This chapter discusses the 1953 legal challenge to Ceylon’s (present-day Sri Lanka) voter registration laws before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, one of the first against domestic legislation on citizenship from a former British colony. The Kodakan Pillai appeal, as the case was known, was part of multiple challenges to the immigration, nationality and citizenship regime in Ceylon at the time which discriminated against people who had migrated to Ceylon from India but had permanently settled there for multiple generations. The appeal ultimately failed, and the malaiyaha thamilar – plantation laborers and their descendants – form part of minority populations in Sri Lanka today, stigmatized as ‘migrants’ and outsiders, frequently lacking documentation and evidence of citizenship, and consequently, to land ownership or welfare benefits. Drawing on a rich legal archive of citizenship applications filed before the Commission for Indian and Pakistani Residents in the 1950s, alongside the Kodakan Pillai appeal, this chapter serves as an illustration for why the legal history of statelessness in Asia is important. Given this historical context, it also cautions against solutions to statelessness in the region that solely rely on improved documentation of political belonging.

In June 2020, the largest democracy movement in a generation emerged in Thailand. The movement began with three demands: the current PM must resign, a new constitution must be drafted, and the state must stop threatening dissidents. In August 2020, a fourth demand was added: the monarchy must be reformed. This demand is where the transformative power of the movement came from, but also led to a swift crackdown in the form of police violence and prosecutions. This may appear to be a particularly egregious illustration of the rule-by-law regimes favored by autocrats, but close examination indicates that the law is being used to criminalize peaceful dissent and the mere questioning of how power is exercised. By examining several key cases, this chapter shows how the Thai regime aims to reshape both the rule of law and the polity through the arbitrary exercise of repressive power.

The chapter explores how the legal system, akin to science and economics, serves as a tool for depoliticizing human decisions. It argues that the transformation of political processes into seemingly apolitical directives is a strategic move to prevent the illegitimate use of power and violence. The status of law as autonomous and above politics is examined, tracing its historical roots to the naturalization of law and forming the basis for legitimate legal decisions. The chapter also considers Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent politics and Walter Benjamin’s perspective on violence within the law. The instrumental convenience of separating law and politics is examined, emphasizing the role of law in constraining politics and power. As Judith Shklar observes, the threefold approach to law in Western tradition – apolitical law, depoliticized law following parliamentary processes, and positive law imposed by hegemonic power – reflects different bases of objectification. The power of natural law, both enhancing and restricting individual freedom, is explored in the context of its capacity to disassociate from politics. The chapter concludes by discussing the broader implications of objectification in fields such as science, technology, and economics, emphasizing the impact on public trust and the diminishing space for ethical and political considerations in contemporary democracy.

This chapter identifies striking convergences between the juridical techniques used in migration control and under colonial rule. These include strategic manipulations of jurisdiction, a legal system based on racialized status categories, normalization of a state of exception, and racialized determinations of culpability. Border externalization and extraterritorialization, reconsidered alongside the colonial practice of manipulating jurisdiction, should be understood as a juridical tactic that aims to evade responsibility for the state violence wielded against racialized migrants. On the basis of a comparative analyses of colonial and migratory juridical regimes, the chapter underscores the key role that law plays in maintaining and justifying racial domination in these two different contexts. The juridical regime in both can be best described as one of “lawful lawlessness,” to borrow a phrase introduced by Austin Sarat and Nassar Hussain, as the lines between “lawful” and “lawless” increasingly blur when law is put in the service of racial domination. To examine this blurring, the chapter turns to the 2020 ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in N.D. and N.T. v. Spain, which condoned the Spanish pushback operations and blamed migrants from “sub-Saharan Africa” for their “culpable” conduct.

The transnational movement of peoples across the globe is one of the most bitterly contested political issues of our times, eliciting populist anger against migrants and refugees. This public outcry has muffled, however, a more dramatic process: the contemporaneous reconfiguration of territory, rights, and jurisdiction. This chapter highlights the formation of “shifting borders” that enable states to create lawless zones as well as rightless subjects. It then explores a combination of juridical and democratic possibilities for resistance and claims-making in a world of shifting borders and cosmopolitanism without illusions.

This book is an introduction to the new field of legal design and a primer on both the application and theory of legal design that has developed so far in a decade of exploration and experimentation. We have assembled case studies of pioneering efforts from around the world, collected examples of methods and perspectives just now coming into focus, and offer a handful of proscriptions for the future. Bookending those three subject areas are both individual and collective articulations of these editors’ frames of reference and influence in our work together—dignity, law, and radical imagination. Our collective frame for this volume is relentlessly optimistic. We believe that the new field of legal design provides a promising intervention for challenging the harmful systems, structures, methodologies and outcomes that currently define legal systems, and designing systems that actually embody and effectuate the full promise of the rule of law – a just, peaceful, and equitable world for everyone.

In this chapter, I introduce philosophical conceptions of dignity and how the framework can serve as the foundation for the interdisciplinary collaboration between design and law as a way to promote human and social values. I further highlight the significance of dignity by providing problematic examples in the intersection of design and law. I propose that there is a need to investigate the moral principles underlying human-centered design in collaboration with law. Together, design and law will contribute to the development of service systems that can improve dignity in citizens’ everyday lives and create positive and real changes in the world.

