07 April 2013

BOOKS: Ashgate Law and Legal Studies

The Ashgate Research Companion to Migration Law, Theory and Policy
Ashgate PublishingThe following titles have been published in the Ashgate Law and Legal Studies series:
Ashgate PublishingThe Ashgate Research Companion to Migration Law, Theory and Policy complements the already successful Ashgate series Law & Migration, established in 2006 which now has a number of well-regarded monographs to its credit. The purpose of this Companion is to augment that Series, by taking stock of the current state of literature on migration law, theory and policy, and to sketch out the contours of its future long-term development, in what is now a vastly expanded research agenda. The Companion provides readers with a definitive and dependable state-of-art review of current research in each of the chosen areas that is all-embracing and all-inclusive of its subject-matter. The chapters focus on the regional and the sub-regional, as well as the national and the global. In so doing, they aim to give a snap-shot that is contextual, coherent, and comprehensive. The contributors are both world-renowned scholars and newer voices and include scholars, practitioners, former judges and researchers and policy-makers who are currently working for international organisations.
With contributions from experts in the field of sociology of law, this book provides an overview of current perspectives on socio-legal studies. It focuses particularly on the relationship between law and society described in recent social systems theory as ‘structural coupling’. The first part of the book presents a reconstruction of theoretical tendencies in the field of socio-legal studies, characterised by the emergence of a transnational model of legal systems no longer connected to territorial borders and culturally specific aspects of single legal orders. In the following parts of the book, the contributions analyse some concrete cases of interrelation between law and society from an empirical and theoretical perspective.
Transitional justice is usually associated with international criminal courts and tribunals, but criminal justice is merely one way of dealing with the legacy of conflict and atrocity. Justice is not only a matter of law. It is a process of making sense of the past and accepting the possibility of a shared future together, although perpetrators, victims and bystanders may have very different memories and perceptions, experiences and expectations. 

This book goes further than providing a legal analysis of the effectiveness of transitional justice and presents a wider perspective. It is a critical appraisal of the different dimensions of the process of transitional justice that affects the imagery and constructions of past experiences and perceptions of conflict. Examining hidden histories of atrocities, public trials and memorialization, processes and rituals, artistic expressions and contradictory perceptions of past conflicts, the book constructs what transitional justice and the imagery involved can mean for a better understanding of the processes of justice, truth and reconciliation. 

In transcending the legal, although by no means denying the significance of law, the book also represents a multidisciplinary, holistic approach to justice and includes contributions from criminal and international lawyers, cultural anthropologists, criminologists, political scientists and historians

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