When a state claims its practices are lawful but at the same time another claims this unlawful, a paradox emerges. Legal indeterminacy becomes the ordinary rule, while the resolution of disputes is designated the exception. To illustrate how international law deals with paradoxes, this paper will employ the dichotomy of upstream–downstream trans-boundary interstate relations. Here the paradox arises, since upstream states traditionally advocate for the free utilisation of water within their territory, while downstream states instead advocate for the waters full continued flow. Although, from a logical perspective, such a paradox would typically be viewed as something negative, from a social perspective, paradoxes also draw attention to the frames of common sense. Indeed, by employing a Luhmannian-inspired theoretical framework, this paper proposes that, through a sociological understanding of paradoxes, one can more adequately rediscover and reconceptualise the manner in which international law institutionalises conflicting expectations into a more harmless, bounded and permitted contradiction.

This paper examines recent constitutional mobilisation in China, embodied in the weiquan (right defence) movement, Charter 08 and the 2013 constitutionalism debate. It contrasts Chinese and Vietnamese experience of constitutional mobilisation. This paper argues that constitutional mobilisation in China presents both convergence and divergence with those in Vietnam. The convergence stems from domestic dynamics, the impact of globalisation and the shared features of socialist/communist institutional settings. The divergence is due to Chinese constitutional exceptionalism and Vietnam's instrumentalist approach to global constitutionalism. Particularly, without necessary constitutional opportunity created by the constitution-making process, constitutional mobilisation in China has not created a national constitutional dialogue as has happened in Vietnam. This paper draws attention to the new function of socialist constitutions as a frame for social mobilisation and has general implications for the comparative inquiry into the social dynamics of constitutional law.

The attainment of justice through a private dispute-resolution process, such as the mediation process, is an elusive objective. With the prominent place mediation has been given in civil justice, debates about the ability of mediation to deliver substantive justice are relevant, particularly when proponents of the process argue that mediation offers some form of justice to its participants, while critics argue that it provides no justice. This paper explores the issue of justice in the private dispute-resolution process of mediation and its ability to deliver a substantive form of justice (rather than procedural or popular justice, which is often seen as the type of justice, if any, that is provided by mediation). It does so through an analysis of ethnographic data of the mediation process using Amartya Sen's justice framework set out in The Idea of Justice.

This paper compares two judgments of constitutional courts (French and German) assessing the constitutionality of statutes concerning veil-wearing and focuses on the underlying conceptions of ‘living together’. This means that what is actually compared is the self-understanding of the respective majority in the two societies as stated in the decisions. This is done by disassembling the concept of ‘living together’ into three elements: the notion of the individual, the meaning of belonging to the national community and the space accorded to religion in public. Each section of this paper examines one of these elements as they are entailed in the judgments and positions them critically within the respective legal cultural and historical contexts. The main aim of this paper is methodological in nature and is namely to show how comparative legal cultural studies can avoid essentialisation and rather highlight the complexity of every cultural context.

Although the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) proclaims the right to inclusive education, and much attention is being given to the goal of inclusive education in debates on human rights, there are doubts as to whether this right has led to a new direction in policy-making. The under-researched question is: why is there so much opposition to the implementation of the right to inclusive education? This paper examines the question by distinguishing between both the concept and practice of inclusive education. Using a specific interdisciplinary approach in order to critically analyse a legal norm, the paper looks into the very meaning of inclusive education by utilising some central conclusions from disability studies to appraise the ideal of inclusive education, and seeks to resolve related challenges by drawing upon political philosophy to investigate pragmatic solutions to the obstacles to inclusive education. This paper claims that it is thereby possible to incorporate the element of actual achievability into such an ideal.

This paper uses legal consciousness to discuss the influence of Portuguese culture on women's perceptions of and reactions to domestic violence. It is based on an in-depth small-scale study of Portuguese women living in England, and proposes that culture is central in shaping their behaviour, regardless of whether they experienced violence or not. The cultural characteristics that influence women the most are analysed here under the themes of ‘familism’, ‘shame and community pressure’ and ‘acculturation’. These do not operate all at the same level and their influence can change according to structural and individual circumstances. As such, the paper suggests that immigrant women's perceptions of and reactions to domestic violence can only be fully understood by articulating national culture with other structural and individual variables; this will enable a multilayered and situated understanding of women's legality that avoids a simplistic attribution of their behaviour to national or ethnic provenance.

This paper identifies an impasse between two conceptions of ‘property rights’. Formal conceptions explain ‘property rights’ in terms of an alienable right to exclude, that has moral significance in terms of individuals’ preference satisfaction, and describe a trust beneficiary as having a right against the trustees’ right. Functional conceptions explain a ‘property right’ in terms of the entitlements in a resource, which has moral significance in terms of a range of individual and social values, and describe a trust beneficiary as having a share in entitlements in the resource. This impasse has general implications for the normative analysis of property law and particular implications for the practical application of redistributive statutory provisions to discretionary trusts. The solution to this impasse lies in the abandoning the language of ‘property’ when we are concerned with the entitlements in a resource.

This paper analyses the visualisation of rape and sexual assault in legal and scholarly language. It begins with a critique of the Court of Appeal ruling in R v. Evans (Chedwyn) and its forensic examination of the details of a female rape complainant's consensual sexual activity with other men. The case is analysed in light of a visual metaphor used by Ellison and Munro to describe the removal of popular misconceptions about rape. The paper contextualises that discussion with reference to the idea of the male gaze and its affirmation of a phallocentric cultural and social world in which the objectification of female difference is entrenched. The paper finally challenges that assessment, however, sketching an alternative approach to visual-critical scholarship that embraces interdisciplinarity and a literary sensibility to break (or at least to loosen) the association between the prurient eye of the male voyeur and the criminal justice gaze.