This introduction sets out the aims and approach of the book. Following an introduction to the Norwegian post-war reckoning and a review of the existing literature on the topic, it argues that only an analysis of the full time span of the trials can uncover their complex dynamics and the changing positions of their key actors over time. The introduction then sets out the analytical framework of the book, which is to explore the – at times competing – legal and political rationales of the trials in face of a rapidly changing political and social climate.

The concluding chapter reflects on the everyday lives of sex workers, police officers and public health officials in China under Xi Jinping, and considers policy implications of the book’s findings.

This chapter is about how police officers in China enforce anti-prostitution laws. These regulations outlaw the exchange of sex for money or other material goods in all of its forms, and for all individuals who engage in it. Yet in practice, police enforcement primarily targets low-tier sex workers. Of the array of possible sanctions, these women are more likely incarcerated than fined, and they are placed in institutions with a rehabilitative mission that, in practice, is not met. In addition, law enforcement officials often engage in illegal and abusive practices when arresting sex workers. Clients are not completely immune from punishment, but they are less likely to be arrested than are the women they solicit. The major exception to that pattern involves high-profile men whose actions have crossed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Their cases are taken out of the hands of street-level police officers and into the world of elite politics, with prostitution charges used to help secure their downfall.

This chapter is about second wives and mistresses, who form the highest tier of sex work in China. These women live in a world of simultaneous precariousness and power. Their precariousness comes from their total dependence on one man. Unlike women in the lower tiers of the sex industry who solicit on the streets, in brothels, or in entertainment venues, for second wives, finding another client can be a complicated, drawn-out process. Their vulnerability also comes from the state of limbo inherent in a mistress arrangement. They know the relationship is temporary, and while they often yearn for marriage, as kept women they cannot take steps toward that goal. Their power, meanwhile, comes from the emotional dependence their clients sometimes have on them: smitten men will go to great lengths to keep their second wives happy and shower them with countless gifts to do so. It also comes from the knowledge that second wives sometimes gain of their client’s business activities, which provides these women with tools that can be used to help orchestrate his professional downfall when a relationship sours. This combination of vulnerability and strength presents a picture of second wives that belies their harsh reception in Chinese public opinion.

This chapter is about the influence of transnational actors on China’s sex worker health policies. While the policing of prostitution in China is a story of domestic law and politics, the public health approach to regulating sex work in China starts in the international global health community. It then makes its way into central government health institutions in Beijing, and trickles down into the lives of local state health workers and the sex workers in their community. These transnational roots matter: they have shaped both the content of sex work health policies and the public health officials who manage their administration. Indeed, the approach that China’s health policies and officials endorse for gauging the prevalence of HIV/AIDS and reducing its occurrence among sex workers, and the language these authorities use, reflect best practices in the global public health community. Yet the obstacles that Chinese health agents encounter result in practices that fall short of these ideals and harm sex workers. That often grim reality is the subject of the next chapter. What I highlight in this chapter is how the global public health community working in China to support the creation of HIV/AIDS policies seems disengaged from what actually happens on the ground.

This chapter is about how police officers engage with sex workers when they are not enforcing anti-prostitution laws against them. By focusing their enforcement efforts on low-tier sex workers, the police help create a space for the middle tier of China’s sex industry – entertainment venues and their hostesses—to thrive. I find that law enforcement officers engage actively and in myriad ways with the sex industry when they are not focused on arresting sex workers. Some of their actions are purely extractive interactions. Yet other police behavior, while still self-serving, also benefits sex workers. Making sense of police actions in this context requires shifting our framework from exclusively viewing police as powerful figures in relation to sex workers to also viewing them as street-level bureaucrats who are accountable to the local government and the vast police bureaucracy of which they are at the forefront. This approach provides a different perspective on police officers, underscoring their weakness within China’s bureaucratic system rather than their strength in relation to the sex workers. Their vulnerability vis-à-vis the state even affects how they engage with sex workers and underscores conditions under which the job security of frontline police officers in fact depends on a cooperative local sex industry.

This chapter introduces the regulation of prostitution in China as a case study of law in everyday life. It presents China’s three tiers of sex workers, the state’s interests in the sex industry, and patterns of prostitution policy implementation. It shows how the study of prostitution and its regulation in China expands our understanding of state–society relations, and of sex work and its regulation across space and time.

This chapter is about the perspectives and experiences that female sex workers in China share across tiers of prostitution. The daily lives of low-tier sex workers, hostesses, and second wives in China differ from each other in important ways. Yet despite relatively fixed boundaries between tiers of prostitution, these women do not exist in unrelated, independent silos. After all, their source of income comes from the same activity: exchanging sex for money or other material goods. The chapter first highlights how movement across tiers of sex work is limited, and how low-tier sex workers and hostesses express a preference for the work conditions in their own tier, rather than voice a desire to move up in the pecking order. It then examines narratives that these women have in common across all three tiers. Lastly, it discusses how sex workers who cross paths with grassroots organizations develop a shared consciousness of their membership in a global community of sex work civil society, and appropriate its language and symbols in their own lives.