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.
Books: Research
The chapter analyses legal perception of complainants’ action rationality, demonstrating how the default legal understanding of autonomy and rationality obstructs insights into situated action rationality. Empathic translation, by means of empathy hooks and empathy negotiation, can be used by the prosecution to facilitate judges’ empathic imagination and understanding. Complainants’ physical appearance, eloquence and emotional expressions also influence judges’ interpretation of their action rationality. The defence instead advances the legal autonomous subject, which diminishes the import of context and rests on the tacit alignment between legal logics and hissense. This allows them to highlight inexplicable elements as Things. It also deflects focus on the action rationality of defendants and sustains a disproportionate focus on complainants. The chapter further demonstrate the importance of temporal boundary work in empathic translation and negotiation. The significance of temporal boundaries is linked to the preparatory work’s recommendation that the situation as a whole must be considered to assess the issue of (non-)voluntariness.
The chapter presents the aim of the book; to demonstrate, through in-depth, empirically grounded qualitative analysis, how the implementation of the 2018 Swedish consent-based rape law challenges core legal values, that is, the legal meaning of rationality, objectivity and autonomy. It further offers a brief history of the modern legal system; presents the context of the new law and its impact; and explains the theoretical approach to the legal values of autonomy, rationality and objectivity. In the context of previous international research, the relevance of the book to other countries and legal systems is also discussed. The chapter ends by presenting the outline of the book.
This chapter focuses how fuzzy defendants’ action rationality is conveyed to the court. Analysing cases of defendants’ denials, memory gaps and altered stories, the chapter demonstrates various effects of the ‘burden of explanation’. The burden of explanation is advanced as a ‘possibility’ of explanation indicative of an increasingly common defence strategy; the consent defence (‘it was voluntary’). The analysis demonstrates that, while a lack of defendant story led to conviction, changing from denial to a consent defence when faced by forensic evidence does not necessarily support the prosecution, as is often expected by prosecutors. The defence here draws on the empathy hook of hissensical male fear of being falsely accused of rape. The ‘evident’ rationality of male fear is corroborated by the equally hissensical rape myth that women lie about rape, a default assumption embedded in the rule of law. Another example of hissensese blending with default legal logics is protection of male friendship. The analysis specifically highlights defence lawyers’ intuitive understanding of the role of background emotions and the efficiency of activating hissense together with ‘objectivity rule reminders’.
This book offers an empirically grounded qualitative analysis of the 2018 Swedish consent-based rape law, and its implementation by legal professional actors. The theoretical framework combines feminist jurisprudence and the sociology of emotions, contributing to the fields of law and emotions and feminist rape research. The study followed 18 rape cases through observations of trials in districts and appeals courts and interviews with the legal professionals. Modern law and its notion of the rule of law are founded on a patriarchal point of view, which becomes particularly evident in gendered crimes like rape. The results demonstrate how legal professionals’ conventional understanding and practice of the core legal values of rationality, autonomy and objectivity obstruct effective implementation of the law. Conventional practice aligns legal logics with male common sense or hissense. Emphasizing the mutuality of the sex act and the active party’s responsibility to ascertain voluntariness/consent, the 2018 rape law open to legitimate alignment between hersense and legal logics. The dominant pattern in the results was to overlook this potential, hence a failure to achieve the objectives of the law. A few cases did showcase changed practice. Based on these, the book suggests concrete adaptations of professional roles and their collaborative doing of justice. Changed practice would achieve a more fair and just trial procedure; benefit the development of the legal system in democratic society; and strengthen the core legal values.
This first empirical chapter focuses on the legal doing of objectivity and rationality when faced with soft/oral evidence as the main evidence, demonstrating that the legal handling of rape case evidence is haunted by a pervasive ‘feeling of not knowing’. Hence, the emotive-cognitive reasoning around the new law draws on common sense and personal experience. Closer analysis of the legal professionals’ approach to the main and supportive (witness stories and forensic) evidence, shows that the ‘she lies’ myth is a structurally embedded point of departure, motivated by the legal notion of alternative hypothesis. This effectively results in a default credibility deficit on behalf of complainants, subjecting them to epistemic witness injustice. Meanwhile, the background discomfort and confusion of legal professionals having to assess the credibility of stories makes them disposed to objectify their evaluations by drawing on criteria issued as guidelines by the Supreme Court. These criteria are widely contested by psychological witness research.
In this final chapter we discuss the legal system as a slow-changing autopoietic system. As a kind of autonomy, autopoiesis is both protective of core judicial values and an obstacle to their evolving in line with societal values of diversity, inclusion, equality, and justice. The new rape law is transformative of the legal system due to its introduction of hersense to legal logics. This destabilizes the dominance of hissensical legal logics in practice, rooted in the patriarchal perspective structurally embedded in the legal system. The theory of autopoiesis aids to see how social influence both from the top (in the form of the new rape law) and from the bottom (in the form of adaptations) prompts variations in practice. This is seen in the professional role adaptations enacting hersensical legal logics. The chapter summarizes and discusses the results of the analysis and offers a thorough description of how the different legal roles can disseminate the promising adaptations observed. Opening legal practice and the core judicial values to critical reflexivity this way may strengthen the autonomy of the legal system as part of a democratic society.
The chapter explains the main characteristics of the Swedish legal system, a ‘mixed’ system combining codified law with case law, and part of the Scandinavian legal family. It details the 2018 rape law reform, which shifted the emphasis from force to voluntariness. Most rape cases are handled in the district courts, where the majority of judges are lay judges, and in appeals courts, where professional judges dominate. Although the principle of transparency applies in criminal cases, rape trials are conducted behind closed doors. The complainant is usually present in the district court but rarely in the appeals court. Swedish criminal procedure emphasizes legal certainty, transparency and immediacy, moving from preliminary investigation to trial, with prosecutors required to present both inculpatory and exculpatory evidence. The principle of orality mandates that evidence be presented orally, particularly important in rape cases. The chapter also discusses the principle of free admission and evaluation of evidence and Supreme Court guidelines.
