This paper aims at providing an account of the Islamic conception of Gharar in contrast to the current Western conceptualisation of risk, using the respective financial legal frameworks of both as the criterion. One of the more decisive stakes of the difference in approach between the Islamic and contemporary Western legal orders today concern the regulation of financial markets; specifically, the definitions of risk and uncertainty – crucial characteristics of modern economies – can be understood as preferentially related to specific features of Islamic law. In the end, according to Knight, money-creation processes are centred on uncertainty. Without uncertainty, there is no profit. This is why, although different at first sight, Islamic finance with its understanding of permissible Gharar and Western finance with its uncertainty-aversion trend have become more resilient, especially since the financial crisis (2007–2010).

In France, judicial expertise operates within a specific institutional framework at the same time as it covers a distinctive community of practitioners called upon for their technical or scientific knowledge to serve justice. Indeed, while experts in the US are selected by the litigants, the French model features judge-appointed experts. This model could offer better guarantee of independence and neutrality, to the point that recent developments in the US suggest the emergence of a new court-appointed expert. What does such an institutional model involve in terms of evidence production? To answer this question, this paper looks at two areas of expertise in France: economic experts and forensic pathologists. Through an ethnography of the co-production of legal evidence, it analyses the black box of the French practices of legal expertise and allows the way in which the institutional context influences the producing of legal evidence, beyond differences between a scalpel and a calculator, to be understood.

The autonomous position of legal professionals is no longer self-evident. Professionals are under increased pressure to reform. This phenomenon is not only true for legal professionals. A broader trend – which is recognised for the medical profession, academic profession and alike – is that paraprofessionals are gaining a more prominent position. In this paper, we focus on the developments in the Dutch public justice system. We conduct a case-study on the role of paraprofessionals in courts and in the public prosecution service – two understudied legal institutions in this regard. By drawing on empirical data unfolding the working routine of the judiciary and the prosecution service, we find two paradigms that define the thinking about professionalism: a traditional ‘pure professional’ paradigm and a new, more hybrid paradigm that includes (policy-based) managerial thinking. The latter appears to be enhanced by a New Public Management (NPM) approach within these institutions. Although we observe resistance among (para)professionals towards professional changes and ambiguity in the relationships between professionals and paraprofessionals, we also observe that managerialism has changed the work processes and the division of labour between professionals and paraprofessionals.

To date, in Western jurisdictions, many criminal justice reforms are devised and implemented with a close eye on public opinion. These are typically intended to regain or foster legitimacy. However, within this context, there is no common understanding of this concept. This essay aims to provide such a conceptualisation of legitimacy, to enable a consistent and systematic evaluation of attempts to accommodate public opinion. To this end, five levels of legitimacy research are discussed that could structure evaluations of public-opinion-targeted reforms: (1) the normative dimension, (2) the ‘audiences’ addressed, (3) the purpose of the reforms, (4) trust and distrust, and (5) dialogic, or longitudinal effects. Furthermore, since research departing from these five levels of analysis is likely to result in observations that are, by nature, incommensurable, it is argued that an overall assessment of legitimacy always requires a judgment, rather than mere measurement.

This paper considers a planning dispute that surrounded the construction of a Jewish religious installation (called an eruv) in the public urban space of an Australian suburb. The aim of this case-study is to examine the role of law in regulating Jewish difference – a topic that has to date received little attention in the socio-legal literature concerned with the governance of religious diversity. In analysing residents’ objections to the eruv, the paper explores long-standing anxieties about Jewish particularity in Australia and beyond as they surfaced in opposition to the eruv. It shows how the law continues to exclude certain forms of Jewish difference that are perceived as transgressing dominant religious and racial norms. Moreover, the paper highlights the particular ways in which planning law assigned value to these anxieties and legitimised the marginalisation of Orthodox Jews, emphasising the significance of local law as a site for exclusion and inequality.

The field of carceral geography was lately developed by critical human geographers grappling with the spatiotemporal modes of social control and coercion particular to institutions of incarceration (Moran et al., 2018; Moran and Schliehe, 2017). This has included – in keeping with Michel Foucault's (1991) genealogy of the carceral as an art of disciplinary power – studying the disparate ways in which carceral techniques proliferate from and beyond the built site of the prison, becoming incorporated into other spatial formations. Carceral geographers have characterised this extension as transcarceral (Moran, 2014) or heterotopic (Gill et al., 2018; Moran and Keinänen, 2012). However, despite frequent references to law and legal institutions, carceral geographers generally do not theorise about law. Through a case-study involving an Indigenous woman paroled in Toronto, the author theorises about how carceral spaces are expressed through legal forms and techniques, affecting how paroled individuals, particularly those Aboriginalised, are emplaced within urban space.

This paper expounds some critical reflections on Pierre Legrand's recent account of James Gordley's and James Whitman's comparative methodologies. Pushing his unconventional writing style to the limits and labelling Gordley's ‘positivist’ and Whitman's ‘cultural’ comparative law, Legrand's piece appears to be taking the first step towards a new, more sensitive phase for the comparative study of law and legal cultures. The paper argues that, contrary to what might be first thought, Legrand's ‘sensitive epistemology’ cannot act as a gateway to cultural otherness. This is because it is wholly in line with the constructivist objectification of life that characterises the study and practice of law both within and outside the comparative-law dimension.