Speakers: Professors Daniel Monk (Birkbeck University of London) & Rebecca Probert (University of Exeter)

The enactment of the Divorce Reform Act 1969 was a landmark moment in family law. Coming into force in 1971, it had a significant impact on legal practice and was followed by a dramatic increase in divorce rates, reflecting changes in social attitudes.

Fifty Year of the Divorce Reform Act 1969 brought together scholars from law, sociology, history, demography, and film and literature, to reflect on the changes to divorce law and practice over the past 50 years, and the changing impact of divorce on different people in society, particularly women. As such, it presents a 'biography' of this important piece of legislation, moving from its conception and birth, through its reception and development, to its imminent demise. Looking to the future, and to the new law introduced by the Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act 2020. It hopes to suggest ways for evaluating what makes a 'good' divorce law.

Rebecca Probert’s research focuses on the law and history of marriage, bigamy, divorce and cohabitation. She is currently working on a history of bigamy from 1604 to the present day. Daniel Monk’s research has research has explored a wide range of issues relating to families, children, education and sexuality. His current research is about law and friendship and how to make family law visual.

Daniel Monk’s research has research has explored a wide range of issues relating to families, children, education and sexuality. His current research is about law and friendship and how to make family law visual.

This seminar was co-hosted by the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group, an interdisciplinary discussion forum promoting debate on topical socio-legal issues and empirical research methodology, and the Cambridge Family Law Centre.

The CSLG organises and supports events and publications relating to socio-legal research, drawing participants from within the University of Cambridge and around the world. A donation would be instrumental in allowing the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group to continue its cross-disciplinary work:

https://www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-cambridge/the-cambridge-socio-legal-group

Speaker: Joanna Kusiak, Junior Research Fellow in Urban Studies at King’s College

Bio: Dr Joanna Kusiak is a scholar-activist who works at the University of Cambridge. Born in Poland, she has been shaped by the emancipatory tradition of the Solidarność movement and by the brutality of the neoliberal transformation. Her work focuses on urban land, housing crises, and the progressive potential of law. In 2021 she was one of the spokespeople of Deutsche Wohnen & Co enteignen, Berlin’s successful referendum campaign to expropriate stock-listed landlords. She is the winner of the 2023 Nine Dots Prize for ’thinking about the box’ about contemporary social challenges. Her winning book ‘Radically Legal: Berlin Constitutes the Future’ will appear in May 2023 in Cambridge University Press.

Do we need a revolution to save our cities from the rampant housing crisis? Yes – but this revolution is powered by the law. Right in the middle of the German constitution, a group of ordinary citizen discovers a forgotten clause that allows them to take 240.000 homes back from multi-billion corporations. My talk describes the story of a grassroots movement that convinced one million Berliners to pop the speculative housing bubble a design a new institutional model for managing urban housing.

For more about the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group see:

https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/researchfaculty-centres-networks-and-groups/cambridge-socio-legal-group

Bio: Oliver Wilson-Nunn is an Isaac Newton Research Fellow at Robinson College, University of Cambridge. He recently completed his PhD on prison and film in Argentina at the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge. He has published on prison education in contemporary documentary film and on prison writing from Cuba. He is broadly interested in the relationship between law, criminal justice, and culture in Latin America, with his new project focussing on the relationship between contemporary documentary cinema and the processes of judicialisation and juridification.

Prison, the cliché goes, serves as a mirror of society. Films about prison, according to a similarly clichéd logic, serve as a window onto that mirror of society. In this presentation, I move beyond this focus on reflection and refraction to propose a more materially sensitive approach to what prison-based films can tell us about state and society. I reflect on the institutional relationships between the film industry and prisons to show how the very production and exhibition of film—not just the symbolic force of the image itself—reconfigure the relationships between imprisoned people, non-imprisoned people, and the state. Focussing on Argentina, I consider examples of location shooting inside operational prisons, the use of imprisoned people as actors, and the exhibition of film inside prison from the 1930s through to the present day to trouble a tendency among academic lawyers, criminologists, and film scholars to evaluate prison films in terms of their ‘accurate’ or ‘inaccurate’ representation of real-life prisons. By shifting our focus from the truth value of the strictly defined ‘prison film’ towards the broader social relationships produced at the institutional interstice of prison and film, we can better understand prison, following Ruth Wilson Gilmore, not as a ‘building “over there” but a set of relationships that undermine rather than stabilize everyday lives everywhere’ (2007, 242).

