This paper surveys recent trends in the development of the sociology of law in Denmark. The overall argument of the paper is that, currently, the sociology of law in Denmark is marked by a striking sociological and more specifically institutional and empirical turn. This new direction in scholarship suggests not only a renewed research focus on the institutional dimensions of law but it also – and very differently from work from the 1980s and 1990s – suggests a re-orientation towards sociology more generally. A clear consequence of this return to the sociological core of the sociology of law has been an empirical orientation towards how law is practised, how legal institutions work and, as part of that, how the legal profession takes part in both legal change and transformations of state and society. This new research relies not only on general sociological theory and method but also on the more specific elite sociology, sociology of professions and sociology of knowledge.

This paper examines the regulation of ‘personhood’ through the granting or denying of legal capacity. It explores the development of the concept of personhood through the lens of moral and political philosophy. It highlights the problem of upholding cognition as a prerequisite for personhood or the granting of legal capacity because it results in the exclusion of people with cognitive disabilities (intellectual, psycho-social, mental disabilities, and others). The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) challenges this notion by guaranteeing respect for the right to legal capacity for people with disabilities on an equal basis with others and in all areas of life (Article 12). The paper uses the CRPD to argue for a conception of personhood that is divorced from cognition and a corresponding recognition of legal capacity as a universal attribute that all persons possess. Finally, a support model for the exercise of legal capacity is proposed as a possible alternative to the existing models of substituted decision-making that deny legal capacity and impose outside decision-makers.

The introduction of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative in 1996 established landmark legal and policy innovations both in the regulatory landscape of sovereign debt and in the framework of international development finance. As the HIPC framework draws to a close, this paper reviews the impact of this initiative on the regulation of sovereign debt, in particular the governance of third world debt. The paper considers the implications of the initiative's explicit link between debt restructuring and development policy and its incorporation of non-traditional normative values, such as poverty reduction and participatory development, into the legal and political discourse of sovereign debt. The paper argues that while the changes which brought about the HIPC initiative have led to a number of key initiatives to reform the governance of third world debt, they have also had the contradictory effect of reinforcing the core disciplinary discourses and pre-existing practices of the sovereign debt regime.

The recognition of individual identity as multilayered and circumstance based leads to a shift from a theory of general rights to a theory of specific rights connected to structural social change. General rights, such as the right to health and the right to work, must be interpreted according to the circumstance of differently situated women, so that rights are specific enough to ensure that they are actually enforced for different groups, including groups that, due to discrimination, are made invisible to the law. In this sense, the different circumstances that help develop the identity of women, Black women or poor Black women in Brazil will be studied to give specific content to general rights recognised by Brazilian law and by International human rights law.

Precarious work is a crucial impediment to substantive equality. This paper examines the regulation of precariousness in the light of two recent trends: the casualisation of employment in the wake of the crisis, and global efforts to regulate domestic work (e.g. ILO Domestic Workers Convention (No 189)). It takes these developments as an opportunity to explore the effective regulation of contemporary labour markets, and in particular the role of the Standard Employment Relationship (SER). The paper returns to two prominent accounts of the SER: Vosko's critique of SER-centrism in non-standard work regulation and Bosch's notion of the flexible-SER. It argues that the domestic work debates confirm the value of a modernised SER in its temporal dimensions. Yet the literature on precarious work tends to focus on regulatory settings in which the standard model remains dominant. The key contemporary challenge is to identify strategies that will embed this model in settings in which it is in decline or was never deep-rooted. Drawing on the notion of ‘reconstructive labour law’, the paper argues for innovative legal mechanisms that prompt the construction of flexibilised SER-type relationships. It concludes, however, that for these strategies to be effective, casualisation must be identified not only in contractual arrangements but also in working-time practices.

Asylum applicants in the UK must show, to a ‘reasonable degree of likelihood’, a well-founded fear of persecution, on the basis of race, religion, political opinion or membership of a particular social group, in the event of return ‘home’. This requirement presents myriad challenges both to claimants and decision-makers. Based on findings from a three-year national study, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, this paper explores those challenges as they relate to women seeking asylum in the UK whose applications include an allegation of rape. The study explored the extent to which difficulties relating to disclosure and credibility, which are well documented in the context of women's sexual assault allegations in the criminal justice system, might be replicated and compounded for female asylum-seekers whose applications include a claim of rape. Findings suggest that the structural and practical obstacles faced in establishing credibility, and the existence of scepticism about rape claims and asylum-seeking more generally, mean that decision-making can often be experienced as arbitrary, unjust, uninformed or contradictory, making it difficult for women asylum applicants who allege rape to find refuge in the UK.

Pensions constitute an important link, in many welfare regimes, between processes of social categorisation and labour market segmentation over the life-course. Pensions also reveal how socio-economic rights are defined in relation to normative and ideological categories (such as gender, class and race), how (and for whom) the state prioritises their distribution, and what these processes reveal about notions of equality and their political and legal institutionalisation. In this paper, I argue that pensions, especially but not only occupational pensions, therefore fall within the ambit of a broad conception of labour law; they should be of interest to feminist legal scholars not solely because of their linkages to paid employment, however, but because of their relationship with the organisation of both production and social reproduction – and the evolution of norms of equality across these domains.

There is currently no mechanism – no journal, no learned society – somehow integrating Portuguese sociology of law, despite a considerable academic production. In an attempt to appreciate globally and substantially this production, this paper takes as a starting point the theory of semi-periphery formulated by Boaventura de Sousa Santos in the 1980s, and revisits the findings of socio-legal research carried out in Portugal over the recent decades in the light of that theory. The conclusion that can be drawn from this exercise is that the theory of semi-periphery – provided it is upgraded in order to better take into account features of recent processes of globalisation – still supplies a valuable framework for the reflection on the social, economic and political conditions that favour uses of the law as a tool for human groupings to govern themselves.