Legal Outsiders

In Legal Outsiders, Darryl Williams knew law school would be difficult, but he never imagined the viciousness of classmates, the ultra competiveness of his colleagues, the racial intolerance of others, and the arrogance and sarcasm of his professors. But that was only the beginning; he was also intrigued by the seductive charm of Lena, another law school student who vowed to avoid men at all costs after enduring a failed marriage. Malik, the quintessential player, finds more than he bargained for when he allows his sexual addiction to distract from his educational pursuits. His fate will be left at the mercy of others because of his irresponsible actions. James realizes that having an over-sexed wife can lead to ecstasy and utter heartbreak. The question is, which one will he choose?

This volume closely examines a single canonical article and how it continues to shape the future of sociolegal studies.

Law and Outsiders is a collection of 13 essays from leading young scholars covering five important areas of legal scholarship: adjudication, European law and politics, migration, vulnerable minorities and legal values. The recurring theme in the volume is the way in which rules and processes are contributing to the creation of twenty-first-century 'others' in areas such as domestic constitutional systems, international security and migration, and global human rights discourses. The essays are drawn from the second International Graduate Legal Research Conference, held at King's College London in June 2008.

What is the future of civil rights? Like a living thing, discrimination evolves, adapting to its time. As discrimination becomes more individualized, as difference becomes more pronounced, we need a civil rights that is attuned to the way identity is performed today. Outsiders is filled with stories that demand attention, stories of people whose search for identity has cast them to the margins. Their stories reveal that we need to refresh our vision of civil rights. Taking its cue from religious discrimination law, Outsiders proposes two major changes to civil rights law. The first is a right to personality. Identity comes from within. The goal of civil rights law should be to take people as they come, to let each of us determine who we are and how we relate to the world around us. The second change is a shift in how the law responds to discrimination. The critical question driving equality law should be whether there is space to accommodate a person's identity. Accommodations are about respecting difference, not erasing it. Accommodations are a way to bring outsiders in. Outsiders seeks to change the way we think about identity, equality, and discrimination. It argues that difference, not sameness, should be the cornerstone of civil rights. Mixing doctrine and theory, art, and personal narrative, Outsiders proposes a civil rights for everyone. Being different is universal. We are all outsiders.

Who are the agents of financial regulation? Is good (or bad) financial governance merely the work of legislators and regulators? Here Annelise Riles argues that financial governance is made not just through top-down laws and policies but also through the daily use of mundane legal techniques such as collateral by a variety of secondary agents, from legal technicians and retail investors to financiers and academics and even computerized trading programs. Drawing upon her ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Japanese derivatives market, Riles explores the uses of collateral in the financial markets as a regulatory device for stabilizing market transactions. How collateral operates, Riles suggests, is paradigmatic of a class of low-profile, mundane, but indispensable activities and practices that are all too often ignored as we think about how markets should work and be governed. Riles seeks to democratize our understanding of legal techniques, and demonstrate how these day-to-day private actions can be reformed to produce more effective forms of market regulation.

Social polarization has roiled neoliberal political establishments but has rarely culminated in electoral victories for anticapitalist outsiders. Instead, outsiders who accommodate capitalists often prevail. Capitalist Outsiders revisits celebrated exemplars of Latin American populism in Mexico and Venezuela to shed light on this phenomenon. It reveals how anticorruption campaigns boosted Mexico’s neoliberal-era capitalist outsider by drowning out salacious corporate scandals; how Venezuela’s apparently enlightened capitalist outsiders of the 1940s relied on segregationist, punitive labor relations; and how corporate insiders of Venezuela’s neoliberal political establishment unwittingly validated the anticapitalist Hugo Chávez as the true outsider. It weaves together these case studies to reveal an unlikely common origin for capitalist outsiders in both countries: their sequential insertion into global oil production and Mexico’s early twentieth-century radical oil workers. Capitalist Outsiders moves beyond cataloging “populist” traits and tactics or devising the institutions that might avert their rise. Instead, it specifies the distinct social bases of capitalist vs. anticapitalist outsiders. It exposes how a nation’s earlier incorporation into the capitalist world economy casts a long shadow over neoliberal-era outsider politics.

Labour market flexibility is one of the most closely debated public policy issues in India. This book provides a theoretical framework to understand the subject, and empirically examines to what extent India’s ‘jobless growth’ may be attributed to labour laws. There is a pervasive view that the country’s low manufacturing base and inability to generate jobs is primarily due to rigid labour laws. Therefore, job creation is sought to be boosted by reforming labour laws. However, the book argues that if labour laws are made flexible, then there are adverse consequences for workers: dismantled job security weakens workers’ bargaining power, incapacitates trade union movement, skews class distribution of output, dilutes workers’ rights, and renders them vulnerable. The book: identifies and critically examines the theory underlying the labour market flexibility (LMF) argument employs innovative empirical methods to test the LMF argument offers an overview of the organised labour market in India comprehensively discusses the proposed/instituted labour law reforms in the country contextualises the LMF argument in a macroeconomic setting discusses the political economy of labour law reforms in India. This book will interest scholars and researchers in economics, development studies, and public policy as well as economists, policymakers, and teachers of human resource management.