law context

This Special Issue, Frontiers in Coronial Justice, reflects on the future of death investigation studies in the coronial context. Where the uptake of the death studies movement in the social sciences more broadly has expanded the interdisciplinary study of death, comparatively little attention has focused on the work of coroners or their death investigation practices. Important, but albeit ad hoc, contributions from the disciplines of medicine, law, public health and criminology, highlight both the possibilities for coronial scholarship and how coronial studies continue to percolate at disciplinary margins. And yet, there is growing social attention to death generally, from death cafés to death salons, and the 'positive death movement' more broadly. Society is clustering around conversations seeking social change in facing death, including preparatory discussions around end of life wishes and options. Yet, by their very nature, unexpected, sudden or violent deathsthose that fall under the jurisdiction of the coronerconstitute a distinct category of death; one that is, in many ways, incapable of being prepared for. Nevertheless, such deaths present instances of considerable medical, legal and social industry, with attendant issues around autopsy and inquests, for example. This industry is also changing, as coronial law and policy reform across international jurisdictions has refined, clarified and sought to evolve the coronial role. Together, these developments evidence why coronial law and practice deserve sustained attention. Correspondingly, a theme that unites the papers in this special issue is a greater appreciation of the principles and practices of coronial death investigation. It is intended that, by showcasing work that cuts across law, socio-legal studies, criminology and history, this Special Issue will contribute to delivering new frontiers in coronial research. At a snapshot, the genres of scholarly attention to the coronial jurisdiction are wide and varied. Coroners' work has intermittently piqued the attention of socio-legal scholars (e.g.

Although the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) proclaims the right to inclusive education, and much attention is being given to the goal of inclusive education in debates on human rights, there are doubts as to whether this right has led to a new direction in policy-making. The under-researched question is: why is there so much opposition to the implementation of the right to inclusive education? This paper examines the question by distinguishing between both the concept and practice of inclusive education. Using a specific interdisciplinary approach in order to critically analyse a legal norm, the paper looks into the very meaning of inclusive education by utilising some central conclusions from disability studies to appraise the ideal of inclusive education, and seeks to resolve related challenges by drawing upon political philosophy to investigate pragmatic solutions to the obstacles to inclusive education. This paper claims that it is thereby possible ...

This paper presents a double genealogy of indicators as instruments of governance. These have their roots both in the use of statistical tools for normative purposes by states and in the development of indicators within firms as preferred instruments of ‘new management’. The paper argues that social indicators not only convey information, but are genuine tools of global governance and that, for this reason, their legitimacy depends not only on their accuracy, but also on their accountability. If indicators are intended to produce or effectively produce regulatory effects, they should be subjected to the rule of law and to judicial review. The essay ends by formulating four main principles that these indicators should comply with.

The paper examines the changing nature of publicity in the courts, tracing three distinct but interconnected phases of publicity using Jeremy Bentham's theory of open justice and publicity as a framework. The first phase is press coverage, with the news media chronicling the justice system for the general population, most recently including televised court proceedings. The second is the appointment of Courts Information Officers, occurring as early as the 1930s and growing in impact since the 1990s, established to facilitate the relationship between courts and the news media. The third and final phase is the Internet, including social media, resulting in changes to news media models and driving contemporary practices of court-generated media. The paper concludes that, while media and communication practices have changed radically since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the concept of publicity has shifted, Bentham's approach to open justice remains salient for twen...

This article reviews approaches to the needs of disabled people in Asia and the Pacific, the only part of the world currently lacking regional human rights machinery. The article examines some of the social policy choices involved in prioritising different possible approaches to meeting the needs of disabled people in the region, with a focus on a proposed regional disability rights tribunal (DR-TAP). It is argued that this is not the top priority for immediate action; rather it is contended that capacity building and culturally appropriate attitudinal and other change strategies should instead be pursued over the medium-term horizon.

Asylum applicants in the UK must show, to a ‘reasonable degree of likelihood’, a well-founded fear of persecution, on the basis of race, religion, political opinion or membership of a particular social group, in the event of return ‘home’. This requirement presents myriad challenges both to claimants and decision-makers. Based on findings from a three-year national study, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, this paper explores those challenges as they relate to women seeking asylum in the UK whose applications include an allegation of rape. The study explored the extent to which difficulties relating to disclosure and credibility, which are well documented in the context of women's sexual assault allegations in the criminal justice system, might be replicated and compounded for female asylum-seekers whose applications include a claim of rape. Findings suggest that the structural and practical obstacles faced in establishing credibility, and the existence of scepticism about rape ...

