News

JUSTICE has published a new short report assessing some changes in face-to-face civil legal advice since LASPO 2012. The report briefly surveyed three areas: 1) Bringing advice to users, 2) Expanding university law clinics, 3) Alternative business models that can help to make advice more affordable /accessible. The aim of the report is to point out some developments in this field, and assess whether these innovative practices are effective, efficient and ethical. The main finding of the report is that there is a real need for long-term, large-scale research into “what works”.

The current socio-political context is characterised by Brexit and Europe’s shoring up of borders in response to irregular migration via the Mediterranean, hyper-criminalisation of migrants, growth of corporate involvement in the management of migration, travel bans, rise of right-wing populism, racisms and xenophobic sentiments across much of the West, and rapid erosion of rights. At the same time, there are constantly new modes of solidarity and resistance emerging, which are also subject to state responses and controls.

This event aims to bring together scholars at various stages of their careers, third sector workers, and people with direct experience of immigration controls and borders to examine the theme of border harms from different substantive angles and theoretical perspectives. The idea of border harms encompasses the variety of ways that bordering practices produce harm and are interconnected with race and racisms. The symposium organisers therefore invite proposals on any of the following broad areas:

• The policing of migration
• Refugees and asylum seekers
• Border deaths
• Migration and state violence
• Resistance, solidarity, protest, and advocacy
• Immigration detention
• Deportation
• Foreign national prisoners
• The criminalisation of solidarity
• The politics of reform and advocacy
• Everyday borders and bordering practices
• Racialisation, securitisation, criminalisation, and surveillance
• Brexit and the ‘hostile environment’
• Populism, nationalism, and citizenship practices
• Empire, colonialism, and state racisms

In addition to academic papers, proposals are welcome for other types of participation, including workshops, performances, and art. Participants are strongly encouraged to consider issues of race, gender, and other social factors in their contributions.

This event is interdisciplinary and will be of interest to scholars from criminology, sociology, social policy, law, human geography, anthropology, and psychology, as well as people with lived experience of border harms and NGO workers involved in practice, advocacy, policy, and research. Attendance will be free.

Confirmed keynote speakers are Professor Shahram Khosravi (Stockholm University), author of ‘Illegal’ Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders (Palgrave, 2010) and editor of After Deportation: Ethnographic Perspectives (Palgrave, 2018), and Dr Alpa Parmar (University of Oxford), Associate Director of Border Criminologies and co-editor of Race, Criminal Justice, and Migration Control: Enforcing the Boundaries of Belonging (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Please email your proposal (250 words maximum) to the symposium organisers, Monish Bhatia, Gemma Lousley, and Sarah Turnbull (Birkbeck, University of London), by 5:00pm on Friday, 6 April 2018 at BorderHarms@gmail.com. A publication is being planned based on a selection of work presented at the symposium. If you are interested in putting your work forward for consideration in this publication, please so indicate in your proposal. Thank you!

The Early Career Scholars’ Day 2018 and the 10th Conference on the Future of Adversarial and Inquisitorial Systems will be taking place on 25 April 2018 at the Faculty of Law, University of Basel. The theme of the conference is "Accountability of Criminal Justice Systems: Formation, Application and Enforcement of Law in Changing Circumstances".

Accountability in criminal justice has many dimensions: We expect accurate outcomes, procedural fairness, protections of civil liberties, and respectful treatment of all participants in the criminal justice system to the extent possible. Traditionally, we have accorded great power and influence to expert practitioners in the system − be they police, judges, prosecutors, or defense counsel. As victims, defendants and ordinary citizens increase their ability to tell their stories in new ways, their concerns have changed the way that scholars and politicians think about what it means to be accountable. Whether we start with an inquisitorial or adversarial model, increased transparency in the digital age has led to a corresponding increase in pressure on all of the participants in the system. Competing priorities inevitably lead to tradeoffs between incommensurable interests. Maintaining a legitimate system requires thoughtful engagement to manage potential conflicts, and to rebalance the approaches the participants adopt in light of new information.

In this session, we will hear presentations from early-career scholars writing about accountability in criminal justice from comparative and national law perspectives. We welcome authors interested in critiquing the system from a descriptive or normative perspective, or in proposing new methods, approaches or perspectives that will further the conversation on defining and achieving accountability in criminal justice.

The application should encompass:

− maximum 5 pages of the research subject you would like to present

− CV with full contact details

Application deadline: 15 February 2018

Applications should be sent to the conference coordinator, Professor Sabine Gless, to the following address: sabine.gless@unibas.ch. The selected students will give a presentation of their work in front of their peers. Then, discussants will include the members of the 10th Conference on the Future of the Adversarial and Inquisitorial Systems, among them Prof Jackie Hodgson (University of Warwick), Prof Richard Myers (University of North-Carolina at Chapel Hill), Prof Michele Caianiello (University of Bologna), Prof Sabine Gless (University of Basel). The floor will be open to debates. Travel expenses linked to the participation at the Ph.D. seminar, unfortunately, cannot be covered.

On Friday 26 January 2018 from 13:00-14:00 Warwick Alumnus Charles A. Adeogun-Phillips (class of 1986) will be giving an Alumni Talk at the Law School Student Hub (Ground Floor). Charles is an accomplished litigation practitioner and former international prosecutor. Between 1998 and 2010, Charles led with great success, teams of international lawyers in 12 separate precedent-setting, complex and pioneering international criminal trials. Subsequently, he founded Charles Anthony LLP and has expertise in advising governments, international organizations, and sovereign states. Charles will be meeting with the current students of the Warwick Law School to tell them about his time at Warwick and to talk about his career. To attend the event, please sign up: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/newsandevents/events/alumnitalk