The Cambridge Socio-Legal Group organises and supports events and publications relating to socio-legal research, drawing participants from within the University of Cambridge and around the world. For more about the CSLG, see:

https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/researchfaculty-centres-networks-and-groups/cambridge-socio-legal-group

The CSLG organises and supports events and publications relating to socio-legal research, drawing participants from within the University of Cambridge and around the world. A donation would be instrumental in allowing the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group to continue its cross-disciplinary work:

https://www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-cambridge/the-cambridge-socio-legal-group

Speaker: Valentin Jeutner, Lund University

Bio: Valentin Jeutner is an Associate Professor of Law at Lund University, Sweden. He was educated at Oxford (BA Law), Georgetown (LLM), Cambridge (PhD Law), Lund (MTh Theology). Valentin is a member of the New York Bar and has held visiting positions at the Federal Chancellery of Germany, Münster University, KU Leuven, the Berkman Klein Center of Harvard Law School, and Malta University. Since 2013, he has been affiliated with Pembroke College, Oxford. Valentin's teaching and research activities concern foundational questions of (international) law.

For more about the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group see: https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/researchfaculty-centres-networks-and-groups/cambridge-socio-legal-group

Simanti Dasgupta is an associate professor of anthropology and the director of the International Studies Program at the University of Dayton. Her overarching interest in the politics of citizenship and belonging in postcolonial and neoliberal nation-states link her works. She is currently preparing a book manuscript tentatively titled, Prophylactic Rights: Sex Work, HIV/AIDS and Anti-Trafficking in Sonagachi, India, based on her ethnographic research with Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, a sex workers’ collective, since 2011. She published this work in PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review; Anti-Trafficking Review, Opendemocracy:Beyond trafficking and slavery and The Conversation. She previously authored BITS of Belonging: Information Technology, Water and Neoliberal Governance in India (Temple University Press, 2015), which examined the emerging neoliberal politics in urban India at the intersection of Information Technology and water privatization. She can be reached at sdasgupta1@udayton.edu.

Prophylactic Rights examines the emergence of the sex work labour subjectivity at the intersection of two state surveillance regimes: HIV/AIDS and anti-trafficking. It draws on ethnographic work since 2011 with Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (Durbar), a grassroots female sex workers' collective in Sonagachi. In 1992 the All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health identified sex workers as a High-Risk Group and launched the Sexually Transmitted Diseases/HIV Intervention Project (SHIP) in Sonagachi. SHIP recruited sex workers as peer-educators to introduce others to the etiology of HIV/AIDS and promote the condom as the prophylactic device. In addressing structural barriers –poverty and stigma –SHIP achieved remarkable success in reducing new HIV infections through the sustained use of condoms. More importantly, SHIP extended the prophylactic narrative beyond public health to emphasize the threat the virus posed to the labour and livelihood of the women. The rearticulation of HIV/AIDS as a question of the labouring body that is worthy of rights, was unprecedented in Sonagachi. It motivated the peer educators to establish Durbar in 1995 as a collective to demand sex work rights and juridically delink it from trafficking. The existing literature posits both sex work and sex workers as a priori categories, when the categories themselves are relatively new in Sonagachi. This project examines how the labor narrative emerges in dissociation from ‘prostitution’ and how ‘prostitutes’ come to inhabit the worker position. I argue that for labor to emerge as a political category, the women submitted to HIV/AIDS and anti-trafficking surveillances, while also subverting them with resistive connotations. In formulating what I term, the ‘medicolegal unstable’, I further show that the struggle for labor rights in such instances of historical marginalization, is characteristically uneven, that is, advances in HIV/AIDS prevention and related health rights of sex workers are often undermined by regressive anti-trafficking laws.