Women's domestic work is largely deemed to be a ‘labour of love’ and lacking any value outside the private family. This reflects an ‘ideology of domesticity’, whereby women's natural place is deemed to be in an imagined private sphere. In this paper, I examine the status of housework in the context of asserting property rights in the home upon relationship breakdown. Using Valverde's legal chronotope as a lens, I argue that the ideology of domesticity is not merely present in legal discourse, but also takes on material form through the spatiotemporal ordering of the home. Housework is spatially and temporally concealed behind the powerful veneer of the imagined ideal family home, with corresponding invisibility in the law. For domestic work to be acknowledged, the individual often has to demonstrate that her work transgresses boundaries between private and public. However, as I argue, this transgression is particularly difficult for women, who remain spatiotemporally anc...

This study considers how invisibility under the law can lead to stigmatisation. It examines how legal silence affects the stigmatisation process and the identity of male sex workers in Japan. Since male sex work is currently not recognised under Japanese law, male sex workers are not subject to control, regulation, punishment or protection. However, the number of male sex workers in Japan is increasing. Many studies have noted that male sex workers may experience double stigmatisation – referring to the stigma associated with homosexuality and the stigma associated with commercial sex. Male sex workers in Japan, however, may face an additional stigma caused by the fact that the law essentially ignores their existence. This paper draws on fieldwork interviews to show how the silence of the law can exacerbate the marginalisation and disempowerment of a vulnerable social group.

This paper explores the role of anthropological expertise in shaping the outcome of legal proceedings under conditions of cultural diversity. Taking the state-driven land-restitution process in post-apartheid South Africa as its point of reference, the text reflects upon the work of anthropological experts in a number of cases and shows how their theoretical and political stances shaped the trajectories of their legal engagements. Pointing towards frictions that emerge in acts of translation between the seemingly objectivist rhetoric evoked in court and more relativist and subjectivist stances within the academy, the paper revisits and problematises debates around strategic essentialism. Sketching instead the contours of a ‘recursive anthropology’ that expresses itself in terms of a post-positivist universalism, the paper turns on the author's use of his own expertise in support of a White land claim, probing – and critically reflecting upon – the practical potential of a form o...

The comprehensible style of legal texts seems to be a predominantly linguistic problem. This is how the plain-legal-language movements present it. But, while plain-language statutes have been on the agenda for decades in every civilised country, laws still become more and more complicated. The paper attempts to explain this controversy. First, it argues that comprehensibility has more aspects beyond the linguistic or stylistic one. Sometimes it is the linguistically simplest texts that raise the most serious comprehensibility problems. The paper refers to two pieces of corpus linguistic research that provide evidence that vocabulary and grammar in themselves do not explain the incomprehensibility of the legal texts. Second, for a more subtle handling of the comprehensibility problem, the paper offers a framework of three typical pragmatic situations – the processual, the problem-solving and the compliance settings – where comprehensibility problems arise in different ways. The concl...

In the context of a technology-driven algorithmic approach to criminal justice, this paper responds to the following three questions: (1) what reasons are there for treating liberal values and human rights as guiding for punitive justice; (2) is preventive justice comparable to punitive justice (such that the guiding values of the latter should be applied to the former); and (3) what should we make of preventive measures that rely not so much on rules and orders, but on ‘technological management’ (where the preventive strategy is focused on eliminating practical options)? Responding to the first question, a Gewirthian-inspired theory of punishment is sketched – a theory that is, broadly speaking, supportive of liberal values and respect for human rights. What makes this theory apodictic for any human agent is that it demands respect for the very conditions on which any articulation of agency is predicated. With regard to the second question, we indicate how a Gewirthian view of the ...

