May 2020: Research round-up including socio-legal responses to the COVID-19 pandemic

May 2020

Socio-legal insights in the time of COVID-19:

• Covid-secure workplaces: Professor Diamond Ashiagbor was interviewed by BBC Radio Kent after the government issued guidance to employers on how to make workplaces Covid-secure. In her interview on the Mid-morning show, Professor Ashiagbor said: “All of us who work, even if you don’t think you’ve got a contract of employment because you haven’t been given a piece of paper, everyone has a contract of employment which has an implied term that the employer has to provide a safe working environment for you and enable you to use equipment safely.” She also said: “You have the right to ask your employer for a written account of what they are doing to make sure it’s safe for you to go back to work.” Listen again in full at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p08brxc4 (2:10:30)
• Dialling up the pressure – prepping for a family law hearing by phone: Kent Law Clinic solicitor Philippa Bruce offers a fascinating peep behind the scenes in a post on the Clinical blog as she preps paperwork & client for a County Court hearing during lockdown…
• Remote hearings review to report back next week: an article posted by The Law Society Gazette featuring extracts taken from the blog post authored by Philippa Bruce for the Clinical blog
• Informal Work and Public Health in Colombia:Targeted Regulation during the Covid-19 Global Emergency: The COVID-19 pandemic has precipitated a new international research collaboration between Kent Law School, Essex Law School & the University of Rosario in Colombia that will address the precarity of people working in the informal economy. Dr Luis Eslava and Professor Donatella Alessandrini have been awarded £4.9k by Kent’s Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) Emergency Response Fund for the project which sees them partnered with Dr Anil Yilmaz and Dr Tara Van Ho (who have received the support of a GCRF Research Pump Priming Fund from the University of Essex); Professor Johanna Cortés-Nieto and Dr Enrique Prieto-Rios from Rosario’s Faculty of Jurisprudence; Dr Iván Jaramillo, director of the Observatory of Work (LaboUR); and Professor Leonardo Briceño, director of the Public Health Research Group at Rosario’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences. Rosario is also co-sponsoring the project.
• Setting the agenda for Zim’s post-Covid future: by Dr Alex Magaisa for Zimbabwe Independent 
• Articles by PhD legal scholar Ewelina Ochab for Forbes
  • The Growing Calls For China’s Accountability For Covid19 Response
  • Terrorist Organizations Use COVID-19 Lockdown To Expand Territory
  • The Growing Calls For China’s Accountability For Covid19 Response

Articles, books, blogs, chapters, grants and expert contributions:

