Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice (ICCJ) seminar series

'Crisis Diverted? The handling of public crises in the soft legal realm'

Professor Sarah Moore (University of Bath)

This paper is interested in what happens when emerging public crises concerning institutional violence are moved out of a ‘hot’ realm of media coverage into a soft legal realm of inquiry, investigation, and review. It is anchored in an analysis of the media and official response to two events: the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes by Metropolitan Police Officers in 2005 and the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017. In both instances, the soft legal response involved overlapping lines of investigation into ‘what happened’, including (following the shooting of Menezes) a review by the (then) Independent Police Complaints Commission, an inquest, a Scrutiny Report, and Crown Prosecution Service review, and (following the Grenfell Tower fire) an independent review of building regulations, a governance review of the local council, inquests, and a statutory public inquiry. Such multi-layered responses to brewing public crises are customary in the twenty-first century, and this paper suggests that we see this review-work in terms of a distinctive institutional domain, one that sits alongside (and increasingly mops up after) the criminal justice system. This paper seeks to identify the key features of the soft legal realm, including the deferral of decision-making to a central soft legal mechanism and a focus on the empirical question of ‘what happened?’ The paper considers, too, how the soft legal realm responds to impulses to crisis that might reassert themselves in the public sphere, and as part of this identifies a tendency for soft legal mechanisms to become over-burdened and bracket-out concerns and voices.

Thursday 12 December at 14:30pm in Board room 1 (MST.09.022)