Judges perform an important role on behalf of society, as impartial decision-makers, interpreting and applying the law, presiding over courtrooms and ensuring a fair trial. The image of the judge – how they are viewed culturally – reinforces their role, emphasising their authority and neutrality, thus supporting the legitimacy of the court as an institution. Increasingly, judges use video conferencing where either they, or other participants, are located away from the courtroom. Reporting on a three-year empirical study, this paper argues that the introduction of video-conferencing technologies in court has had a profound impact on the production, management and consumption of judicial images, with implications for the role of the judge. Video links challenge cultural assumptions about how the role of the judge is performed and what the image of the judge should be. We argue that greater congruence needs to be achieved over video links between that image and the role of the judge.

Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has created a revolution in legal-capacity law reform. It protects the right to exercise legal agency for people with disabilities with more clarity than any prior human rights instrument. This paper explores what constitutes an exercise of legal agency and what exactly Article 12 protects. It proposes a definition of legal agency and applies it to the lived experience of cognitive disability. It also uses a republican theory of domination to argue that people with cognitive disabilities who are experiencing domination are forced to assert legal agency in even daily decision-making because of the high level of external regulation of their lives and the ever-present threat of others substituting their decision-making. It identifies Article 12 as a tool for protecting such exertions of legal agency and curtailing relationships of domination.

Our increasingly cosmopolitan discipline needs to be underpinned by a revival of the idea of general jurisprudence, in which generalisations-conceptual, normative, empirical, legal-about legal phenomena are treated as problematic. This paper argues that, as part of this, analytical jurisprudence should broaden its focus not only geographically, but also in respect of the range of concepts, conceptual frameworks, and discourses that it considers. How far is any of our current stock of concepts adequate for talking meaningfully across legal traditions and cultures? Which concepts 'travel' relatively well or badly and why? Such questions are illustrated with reference to discourses about legal rights, the treatment of prisoners, and corruption. * This paper is a revised version of the second in a series of lectures on 'General Jurisprudence', delivered in Tilburg during the academic year 2000-01. It is a sequel to two books: (i) Globalisation and Legal Theory (Butterworths, 2000 and Northwestern UP, 2002) (hereafter Twining, 2000) (which critically explores mainstream Anglo-American jurisprudence and comparative law in relation to 'globalisation'); and (ii) The Great Juristic Bazaar (hereafter GJB) (Ashgate, 2002), especially Ch. 4, and 9-11. This is a collection of essays dealing with particular jurists in the same tradition. This essay builds on four further essays: (iii) 'Reviving General Jurisprudence' in M. Likosky (ed.

The work of the Polish–Russian scholar Leon Petrażycki from the early decades of the twentieth century holds a strikingly paradoxical position in the literature of juristic and socio-legal scholarship: on the one hand, lauded as a supremely valuable contribution to knowledge about the nature of law and, on the other, widely neglected and little known. This paper asks how far Petrażycki's theories, expressed in writings by and about him available to an international readership, can provide insight for contemporary socio-legal studies – not as historical background but as living ideas. How far can his work speak to current issues and inform current debates? What obstacles stand in the way of this? Why have few international scholars engaged with his theories despite their rigour and originality? The paper starts from this last issue before addressing the others. It argues that Petrażycki's radical legal theory offers strikingly distinctive resources for rethinking issues about...

Does legislation that grants land rights necessarily ensure justice? The Forest Rights Act of 2006 (FRA) in India, a landmark social justice law, aims to enhance land security for forest peoples. Increasingly displaced by development and extractive industries that intensify impoverishment, indigenous peoples in India should, with the FRA, be able to protect their land, their livelihoods and their culture. Continued government violations of forest land rights in the name of development highlight that economically vulnerable populations lack the power to take advantage of legislation. I examine the tension of current indigenous land struggles in the context of the legal frameworks of the FRA and the neoliberal culture of India.

In the last decade, several states have increasingly tried to ‘un-sign’ to their humanitarian obligations by seeking ways to circumvent European or international law. Through an analysis of a recently passed act in Australia on the management of asylum seekers, this paper examines how the practice of ‘un-signing’ can be seen as a symptomatic instance of reconfiguring asylum in late modernity. We focus on the proliferation of ‘legal pragmatics’ in the management of refugees. By ‘legal pragmatics’, we refer to the processual ways in which the state attempts to hollow out international refugee law and in which courts respond by reinstating it. Normative consequences are the criminalisation and the juridification of refugees. We argue that the proliferation of ‘legal pragmatics’ illuminates not only the ever-expanding reach of neoliberal changes in domestic legislation, but also the limitations of human rights to adequately respond to the neoliberal vicissitudes of humanitarian government.