• The State and International Law: A Reading from the Global South: an essay coauthored by Dr Luis Eslava and Professor Sundhya Pahuja (Melbourne Law School) published in Humanity, an international journal of human rights, humanitarianism and development as part of their Dossier on Technologies of Stateness (free access via Project Muse). Abstract: In this essay we re-describe the relationship between international law and the state, reversing the usual imagined directionality of the flow between the two. At its most provocative, our argument is that rather than international law being a creation of the state, making the state is an ongoing project of international law. In the essay, we pay particular attention to the institutionalised project of development in order to illuminate the ways in which international law gives form to, and actualises, states, and then recirculates from a multiplicity of points “within” them
• Equality – it’s a class issue. How do we build a more equal society? Problems and possibilities: a webinar featuring Professor Lydia Hayes, Dr Faiza Shaheen (CLASS) and Roger McKenzie (UNISON) hosted by the Institute of Employment Rights
• Victory on government funding of sick pay for care workers: Some background and implications.The government’s promise to fund sick pay for care workers is a step towards recognising the intrinsic link between care quality and workers’ rights. An article for the Institute of Employment Rights by Professor Lydia Hayes 
• The suspension of routine inspections renders care homes invisible to scrutiny and costs lives: A post by Alison Tarrant and Professor Lydia Hayes for LSE’s British Politics and Policy blog
• Giving care workers a collective voice is key to addressing the sector’s problems: an article by Professor Lydia Hayes for the Morning Star 
• Special Issue of the International Journal of Postcolonial Studies: Interventions 22.4 (2020) on Decolonial Trajectoreis: Praxes and Challenges: A new roundtable forum featuring Dr Sihraiya Jivraj and Dr Sandeep Bakshi in conversation with Professor Paola Bacchetta provides a comprehensive account of decolonial queer theorisation and her concept of “situated planetarities”, comments on transnational grassroots movements and alludes to processes of healing. A new Introduction to the Special Issue is also now available.
• Inscribing the State: Constitution Drafting Manuals as Textual Technologies: an essay by Dr Sara Kendall published in Humanity, an international journal of human rights, humanitarianism and development as part of their Dossier on Technologies of Stateness (free access via Project Muse). Abstract: The rise of expert knowledge in constitutional matters marks a turn toward “constitutional technicity,” where constitution drafting is regarded as a domain of technical expertise inhabited by neutral and politically divested actors. This article considers the constitution drafting manual or handbook as a genre in which technical expertise confronts the political. These documents consolidate a view of what constitutes “best practice” in the production of contemporary state identity, yet they also act into the field of state-building, naturalizing particular understandings of the state that reflect liberal legalist norms. In this sense the constitution-drafting manual is a consequential legal material that enlists values and actors in the production of contemporary stateness
• SQE Survey: a survey organised by Dr Ed Kirton-Darling and Antonia Layard (Bristol) that focuses on proposed changes to qualification as a solicitor – including the Solicitor Qualifying Examinations (SQE) – which the Solicitors Regulation Authority proposes to introduce from September 2021 (closing date 31 May 2020)
• Big Saturday Read: a blog by Dr Alex Magaisa
  • The crocodile does not give safe lifts
  • Critical analysis of the law of parliamentary recall
  • Old battles – When Joshua Nkomo nearly lost his seat
  • The trouble with our judiciary
• Articles by PhD legal scholar Ewelina Ochab for Forbes
  • Yet Another Girl In Pakistan Abducted, Forcibly Converted And Forcibly ‘Married’ To Her Abductor 
  • Is Pakistan’s Minorities Commission Doomed To Fail? 
• Walls: Brutality + Nostalgia in the Age of Terror: An image-based article by Dr Rose Sydney Parfitt, published in the online journal, New Perspectives. The article, which features in a Special Section on ‘Brutal International Law’ is one of a variety of submissions offering unusual and creative perspectives on the former US Embassy building in The Hague
• Fluctuating intensities: Thinking about gender through other socio-legal categories: an article by Dr Flora Renz for the SLSA Blog
• ‘Too Much, too Indigestible, too Fast’? The Decades of Struggle for Abortion Law Reform in Northern Ireland: by Professor Sally Sheldon, Jane O’Neill, Clare Parker & Gayle Davis for the Modern Law Review. Abstract: In July 2019, the UK Parliament voted by an overwhelming majority for fundamental reform of Northern Ireland’s archaic abortion laws. Regulations implementing the reform came into effect on 25 March 2020. Drawing on extensive archival resources and a small number of interviews, we locate this extraordinary political moment in a broader historical context. We explore the factors that blocked the possibility of reform in either Westminster or Stormont for over five decades and consider what it was that had changed in 2019 to render it possible. While the measure passed in Westminster represents a radical rupture with the past, we suggest that it was anything other than sudden, rather representing the culmination of decades of sustained campaigning. We conclude by briefly discussing what this change is likely to mean for the future.
• The Law of the List: UN Counterterrorism Sanctions and the Politics of Global Security Law: A new book by Dr Gavin Sullivan provides a unique and critical socio-legal analysis of the UN Security Council’s counterterrorism listing regime and the global data infrastructures that sustain it
• Potency and Power: Estrogen, Cosmetics, and Labeling in Canadian Regulatory Practices, 1939-1953: an article by PhD scholar Lara Tessaro for a Special Section on Chemical Entanglements: Gender and Exposure in the journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience 
• Criminal Justice Notes: a blog by Professor Dermot Walsh
  • Police Firearms Operations in the UK: The UK government’s considered response to the recommendations of the Inquiry into the flawed police operation that resulted in the fatal shooting of Anthony Grainger was published last week. It seems a missed opportunity to implement concrete reforms making such shootings less likely to happen in the future
  • Prosecuting Police Complaints in Jamaica: In a decision handed down a few weeks ago in Commissioner of the Independent Commission of Investigations v Police Federation and Others (Jamaica) [2020] UKPC 11, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council offered some interesting insights on the legal status and limited powers of the independent police complaints body in Jamaica

• KLS Research round-up April 2020
• KLS Research round-up March 2020