Reflections on the sociology of law: A rejection of law as 'socially marginal'

Rejecting the concept of law as subservient to social pathology, the principle aim of this article is to locatc law as a critical matter of social structure - and power - which requires to be considered as a central element in the construction of society and social institutions. As such, this article contends that wider jurisprudential notions such as legal procedure and procedural justice, and juridical power and discretion are cogent, robust normative social concerns (as much as they are legal concerns) that positively require consideration and representation in the ernpifical study of sociological phenomena. Reflecting upon scholarship and research evidence on legal procedure and decision-making, the article attempts to elucidate the inter-relationship between power, 'the social', and the operation of law. It concludes that law is not 'socially marginal' but socially, totally central. (c) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Agricultural tenancy reform: the end of law; or a new popular culture?

This paper applies a reading of the postmodernisation of law to the incremental reform of agricultural holdings legislation over the last century. In charting the shifting legal basis of agricultural tenancies, from ‘black letter’ positivism to the cultural contextuality of sumptuary law, the paper theorises that the underlying political imperative has been allied to the changing significance of property ownership and use. Rather than reflecting the long-term official desire to maintain the let sector in British agriculture, however, the paper argues that this process has had other aims. In particular, it has been about an annexation of law to legitimise the retention of landowner power while presenting a rhetorical ‘democratisation’ of farming, away from its plutocratic associations and towards a new narrative of ‘depersonalised’ business.

Key conclusions of the first international urban land surface model comparison project

he first international urban land surface model comparison was designed to identify three aspects of the urban surface-atmosphere interactions: (1) the dominant physical processes, (2) the level of complexity required to model these, and 3) the parameter requirements for such a model. Offline simulations from 32 land surface schemes, with varying complexity, contributed to the comparison. Model results were analysed within a framework of physical classifications and over four stages. The results show that the following are important urban processes; (i) multiple reflections of shortwave radiation within street canyons, (ii) reduction in the amount of visible sky from within the canyon, which impacts on the net long-wave radiation, iii) the contrast in surface temperatures between building roofs and street canyons, and (iv) evaporation from vegetation. Models that use an appropriate bulk albedo based on multiple solar reflections, represent building roof surfaces separately from street canyons and include a representation of vegetation demonstrate more skill, but require parameter information on the albedo, height of the buildings relative to the width of the streets (height to width ratio), the fraction of building roofs compared to street canyons from a plan view (plan area fraction) and the fraction of the surface that is vegetated. These results, whilst based on a single site and less than 18 months of data, have implications for the future design of urban land surface models, the data that need to be measured in urban observational campaigns, and what needs to be included in initiatives for regional and global parameter databases.