Health-care law presents numerous challenges to the conception of the law as a dispassionate arbiter of disputes or protector of rights. Issues relating to end-of-life care, the assessment of mental capacity and decision-making for those who lack capacity, amongst others, epitomise the complex nature of health-care law. They also raise globally applicable questions about discrimination, or equal protection, as well as concerns for relief of suffering, the assessment of best interests and the exercise of individual autonomy. This paper will evaluate the extent to which law's traditional objectivity (dispassion) is undermined by the introduction of concerns about compassion into judicial and executive decisions. Focusing primarily on the law in England and Wales, but with reference to multi-jurisdictional case-law and international instruments, it will consider whether the law provides compassionate approaches and outcomes in end-of-life decision-making, and the implications of co...

Whilst international law has traditionally been dominated by states, non-state actors today have an increasing influence on many spheres of international life. This paper argues that non-state actors, in particular business interest non-governmental organisations (BINGOs), not only participate actively within those intergovernmental regimes which have been created by states, but they are also able to establish their own private regimes on particular issues in which they have an interest. The global regulation of oil pollution liability and compensation is used as an example to show how intergovernmental and private regimes can overlap and interact with one another. Such interplay poses several challenges for the way in which we understand traditional state-centred international law-making. At the same time, private regimes themselves raise their own questions of legitimacy and effectiveness.

In many parts of the world, the adoption of alternative dispute-resolution (ADR) processes was premised on creating better access to justice for citizens, particularly those with lesser means (Woolf, 1996; Access to Justice Advisory Committee, 1994). ADR's foundational link with access to justice is in relation to not only justice as a process for the resolution of disputes, but also justice in relation to equality of access and equitable outcomes. This Special Issue focuses on the relationship between ADR and access to justice in various contexts and jurisdictions, including Australia, China, England and Wales, Scotland and Singapore, and within the family-law system in Australia. The papers engage in a critical discussion of ADR's contribution to access to justice in the resolution of disputes and, in particular, the extent to which ADR has contributed to improved access to justice. In doing this, the papers highlight the role of access-to-justice discourse in the developm...

Many different indicators are used to monitor poverty and poverty-related deprivations. Two kinds of legitimacy worries may arise about any such indicator: one regarding its reliability as a measure of progress and another regarding the uses to which it is being put. This essay will touch upon both worries, beginning with the latter.

Despite the fact that the Millennium Development Goals promised to achieve gender equality and maternal health by 2015, equality remains elusive for too many women. Indeed, austerity, the rise of fundamentalism and the continuing gendered division of labour, especially when it comes to socially necessary but unremunerated care work, have contributed to the increase in gendered inequalities in many areas of social life and in most regions of the world. There is a plenitude of international, transnational and national equality instruments and strategies at the same time as gendered inequality is increasing both within and between nations. These equality instruments and strategies have also had an uneven impact: some women benefit more than others. Moreover, if interpreted in a formal manner, equality can be achieved as much through levelling down men's employment opportunities as by elevating women's life chances.

This article explores a primary source of legal studies, case-law, as a form of narrative in the context of indigenous land rights, and considers how this narrative negotiates pre-colonial land claims in a post-colonial context. Its case-study is the South Pacific island country of Vanuatu, a small-island, least-developed, nation-state, where laws introduced under Anglo–French colonial administration are still retained and sit uneasily alongside the customary forms of land tenure which govern ninety percent of all land in the islands. The article looks at the traditional and changing role of narrative presented as evidence by claimants and their witnesses against a context of rapid social and economic change, and asks whether the metamorphosis of narrative signals the future survival or imminent demise of customary indigenous land rights and what that might mean for these island people faced by the pressures of development.

