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For an analysis of the “legal context” in which speech is at issue, one might most naturally turn to the development of judicial doctrine. But the history of attempts to demarcate the legal boundaries of speech is mostly a history of failed and inconclusive efforts, as even a brief review will show. Nevertheless, a few helpful clues also emerge. This chapter examines three legal doctrines that have been used to set boundaries on what counts as speech for constitutional purposes: prior restraints, obscenity, and defamation. Briefly, these doctrines start off by claiming that prior restraints, obscenity, or defamation define what is not speech; but, as this chapter, that claim has been unraveled by subsequent judicial decisions in all three areas. So these doctrines do not serve, even negatively, as a definition of speech for legal or constitutional purposes. They do not set the “outer boundaries” of speech.

The authors conclude by examining their emergent theory, and the contributions that their study makes to studies of legal consciousness and to social and legal policy. They indicate that their research reveals how LGBT individuals frame their access to the creation and maintenance of families; the legal, social, and geographic obstacles to those goals; and their responses and reactions to those obstacles. The authors find that individual factors such as demographics and familial desires; mediating factors such as social networks, legal actors, and organizations; and legal context all interact with cultural discourses about the law in order to shape LGBT parents’ legal consciousness. Their findings thus illustrate that there is no single experience of LGBT parents with regard to legality. Their legal consciousness as part of the parenting process is as varied and contextual as the legal and sociopolitical environments in which they reside.

This chapter begins by presenting recent theoretical discussion of the relationship between stress and memory. It then summarizes a body of research that explored children's recall of naturally occurring stressful events, specifically injuries serious enough to require hospital emergency-room treatment. It focuses on potential sources of individual variation in children's recall of real-life stressful events, both in research conducted in the laboratory and in related research conducted by other investigators. Finally, the chapter discusses the practical significance of this work for clinical and legal contexts.

Police homicide investigations can be understood as being situated in a legal context that is shaped by the extant framework of legal rules and definitions, and the social processes of their enforcement. Law establishes the principles, functions, and structures within which and through which the police operate as crime investigators. This chapter examines how law and legal system regulate investigative work. It also considers the ways detectives are able to negotiate actively such constraints, so as to shape and inform the wider legal process of which the investigation is a constituent part.

In the introduction, the authors provide an overview of the literature on same-sex families, the theoretical framework of legal consciousness, conceptualization of key variables, the study’s research methods, and sample characteristics. They describe the research question, which involves examining how the law becomes salient in the lives of same-sex families, how individuals navigate the law as part of their family decision-making, and how these practices and understandings of the law vary across legal context. They emphasize the ways in which legal context, namely the legal and sociopolitical environment within a particular state of residence, shapes decisions to become a parent, the method of becoming a parent, and everyday parenting. The varied ways that LGBT parents grapple with legality shed light on the manner in which the law can be, at times, embraced, manipulated, modified, or rejected by those seeking to create and protect family within a heteronormative legal system.

This chapter begins by describing the legal environment for LGBT parents in the United States. The ways formal laws regarding LGBT families vary across state lines are important, not just in terms of how the law can affect access, but also in how variation in laws conveys different cultural messages about whether and how law can be used. The authors then examine differences in family laws across states and present statistical analyses that explore how formal laws appear to affect the presence of children in same-sex households and particular routes to parenthood. These analyses illustrate how formal law, at times, appears to have surprisingly little effect on the family outcomes of LGBT parents. Accordingly, these findings raise questions regarding how formal law might be ignored, modified, or rejected by LGBT individuals who are engaged in family formation, and whether legal context plays a role in shaping these outcomes. Chapter 1 concludes by discussing how the authors measure legal context for the study, including examining the challenges inherent in measuring a broad, dynamic concept such as “the law.”