Speaker: Davide Luca, Department of Land Economy, Cambridge University

The adoption of low-carbon energy sources is considered as one of the key policies to tackle climate change and, to this aim, many European governments have been supporting the transition to renewable energy through subsidies. Growing anecdotal evidence suggests that the generosity of incentives has attracted the interests of corrupt politicians and criminal organisations, as the sector offer attractive opportunities for mafias to benefit from generous public grants and tax subsidies and to launder illegal money via legal business structures. Yet, no academic research has systematically explored the link between organised crime and the renewable energy sector at the local level. In ‘Gone with the wind’, Dr Davide Luca and Alessio Romarri aim to fill this gap. The analysis features innovative GIS data on the geo-location of wind farms across Italy and on the local presence of mafia groups. Preliminary findings confirm how, in mafia-ridden regions, local criminal presence is strongly associated with a higher likelihood of hosting at least a plant.

The Cambridge Socio-Legal Group is an interdisciplinary discussion forum promoting debate on topical socio-legal issues and empirical research methodology. It is affiliated with several departments across the University, including the Faculty of Law, the Institute of Criminology, the Centre for Family Research and Physiology, Development & Neuroscience (PDN). The Group serves to bring together people from within Cambridge and farther afield from different disciplines, including Law, Criminology, POLIS, Sociology, Psychology, Psychiatry, PDN, Biology, Economics, History and Social Anthropology.

For more information see: https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/researchfaculty-centres-networks-and-groups/cambridge-socio-legal-group

A webinar hosted by the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group.

May Hen-Smith is a PhD student in Sociology at Cambridge. She is a former tax collector from Canada Revenue Agency and studies offshore financial centres. She is also co-founder of the Cambridge Tax Discussion Group, a student-led discussion group which began in 2015 and continues to meet weekly during term to talk about all things tax. Their website is taxtaxtax.tax

More information can be found at:

https://research.sociology.cam.ac.uk/profile/may-hen-smith

This presentation will discuss my PhD work which takes an ethnographic approach to the study of Cayman Islands professionals to understand how an offshore financial centre operates from the perspective of the professionals who live and work in them. It offers a close-examination of a single jurisdiction, one that is heavily referred to by critics of offshore, and brings new empirical data based on 13-months of fieldwork from a jurisdiction heavily used by some of the largest financial transactions in the world.

Supported by the Centre for Tax Law.

Speaker: Dr Brian Sloan, College Lecturer & Fellow in Law, Robinson College, Cambridge

A joint seminar between Cambridge Reproduction and the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group.

In 2015, The Independent newspaper reported the case of a man who had ‘failed’ a paternity test in the United States because the genetic material in his saliva was different from that in his sperm. This was apparently the first reported instance of a paternity test being ‘fooled’ by a ‘human chimera’. Such a chimera has extra genes, in this instance absorbed from a twin lost in early pregnancy. The result was that the true genetic father of the man’s son was the man’s deceased twin, who had never been born. Cases of chimeras potentially present a challenge to legal systems, given their frequent emphasis on genetics in determining parenthood. This seminar will explore the likely practical response of English Law to the situation of a potential chimera, with reference inter alia to the human rights of all family members involved. The seminar will then consider what the phenomenon of the chimera might tell us about our understanding of parenthood and the differences between biological motherhood and fatherhood respectively. It will advocate the recognition of the chimeric person as the ‘true’ legal father but point out that this may require fatherhood to be understood as more of a ‘process’ than is often realised.

Brian Sloan is College Lecturer & Fellow in Law, Robinson College, Cambridge and a member of the Cambridge Family Law Centre. His research focuses on issues including care of both adults and children. He is the author/editor of several books, most recently Spaces of Care (Hart, 2020, edited with Loraine Gelsthorpe and Perveez Mody). Several of his many articles concern the law of adoption and parenthood.