Cultural Expertise and Socio-Legal Studies: Special Issue Vol: 78

Austin Sarat
Amherst College, USA


Product Details
Format:
Hardback
ISBN:
9781787695160
Published:
Publisher:
Emerald Publishing Limited
Dimensions:
216 pages - 152 x 229mm
Series:
Studies in Law, Politics, and Society
List price £74.99 List price €99.99 List price $127.99
Categories:
This special issue of Studiesin Law, Politics, and Society aims to foster a dialogue that is inclusive,constructive, and innovative in order to lay the basis for evaluating theusefulness and impact of cultural expertise in modern litigation. Itinvestigates the scope of cultural expertise as a new socio-legal concept thatbroadly concerns the use of social sciences in connection with rights and thesolution of conflicts. While the definition of cultural expertise is new, theconflicts it applies to are not, and these range from criminal law to civillaw, including international human rights. 
In this special issue, socio-legal scientists withinterdisciplinary backgrounds scrutinize the applicability of the notion ofcultural expertise in Europe and the rest of the World. Cases include murder,female genital mutilation, earthquake claims, Islamic law, underage marriages,child custody, adoption, land rights, and asylum. The authors debate on avariety of themes, such as legal pluralism, ethnicity, causal determinism,reification of culture, and the "culturalization" of defendants. The volume concludes with an overview of the ethical implications of the definitionof cultural expertise and suggestions for a way forward.

Introduction; Livia Holden
Part I. Cultural Expertise with(out) Cultural Experts
From Invisible to Visible: Locating Cultural Expertise in the Law Courts of Two Finnish Cities; Taina Cooke
Cultural Expertise in Italian Courts: Contexts, Cases and Issues; Antonello Ciccozzi and Giorgia Decarli
Part II. Sites of Cultural Expertise
Assessing Cultural Expertise in Portugal: Challenges and Opportunities; João Teixeira Lopes, Anabela Leão and Ligia Ferro
Cultural Expertise in Asylum Granting Procedure in Greece: Evaluating the Experiences and the Prospects; Helen Rethimiotaki
Part III. Comparative Perspectives on Cultural Expertise
Court Cases, Cultural Expertise, and FGM in Europe; Ruth Mestre and Sara Johnsdotter
Between Norms, Facts and Stereotypes: The Place of Culture and Ethnicity in Belgian and French Family Justice; Caroline Simon, Barbara Truffin and Anne Wyvekens
Part IV. Cultural Expertise in Non-European Contexts
Cultural Expertise in Australia: Colonial Laws, Customs, and Emergent Legal Pluralism; Ann Black
The Role and Use of Cultural Expertise in Litigation in South Africa. Can the Western World Learn Anything from a Mixed, Pluralistic Legal System? Christa Rautenbach
Part V. Suggestions for a Way Forward
Beyond Cultural Expert Witnessing: Toward an Integrated Definition of Cultural Expertise; Livia Holden
Austin Sarat is WilliamNelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at AmherstCollege, USA. He is also a Five College Fortieth Anniversary Professor. He haswritten, co-written, or edited more than fifty books in the fields of law andpolitical science.

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