Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Exploring how justice is delivered at a time of rapid technological transformation, Justice in the Digital State exposes urgent issues surrounding the modernisation of courts and tribunals whilst examining the effects of technology on established systems. Case studies investigate the rise of crowdfunded judicial reviews, the digitalisation of tribunals and the rise of ‘agile’ methodologies in building administrative justice systems. Joe Tomlinson’s cutting-edge research offers an authoritative and much-needed guide for navigating through the challenges of digital disruption.
In recent years, the United Kingdom's Home Office has started using automated systems to make immigration decisions. These systems promise faster, more accurate, and cheaper decision-making, but in practice they have exposed people to distress, disruption, and even deportation.
This book identifies a pattern of risky experimentation with automated systems in the Home Office. It analyses three recent case studies including: a voice recognition system used to detect fraud in English-language testing; an algorithm for identifying ‘risky’ visa applications; and automated decision-making in the EU Settlement Scheme.
The book argues that a precautionary approach is essential to ensure that society benefits from government automation without exposing individuals to unacceptable risks.
Family group conferences (FGCs) are a strengths-based approach to social work practice, empowering families to take responsibility for decision-making. It is a cost-effective service, which is currently used by the majority of local authorities.
This collection discusses the origins and theoretical underpinnings of family led decision making and brings together the current research on the efficacy and limitations of FGCs into a single text.
This insightful book also covers topics such as the use of FGCs in different areas of children and families social work, uses case studies to illustrate current practice, and explores whether FGCs should become a mainstream function of children and families social work.
After years of research and reflection on the work of the interdisciplinary family justice system Mervyn Murch offers a fresh approach to supporting the thousands of children every year who experience a complex form of bereavement following parental separation and divorce. This stressful family change, combined with the loss of support due to austerity cuts, can damage their education, well-being, mental health and long-term life chances.
Murch argues for early preventative intervention which responds to children’s worries when they first present them, without waiting until things have gone badly wrong. His radical proposals for reform involve a much more coordinated and joined up approach by schools, the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, and Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services.
This book encourages practitioners and academics to look outside their professional silos and to see the world through the eyes of children in crisis to enable services to offer direct support in a manner and at a time when it is most needed.
Modernising health care: Reinventing professions, the state and the public is a crucial contribution to debates about the rapid modernisation of health care systems and the dynamics of changing modes of governance and citizenship.
Structured around the role of the professions as mediators between state and citizens, and set against a background of tighter resources and growing demands for citizenship rights, Ellen Kuhlmann’s book offers a much-needed comparative analysis, using the German health care system as a case study. The German system, with its strongly self-regulatory medical profession, exemplifies both the capacity of professionalism to re-make itself, and the role of the state in response, highlighting the benefits and dangers of medical self-regulation, while demonstrating the potential for change beyond marketisation and managerialism.
Kuhlmann critically reviews dominant models of provider control and user participation, and empirically investigates different sets of dynamics in health care, including tensions between global reform models and nation-specific conditions; interprofessional dynamics and changing gender arrangements; the role of the service-user as a new stakeholder in health care; and the rise of a new professionalism shaped by social inclusion.
Modernising health care provides new approaches and a wealth of new empirical data for academics and students of health policy, medical sociology and sociology of professions, and for health policy makers and managers.
ePDF and ePUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence.
During the 20th century the locus of care shifted from large institutions into the community. However, this shift was not always accompanied by liberation from restrictive practices. In 2014 a UK Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of ‘deprivation of liberty’ resulted in large numbers of older and disabled people in care homes, supported living and family homes being re-categorized as ‘detained’.
Placing this ruling in its social, historical and global context, this book presents a socio-legal analysis of social care detention in the post-carceral era. Drawing from disability rights law and the meanings of ‘home’ and ‘institution’ it proposes solutions to the Cheshire West ruling’s paradoxical implications.
Parliamentary diplomacy has provided a crucial, promising outlet in Taiwan’s challenging pursuit of its own interests in the international arena.
This book assesses both the potentials and the constraints of parliamentary diplomacy for Taiwan. Through a comparative perspective, and using evidence from the relations of the Legislative Yuan in Taiwan with the US Congress and the European Parliament, the authors investigate the implementation of parliamentary diplomacy in Taiwan and its impact in Taiwan’s foreign policy. In their analysis, the authors draw vital lessons that will have important implications for other entities which have similar challenges and aspirations.
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence
Effective participation in court and tribunal hearings is regarded as essential to justice, yet many barriers limit the capacity of defendants, parties and witnesses to participate.
Featuring policy analysis, courtroom observations and practitioners’ voices, this significant study reveals how participation is supported in the courts and tribunals of England and Wales. Including reflections on changes to the justice system as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, it also details the socio-structural, environmental, procedural, cultural and personal factors which constrain participation.
This is an invaluable resource that makes a compelling case for a principled, explicit commitment to supporting participation across the justice system of England and Wales and beyond.
Counter-terrorism is now a permanent and sprawling part of the legislative and operational apparatus of the state, yet little is known about the law and practice of how it is reviewed, how effective the review mechanisms are, what impact they have or how they interact with one another.
This book addresses that gap in knowledge by presenting the first comprehensive, critical analysis of counter-terrorism review in the United Kingdom, informed by exclusive interviews with policy makers, politicians, practitioners and civil society.
At a time of rising populism and debate about immigration, leading legal academic Jo Shaw sets out to review interactions between constitutions and constructs of citizenship.
This incisive appraisal is the first sustained treatment of the relationship between citizenship and constitutional law in a comparative and transnational perspective.
Drawing on examples from around the world, it assesses how countries’ legal, political and cultural processes help to determine the boundaries of citizenship.
For students and academics across political, social and international disciplines, Shaw offers an accessible response to some of the most pressing international questions of our age.