Since its establishment, international human rights regime has received heavy criticism: to its content, form and frameworks. Critical approaches to human rights theories usually take three routes: those who argue that human rights are entitlements, independent of factors such as nationalities, sex, race and ethnicity; those that regard human rights as a kind of international law that supports human 'grievances'; and still those that view human rights as a new form of Western imperialism. Santos's project mostly takes the third route, further claiming that there is a growing gap between the aspirations of equality and social justice, its reality, and that the existing frameworks will not be able to bridge this gap, unless substantial paradigmatic change takes place. As a book, Towards a New Legal Common Sense is a challenging read. It is both undeniably sophisticated in content and approach and, at the same time, also inspirational in its questions and invitations to rethink existing epistemologies on the global legal order. Santos views law as a tool of domination and, through identifying intersections and interactions, puts forward a possible proposal for change and a new way of relating the world. The main purpose of this project is a call to emphasise on human beings and their needs, and to realign social justice movements towards the achievement and sustenance of such ideals. This book not only critically analyses social, cultural, political and legal frameworks, but also offers possible solutions. The first edition of the book deals with both science and law, but the second edition primarily focuses on law and the crisis it undergoes. The first three chapters of the book are theoretical chapters and discusses the theoretical and historical conceptions of law and modernity. Here he shows how law has failed to take into consideration the modern-day challenges for law and society, and thus failed the promise of justice. Santos positions himself as an 'oppositional postmodernist' and calls for an 'unthinking' of the modern law. He claims that it is 'necessary to start from the disjunction between the modernity of the problems and the postmodernity of the possible solutions, and turn such disjunction into the urge to ground theories and practices capable of reinventing social emancipation out of the wrecked emancipatory promises of modernity' (Santos, 2002, p. 14). Through Chapters Four to Six, Santos discusses the empirical findings of his research. Chapter Four analyses Pasargada law and reveals 'legal experiences that, because they do not fit the legal modernist canon, are ignored, marginalized, silenced in a word, wasted' (Santos, 2002, p. xx, Preface). Chapter Five is the longest chapter in the book and discusses law on a global scale. It explores the conceptions of universal human rights and its implications for human rights effectiveness, in light of a 'diatopical hermeneutics' and intercultural dialogue. The book offers insights about how to rethink human rights from the perspectives of the victims of colonialism and global capitalism and how the Eurocentric origins of human rights could be a problem for a global conception of human rights. To understand the existing paradigms of law

Within legal debate, the state and the body are discourses at once apparent and buried. Amongst international legal scholars, the state is all-consuming while the body is unimportant whereas, in the domestic sphere, state ascendency precludes the study of its existence, while the body as the liberal autonomous rational agent of consent is the principal preoccupation. Neither of those constructs bears much analysis. Trends within global, comparative and transnational legal debate endeavour to deconstruct the state and the body, but often do so in ways that cannot challenge, subvert or disrupt the character of either body or state, or to consider their intimacy in patterns of historic conditioning. In particular, we are so inured to ideas now considered common sense that tracing how perceptions of law, legitimacy and authority were naturalised via the body and state is very difficult. Within the canon, the male White body, as Epstein argues, remains the core and the naturalised state the subject of the modern world (p. 261). From this premise, Epstein undertakes a fascinating journey through security, liberty and property, making plain the processes of naturalisation so dominant that they now go unremarked. Epstein makes visible the concerns of the state and the body at the centre of law and politics. While this is not a traditional book review, I begin by noting the quality of scholarship and writing in the Birth of the State. Do we need another deep dive into Locke and Hobbes? Epstein's answer is an emphatic 'yes', and the book amply shows what may be achieved in doing so. Moving from security to liberty and finally to property, the book deftly sets out how ideas that were not obvious or natural, and indeed were in some incidences alien to the medieval ideas that preceded them, were articulated so as to become naturalised. It does so by embracing the work of Foucault, Butler, Skinner and others, but not uncritically. The book shows the limitations in embracing one theoretical view and how a pluralism of critical approaches unbeholden to one methodology, particularly when examining the history of ideas, often achieves more than the sum of its parts. Naturalisation is at the core of book, namely how ideas become naturalised so that we no longer see them for what they are, constructs, but regard them as a priori matters of objective fact. Reading Birth of the State from another disciplinea process that requires care and attention to disciplinary, linguistic and methodological contextstwo of the book's features come to the fore: first, the methodological choices and, second, the substantive arguments and where they are amenable to disrupting legal debate. Foucault, Agamben, Haraway and others are usefully and thoughtfully embraced amongst some legal scholars. Epstein fruitfully puts such scholarship to work in combination with her close textual analysis of Hobbes, Locke, Grotius, Suarez, Pufendorf, Bacon and others, bringing to the fore the processes of naturalisation of key concepts related to the state and the individual that ensued. In particular, it draws attention to the processes of Othering that underscored these naturalisations, where the non-White body, the women's body, the body of the criminal, the