The historical transition from symbolism to signification, from natural connections to arbitrary designations, represents the last great stage in the expression of meaning. The sign is, at last, freed of any inherent, necessary connection with what it signifies. This chapter grapples with a key feature of modern language: its “signs” are arbitrary, in the sense that they lack any inherent natural connection with what they signify. Instead of looking beyond or outside a language for indications of its meaning, we must look inside. Linguistic values—like those of the other systems of meaning previously discussed—are contrastive and relational. Although natural meaning, speaker's meaning, and expression meaning all share a deep contrastive or relational structure, to the extent that they differ it is speaker's meaning that predominates in the legal context. The chapter clarifies how speaker's meaning arises within an advanced system of signification, especially a language.

Chapter 1 introduces the book with a brief description of the complex phenomena of human trafficking, highlighting the contested definitions that characterise it. Using the Mediterranean ‘migrant crisis’ of 2014/15 as a backdrop the chapter explores the way that terminology is used interchangeably to confuse the whole area of exploitation and focus on individualised perpetrators while largely ignoring the socio-economic conditions that permit the ‘trade’ in people to flourish. By examining the complex nature of human trafficking and the challenges of conceptualising it in terms of exploitation discourses, chapter one introduces the book’s focus on an examination of the appropriateness of current responses to victims/survivors and attempts to provide ‘holistic’ and ‘effective’ intervention. Within this analysis, the challenges that the wider socio-political sphere imposes on survivor care are examined.

Chapter 1 argues that women’s street involvement comprises a variety of criminalized income-generation and resource-acquisition strategies, including prostitution, that result in part from their cultural and spatial-environmental estrangement from legal work opportunities and social services. Situating the women’s everyday hustles within this gendered and racialized sociolegal and economic context considerably complicates centuries-old debates on prostitution by elucidating how, for most street-involved women, sex trading constitutes the most immediately available solution to their need for money, drugs, and shelter. This chapter details how women differ considerably by age, other sources of income, criminal justice system involvement (as indicated by quantitative arrest and conviction data), and life experience in terms of how they approach sex trading. Likewise, it explores how alliance professionals engage in their work differently depending upon their personal and/or professional subscription to particular ideological frameworks informed by the cultural and legal contexts in which they live and work.

This chapter focuses on Georg Büchner's Woyzeck (1837), which, based on an early case of legal responsibility, expounds the problem of judgment in the medical-legal context by staging the case as a dramatic ensemble of scenes of observation. The procedures leading up to the confirmation of the murderer Johann Christian Woyzeck's death sentence shape what was to be known as the Woyzeck case. By commissioning Dr. Clarus as a medical expert, the legal case, which was about the societal sanction of a criminal act, became a case of quite a different nature. The question that Dr. Clarus attempts to answer is not about the deed and its particular circumstances, but about the personality of the perpetrator and his motives. The document to which Büchner's Woyzeck refers verbatim is the second report that Dr. Clarus provided and that he published twice within only one year. The chapter argues that the canonical drama Woyzeck, based on the Woyzeck of the Clarus report, is essentially about the making of the case.

This chapter evaluates the capability approach both in its ability to justify the traditional account of labour law and in its usefulness in furthering a newer conceptual articulation of regulation of work (labour law). The chapter undertakes this evaluation through an exploration of labour law scholars’ engagement with the capability approach. While labour law scholars’ engagement with the capability approach is varied, several of them offer a narrow interpretation of the approach. That interpersonal variations mandate different levels of resources and circumstances for individuals to attain similar functioning ability is one of the fundamental insights of the capability approach. Seen in the context of legal entitlements of heterogeneous workers—from Uber drivers to domestic workers—this insight signifies that substantive entitlements of workers need to be context-specific and diverse so that each different category of workers could expand their overall capability to a roughly equal level. It is the capability approach that is able to offer a coherent idea of legal regulation integrating heterogeneous legal entitlements under one conceptual whole. The chapter contends that while it is possible to justify the traditional account of labour law by employing the capability approach, full potential of the approach will be realized in engaging it in normative (re)conceptualization of regulation of work.