In this paper we examine the concept of vulnerability as it relates to the materiality of systems, the exclusion of human physical corporeality, and social exclusion in Luhmann's theory of social autopoiesis. We ask whether a concept of vulnerability can be included in autopoiesis in order to better conceptualise social exclusion and the excluded, with a view to understanding how, if at all, the dangers posed by this exclusion are mitigated by autopoietic processes. We are emphatically not returning to the human subject over operational systems, but seek instead to develop an understanding of the embodied nature of humans and their vulnerability within an autopoietic framework. We argue that the awareness of the risks to social functional differentiation posed by unmanaged exclusion – disenchantment, disassociation and, most drastically, dedifferentiation – provided by our analysis indicates why hyper-exclusion must be mitigated.

The issue of women serving as judges has been a contentious one in Egyptian society for nearly eight decades. While other Muslim majority countries started appointing women judges as early as the 1950s and 1960s, it was not until 2003 that the Egyptian government announced the appointment of its first ever female judge. Despite the approval of Egypt's religious scholars, her appointment was fiercely contested, among both the general public and the legal profession. In this paper we explore the question of why the appointment of women as judges provokes so much controversy in Egyptian society, and in the judiciary in particular. We show that the debate reveals a preoccupation with the proper place of women in society. With both traditionally educated religious scholars and people lacking formal religious training justifying their point of view by resorting to religious argumentation, the debate is also a clear example of the fragmentation of religious authority in Islam.

As the title suggests, Jeffrie G. Murphy's latest anthology of thirteen essays comprises an agglomeration of his thoughts on punishment and forgiveness along with the moral emotions of guilt, remorse, resentment, shame, love and jealousy. All were written and published in law and philosophy journals between 1999 and 2011, with the exception of the final chapter in which he returns to an earlier passion for Kant's moral, political and legal theory in relation to duelling, infanticide, shipwrecks and the right of necessity. Murphy's enduring commitment to the quasi-Kantian ideal of human dignity is articulated by reference to the social significance of a religious framework within which, he claims, it is possible to elucidate an appropriately moral vision of punishment for criminal justice decision-making. Although the investigation of moral emotions is not purported to deliver solutions in the form of a set of precise rules or principles capable of producing specific outcomes, he provides normative direction by an appeal to the core values which comprise the traditional Christian ethic of forgiveness. Because, according to Christianity, we are all created in God's image, there is resemblance between all human beings which means we are able to identify with the sentiments of others.

This paper contains three main arguments. First, tropical forests have become objects of climate and environmental governance under the REDD+ mechanism in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change that combines legal, market and scientific rationalities with measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) technologies in a neoliberal green governmentality regime. Second, the current structures and institutions of governance are contradictory and international environmental law provides inadequate means for regulating and protecting forests. Third, these deficiencies point to the need for imaginative alternative forms of governance to prevent further deforestation.

This paper uses the example of civil disobedience to explore Luhmann's description of the constitution as structural coupling between law and politics. Civil disobedience highlights the paradox of constituent and constituted power. The claims made for constituent power provide a basis for challenging the current configuration and expression of constituted power. This paradox is first avoided in the legal system through that system's inability to recognise a legal right to disobey law. In turn, a political system that has, under conditions of modernity, increasingly second coded power as legality, has an ever decreasing capacity to include communications that acknowledge a right to disobey law. Civil disobedience is only able to operate within the political system in the form of protest, and is accommodated through the exercise of discretionary powers. However, juridification of those powers has the capacity to threaten this accommodation.

Attributing a great deal of attention to global and local knowledge, this paper is focused on law and society scholarship that has been published by Israelis, both Jewish and Arab-Palestinians. It attempts to unveil and to map some of the major issues that have characterised the scholarly debates and intellectual discourse, primarily critical questions on law and political power, the nation-state, legal rights discourse and equality. More specifically, the paper analyses socio-legal research on various local issues, such as multiculturalism and national rifts on the backdrop of the 1967 military occupation alongside the emergence of a neoliberal capitalist economy. The protracted Arab-Palestinian–Israeli conflict and the fragmentation of the political partisan map in Israel have incited more emphasis on the place of the Israeli Supreme Court, primarily sitting as a High Court of Justice, in public life as an important regulatory institution. This focus on the judicial power of the Court has resulted in an even more frantic controversy on whether the Court has become too engaged in political affairs. In all the law and society debates, local concepts and global knowledge have been intertwined. Hence, the paper enables scholars around the world to closely examine law and society scholarship on the convergence of local and global knowledge.

This paper analyses sovereignty as part of multiple power operations and the self-referential semantics of positive law and politics regarding the concept of popular sovereignty. The interplay between power structures and the self-description of society as democratic polity with popular sovereignty reflects on the typically modern tension between democracy as a contingent form of government and democracy as an imagined stable form of social totality. Using autopoietic social systems theory, the author reformulates the concept of sovereignty as the specific semantics internally constructed by the functionally differentiated systems of politics and law beyond the image of Leviathan and its socially integrating force, and independently of state organisation and its limitations.