disposal types that are measured in different units (e.g. money for fines, days for custodial sentences). To overcome this problem a wide range of scales of sentence severity have been suggested in the literature. One particular group of severity scales that has achieved high validity and reliability are those based on Thurstone’s pairwise comparisons. However, this method invokes a series of simplifying assumptions, one of them being that the range of severity covered by different disposal types is constant. We undertook an expert elicitation workshop to assess the validity of that assumption. Responses from the six criminal law practitioners and researchers that participated in our workshop unanimously pointed at severity ranges being highly variable across disposal types (e.g. much wider severity ranges were identified for suspended custodial sentences than for fines). We used this information to re-specify Thurstone’s model allowing for unequal variances. As a result, we obtained a new, more robust, scale of sentence severity
Sex Workers: Citizenship Status and Identity, Civic Deficits, and Exiting
Get PDFSex workers have a lesser citizen status, yet the relationship between sex work and citizenship status has rarely been explicitly considered within extant research. In contrast, this article will critique England and Wales’s sex work legal and policy discourses and frameworks from the perspective of the moral, material, structural, and operational components of citizenship (Lockwood,1996). The operation of citizenship has led to the creation of policy and law (such as the Sexual Offences Act 2003) which has assigned sex workers to a “negatively privileged” group prevented from accessing a full citizenship identity (Lockwood, 1996, 538). Sex workers experience civic deficits (stigmatised, power, and fiscal) and inferior resource allocation, as their access to social citizenship rights are curtailed on moral and material grounds. Despite claims by policy and lawmakers to support and protect this group, the article proposes that the structure and operation of citizenship interplays with victim and criminal discourses to further marginalise sex workers. This is evidenced in the article by the example of exiting programmes, which reconfigure and reinforce the exclusion of sex workers while claiming to provide a supportive route out of the profession