The book presents a comprehensive reconceptualization of Geert Hofstede’s well-known concept of power distance, applying the theory to the specific case of judge–witness courtroom interactions in Polish regional courts. In the light of the detailed critique of Hofstede’s original approach to power distance, the book first carefully develops a three-level concept of power distance, including personal preferences concerning the realization of power relations (subjective level); rules, practices and spatio-architectural arrangements underlying power relations (organizational level); and individual demeanors that can, in practice, increase or decrease the asymmetry between parties to a power relation (interactional level). This reconceptualization provides a universal conceptual apparatus that is applicable to various social settings, but the authors have used it in extensive qualitative and quantitative research focused on courtroom interactions. After laying the theoretical foundations, the book details the elements of judge–witness courtroom interactions (both verbal and non-verbal) that contribute to establishing power distance between judge and witness. These were identified over 6 months of observational research conducted in 2018 in the Kraków regional courts. Lastly, the book addresses the issue of the relationship between the subjective level of power distance and opinions that laypeople can have concerning a judge’s demeanor in the courtroom environment. To do so, it describes specific quantitative research that involved the creation of original film clips depicting witness questioning by the judge in a courtroom in three power distance situations. Offering a coherent framework for examining various interpersonal relations in legal contexts and illustrating how the framework can be applied on the courtroom interactions example, the book will appeal to a wide range of legal practitioners and academics. It also allows scientists outside the legal field to gain a new and broad understanding of power distance that they can easily apply in their respective fields. Furthermore, it provides non-academics with insights into courtroom interactional dynamics, as exemplified by the discussion of Polish judicial practice.

The Research Handbook on the Sociology of Emotion investigates the role of emotions in key institutions understood as the frames and fabrics of society. It takes a critical look at society-framing institutions such as the state, the military, the market, and international organizations.

This interdisciplinary book brings together leading social and legal scholars to tackle the incompatibility of marriage laws with contemporary social reality in Europe. Their critique is based on the assumption that individuals should be able to choose how they organise their close relationships. The contributors emphasise the importance of pluralism of beliefs, values, cultures, and lifestyles and the consequent need for legal recognition to make individuals' private choices valid and respected. The first part of the book establishes the foundation for the subsequent chapters by exploring the advantages and challenges of focusing on values while accommodating relationship design plurality, the impact of the European Court of Human Rights on the issue, and the transformation of the institution of marriage. The second part presents different legal responses to non-state marriages, particularly religious marriages among Muslim communities, and proposals for reform. The third part of the book features empirical research on the marital experiences of two communities: Muslims and migrants. The chapters concentrate on polygyny among female converts to Islam, the importance of religious knowledge for practising Muslim women in securing rights in their marital relationships, transnational and interreligious marriages, and the impact of acculturative orientation and position in the dual labour market on the choice of life partner among Polish migrant women. The book will be of interest to academics, researchers, and policymakers working in the areas of human rights law, family law, legal anthropology, law and religion, socio-legal studies, feminism and queer studies, and sociology of family.

The recent financial crisis exposed both a naïve faith in mathematical models to manage risk and a crude culture of greed that embraces risk. This book explores cultures of finance in sites such as corporate governance, hedge funds, central banks, the City of London and Wall Street, and small and medium enterprises. It uses different methods to explore these cultures and their interaction with different financial orders to improve our understanding of financial crisis dynamics. The introduction identifies types of cultural turn in studies of finance. Part I outlines relevant research methods, including comparison of national cultures viewed as independent variables, cultural political economy, and critical discourse and narrative policy analysis. Part II examines different institutional cultures of finance and the cult of entrepreneurship. Part III offers historical, comparative, and contemporary analyses of financial regimes and their significance for crisis dynamics. Part IV explores organizational cultures, modes of calculation, and financial practices and how they shape economic performance and guide crisis management. Part V considers crisis construals and responses in the European Union and China. This book’s great strength is its multi-faceted approach to cultures of finance. Contributors deploy the cultural turn creatively to enhance comparative and historical analysis of financial regimes, institutions, organizations, and practices as well as their roles in crisis generation, construal, and management. Developing different paradigms and methods and elaborating diverse case studies, the authors illustrate not only how and why ‘culture matters’ but also how its significance is shaped by different financial regimes and contexts.

