This paper introduces a symposium on socio-legal studies and the humanities, justifying the originality of a dedicated special issue on this topic. The paper identifies and critically examines themes and problems in the literature before introducing the articles in the symposium and, finally, discussing areas for future research. Oneof the defining characteristics of socio-legal studies is to l...

The need for legal information from foreign countries and the various levels of legislation in Europe is greater than ever before. Due to the increase in legal information repositories on the Internet this information is also widely available in digital form. In spite of this, users of European legal information encounter multitude of problems in information retrieval. The information is scatte...

legal actions remains sufficiently predictable. Such predictions on legal conflicts have to be shared among economic actors to stabilize mutual expectations of behavior. This stability then helps to reduce legal risks. Predictability is not necessarily related to precise legal knowledge. It is sufficient to know when legal specialists have to get involved. Economic actors prepare for such situa...

AIM The aim of this study was to assess the prevalence, causes and forms of the use of legal highs in Poland. METHODS The study was based on an original questionnaire and was carried out through the Internet before banning of the legal highs in Poland. RESULTS The study covered 3013 people, aged 24.7 +/- 6.9, of which 9.3% admitted to use legal highs (6.5% ofwomen, and 14.7% ofmen, P < 0.01...

In all relevant patent systems an adversely affected party has the possibility to appeal the patent office’s decision in front of a patent court or Board of Appeal (BoA). Within a European context, the EPO is, in a way, even engaging in de facto competition with national patent offices. As an example, the German Patent and Trademark Office (DPMA) provides quasi identical patent products and off...

How do minorities, defined as non-ruling communities, use as well as evade using state law, legal ideology and communal law for achievement of their political aims in democracies? What relations hold between violent, and non-violent means as hermeneutics, litigation, and legal mobilization? What is a communal legal culture, and what is its relevance for relations between state and society in th...

Legal texts express conditions in natural language describing what is permitted, forbidden or mandatory in the context they regulate. Despite the numerous approaches tackling the problem of moving from a natural language legal text to the respective set of machine-readable conditions, results are still unsatisfiable and it remains a major open challenge. In this paper, we propose a preliminary ...

Feminist legal theory provides a healthy skepticism toward legal doctrine and insists that we reexamine even formally gender-neutral rules to uncover problematic assumptions behind them. The article first outlines feminist legal theory from the perspectives of liberal, cultural, and radical feminism. Examples of how each theory influences legal practice, case law, and legislation are highlighte...

By examining discursive struggles around sexuality in contemporary India, I show how and when the legal status of sexuality becomes used by individuals and communities to make political claims about their relations in and to the post-colonial nation-state. The ‘modern’ legal system introduced by British colonial rule installed state regulation of homosexuality and sex work in India. I look at w...