Research
You will find a complete range of our peer-reviewed monographs, multi-authored and edited works, including original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
This chapter traces the feminist origins of Vulnerability Theory, critiquing the focus on gender equality reforms that emphasized discrimination while neglecting the need for redistribution of caregiving responsibilities across social institutions. It explores how legal frameworks historically reinforced gender hierarchies, creating separate public and private spheres that confined women to dependent roles within the family. Early Supreme Court decisions institutionalized these gendered roles, making formal equality difficult to achieve in an unequal society.
Vulnerability Theory offers an alternative by rejecting the individualized rights-based approach and advocating for a universal legal subject that reflects the collective human condition. It calls for rethinking social institutions and the public–private divide to ensure a more equitable allocation of caregiving and societal responsibilities, arguing that caregiving is essential to societal reproduction and must be supported through responsive institutional arrangements.
This chapter examines the institutional, as well as the theoretical, implications of the core principle of Vulnerability Theory: as embodied beings we are inherently dependent on social structures and arrangements, which are the products of state law and policy. It emphasizes the role of social institutions in fostering resilience and critiques the traditional focus on specific demographic categories. The chapter advocates for a broader understanding of institutional structures that affect everyone. Shaped by political, legal, and social frameworks, these structures must be responsive to universal vulnerability rather than shaped by individualized neoliberal ideals of autonomy and independence. The chapter calls for institutionalizing rather than isolating the individual in our theories so as to best serve both collective, as well as individual, wellbeing.
This chapter introduces the concept of the ontological body to highlight the universality of vulnerability and its implications for law and policy. Vulnerability Theory posits that, as embodied beings, we are inherently embedded within social institutions. Embodiment inevitably generates dependencies, which challenges the neoliberal focus on individual liberty and autonomy.
By centring vulnerability as a fundamental aspect of the human condition, the chapter underscores the necessity of a responsive state, one that will generate laws and policy responsive to the ‘vulnerable subject’. Vulnerability Theory thus provides a framework for assessing the laws and policies around state creation and monitoring of societal institutions essential for individual and collective wellbeing.
This chapter explores the challenges of conceptualizing a collective approach to social justice in a society dominated by individualistic, non-interventionist political discourse. It contrasts the neoliberal emphasis on liberty and autonomy with a progressive rights-based, anti-discrimination approach, finding both inadequate for defining a universal or truly social approach to justice.
Vulnerability Theory, by acknowledging the realities of the corporeal body and our inescapable dependence on social institutions, asserts social justice must be grounded on recognizing the state’s responsibility to create and support social institutions. Individual and societal resilience is nurtured within these critical social institutions. It challenges current notions of limited governance and the deference to ideals of individual rights, emphasizing the importance of governmental responsibility in achieving comprehensive social justice through responsive and coordinated institutional arrangements.
This chapter examines the limited ways in which injury or harm is understood within US political and legal culture, focusing on the failure to recognize state inaction as a source of harm. It critiques the distinction between ‘negative rights’ (non-intervention) and ‘positive rights’ (state obligations), particularly the tendency to view state inaction as safeguarding individual liberty, even as it allows profound inequalities to persist.
Vulnerability Theory argues that state neglect should be viewed as institutionalizing subordination and inequity, constituting a form of gross constitutional negligence. This perspective shifts the understanding of injury to encompass the harm caused by systemic indifference to human vulnerability and dependency, asserting that the very principles that legitimate the creation of the state means it must be constituted to actively support and extend individual and societal wellbeing.
This chapter explores the limitations of equality as an overarching aspiration, examining how traditional notions of equality, liberty, and autonomy distort our understanding of justice and state responsibility. Vulnerability Theory, by focusing on the body and the life course, challenges these abstract ideals and highlights how ‘inevitable inequality’, which arises from our inescapable biological and developmental dependence on social institutions, must be recognized in the structuring of those institutions.
Many, if not most, social institutions and relationships are inherently unequal. Examples include those of employment (employer/employee), the family (parent/child), or education (teacher/student). These social arrangements often are inappropriately characterized as private but, in reality, are legal and political constructs shaped by law and policy. This realization necessitates a rethinking of state responsibility to ensure the just allocation of shared but asymmetric responsibility, one that would reflect the realities of the ‘vulnerable subject’ and the individual’s lifelong dependency on social arrangements.
Vulnerability theory offers an alternative to social-contract and rights-based paradigms. Beginning with the corporeal body, the theory argues we are inevitably and constantly dependent on social institutions that are generated (and ideally monitored) through law. Accordingly, vulnerability theory argues for a state attentive to the needs of the universally ‘vulnerable subject’.
Based on lectures at Trinity College Dublin that focused on four foundational concepts, this book highlights how vulnerability theory differs from individualistic liberal frameworks.
Calling for a reorientation of law toward a collective responsibility-based approach, it is essential reading for anyone interested in political theory, social justice, and sociolegal scholarship.
This closing chapter provides conclusions that point towards where the debates and findings should be directed once the book has finished. Here, I draw together all the core arguments from each chapter. I ultimately argue that legal aid lawyering cannot be explained solely through macro theories of sociology of work and precariousness alone, as this misses out the interactions on the organizational and individual levels. Likewise, without situating the profession in the macro context, an accurate and valid representation of the legal aid world would not be given as the legal aid cuts permeate every layer of the occupation. Social reality in the context of the legal aid lawyer is multifaceted and complex, and therefore such an eclectic approach is needed to give real insight. It is through this threefold (macro/meso/micro) model that a richer picture of how precarity and austerity refract down the varying levels of the legal aid occupational terrain emerges. The humanity of lawyers is not something that is regularly spoken about. External characteristics are very one-dimensional, and they ignore the day-to-day professional roles. This book has sought to address that.
Since the 2012 LASPO cuts, legal aid provision in England and Wales has faced severe challenges, threatening both client access to justice and traditional practices.
This book offers an in-depth ethnographic study of how these cuts have transformed the professional identity of legal aid lawyers amid shrinking resources. By documenting the first-hand experiences of those on the front line, it reveals how these professionals navigate the precarious landscape while maintaining their commitment to justice.
This is a unique and insightful look into the evolving role of legal aid lawyers in a diminishing industry across both civil and criminal remits.