Expertise in Court: Perspectives on Testimony is the second of a two-volume set on the Psychology of the Courtroom. The authors, a renowned group of psychology and legal scholars, offer definitive coverage of the use of psychological expert testimony and evidence in a variety of legal contexts. They explore the controversies that surround it, from questions of its admissibility to its effects on eventual juror decisions. A wide range of topics are covered including system and estimator variables in eyewitness identification, expert testimony on psychological syndromes, the insanity defence and sexual harassment, how child sexual abuse is used by the courts, and recent research on false confessions. They also provide a comparative analysis exploring how different types of psychological expert testimony and evidence are used by different countries’ legal systems. All the chapters conclude by making specific recommendations for how psychological research and information could be better utilized by courts around the world.

The Democratic Courthouse examines how changing understandings of the relationship between government and the governed came to be reflected in the buildings designed to house the modern legal system from the 1970s to the present day in England and Wales. The book explores the extent to which egalitarian ideals and the pursuit of new social and economic rights altered existing hierarchies and expectations about how people should interact with each other in the courthouse. Drawing on extensive public archives and private archives kept by the Ministry of Justice, but also using case studies from other jurisdictions, the book details how civil servants, judges, lawyers, architects, engineers and security experts have talked about courthouses and the people that populate them. In doing so, it uncovers a changing history of ideas about how the competing goals of transparency, majesty, participation, security, fairness and authority have been achieved, and the extent to which aspirations towards equality and participation have been realised in physical form. As this book demonstrates, the power of architecture to frame attitudes and expectations of the justice system is much more than an aesthetic or theoretical nicety. Legal subjects live in a world in which the configuration of space, the cues provided about behaviour by the built form and the way in which justice is symbolised play a crucial, but largely unacknowledged, role in creating meaning and constituting legal identities and rights to participate in the civic sphere. Key to understanding the modern-day courthouse, this book will be of interest to scholars and students in all fields of law, architecture, sociology, political science, psychology and criminology.

Procedure is not just a programme or a nexus of formalities. It is something done by legal experts and lay participants in a highly concerted ensemble. Procedure frames and advances all law-relevant activities. This book, written by three authors from different disciplinary backgrounds, provides an in-depth comparison of criminal defence work in different legal cultures. Via an ethnographic comparison, this book also shows how defence work responds to the challenges of different procedural regimes and how it contributes to their individual outcomes. Criminal Defence and Procedure opens up new horizons for legal comparison, inviting novel understandings of procedural law as well as possibilities of legal reform.

The International Court of Justice is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations and plays a central role in the settlement of disputes and the development of international law. This commentary analyses the Statute of the Court and the related provisions of the UN charter and the Court's Rules of Procedure.

From the Colonial to the Contemporary explores the representation of law, images and justice in the first three colonial high courts of India at Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. It is based upon ethnographic research work and data collected from interviews with judges, lawyers, court staff, press reporters and other persons associated with the courts. Observing the courts through the in vivo, in trial and practice, the book asks questions at different registers, including the impact of the architecture of the courts, the contestation around the renaming of the high courts, the debate over the use of English versus regional languages, forms of addressing the court, the dress worn by different court actors, rules on photography, video recording, live telecasting of court proceedings, use of CCTV cameras and the alternatives to courtroom sketching, and the ceremony and ritual that exists in daily court proceedings. The three colonial high courts studied in this book share a recurring historical tension between the Indian and British notions of justice. This tension is apparent in the semiotics of the legal spaces of these courts and is transmitted through oral history as narrated by those interviewed. The contemporary understandings of these court personnel are therefore seen to have deep historical roots. In this context, the architecture and judicial iconography of the high courts helps to constitute, preserve and reinforce the ambivalent relationship that the court shares with its own contested image.

Dialogue interpreting is a generic term covering a diverse range of fields of interpreting which have in common the basic feature of face-to-face interaction between three parties: the interpreter and (at least) two other speakers. The interaction consists of spontaneous dialogue, involving relatively short turns at talk, in two languages. It is usually goal-directed in the sense that there is some outcome to be negotiated. The studies in this volume cover several different fields: courtroom interpreting, doctor-patient interviews, immigration interviews, etc., and involve a range of different languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, More and Austrian Sign Language. They have in common that they view the interpreter as just one of the parties to this three-way exchange, in which each participant's moves can affect each other participant and thus the outcome of the event. In Part I, new research directions are explored in studies which piece together evidence of the ways dialogue interpreters actually behave and the effects of their behaviour. This is followed by two studies which discuss traditional interpreter roles - the 'King's Linguist' in Burkina Faso and the Oranda Tsûji, official interpreters employed in isolationist eighteenth-century Japan to ensure contact with the outside world. Finally, issues involved in training are the subject of two chapters relating to Austria and the UK. The variety of aspects and approaches represented in the volume - linguistic, cultural, pragmatic, historical - offer a rich and fascinating overview of the field of dialogue interpreting studies as it now stands.