understanding law-making requires coming to grips with cognitive schemas, practical wisdom of agents involved in the production of law, as agents may interpret or apply the law according to socially accepted mental schemas developed as a result of socialisation in families, schools, universities and other social settings or in the course of exchange in professional settings. a case study on the conduct of officials of the european commission seeks to illustrate this point. this looks at tacit understandings regulating the conduct of officials of the european commission, engaging in the production of a legal proposal or in the implementation of a legal measure. such interaction may be successful, or less successful, depending on how contentious a legal file is, but is underlined by certain understandings, particular norms of conduct, as to how things are get done. in uncovering shared understandings, the article looks at modes of co-operation in working parties and shared files, prom...

When the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) was negotiated between 2000 and 2006 in New York, legal capacity was one of the major points of conflict among members of the Ad Hoc Committee, the body that drafted the treaty. Universal legal capacity for all persons with disabilities has remained the major challenge for States Parties regarding the implementation of the CRPD. It goes to the heart of the problem with the medical model of disability, which the CRPD seeks to replace with the human rights model of disability. Denial or restriction of legal capacity based on an impairment or disability is enshrined in almost every legal order in this world. While most governments and legislators have at least understood that accessibility of the physical environment and accessible communication and information are preconditions for equal opportunities for persons with disabilities, the level of understanding regarding legal capacity remains minimal. Neither the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights nor any other core human rights treaty has ever pronounced that a certain health status or functional ability is a requirement for human rights. On the contrary, human rights theory is based on the assumption that human rights cannot be gained or merited. We become human rights holders qua birth, simply by being members of the human family. Yet, in practice and in law, persons with disabilities, especially those with psychosocial or cognitive impairments, have traditionally been denied their legal capacity or have been restricted therein and their civil death has been legitimised by their impairments. Adult guardianship laws, and many mental-health laws that infringe upon the right to legal capacity, are based on the conviction that it is just to deny or restrict human rights on the basis of disability. The stereotype of the unable, because disabled, citizen is so deeply entrenched in our legal tradition, that courts, legislatures, guardians and family members can claim this violation to be a form of protectiona form of caretaking. Against this background, it was perhaps naive for the CRPD Committee to take up this issue in its first general comment. When General Comment No. 1 on Article 12 CRPD was finally adopted in 2014, the Committee had worked on it for five years, which gives an indication of how complicated matters were in this regard. The working group on General Comment No. 1 was chaired by several members of the Committee and I had the honour to guide it in the final round as the last chair. I am very grateful to Eilionóir Flynn and Anna Arstein-Kerslake, who acted as my consultants during that time. General Comment No. 1 ends with a call for further 'research and development of best practices respecting the right to equal recognition of the legal capacity of persons with disabilities and support in the exercise of legal capacity' (Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, 2014, para. 48). It also reminds States Parties that persons with disabilities and their representative organisations need to be involved (Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, 2014, para. 26). The Voices of Individuals: Collectively Exploring Selfdetermination (VOICES) project, a Starting Grant funded by the European Research Council, hosted by the Centre for Disability Law and Policy at the National University of Ireland Galway, is one such project. The VOICES project brings together researchers, disability activists, practitioners and policymakers to develop collaborative responses to the challenges posed by recognition of universal legal capacity. This project places the lived experiences of people with autism, dementia, intellectual and psychosocial disabilities at the heart of efforts to develop inclusive and sustainable law reform. It is documenting the narratives of persons with disabilities who recount their experiences in exercising, or being denied legal capacity, in a wide range of legal, political, social, cultural and economic contexts. Storytellers with disabilities have been paired with

This paper combines an empirical analysis of national and international attempts to deal with the problem of poverty in China with a normative analysis of capability theory, as developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. In this way, it attempts to highlight the centrality of normative approaches to poverty and its elimination. The paper is in five parts. Section I analyses the history, development and effectiveness of social assistance under the Minimum Living Standards Scheme (MLSS) in China; Section II provides an outline of capability theory; Section III analyses the history, development and effectiveness of the United Nations Development Program's (UNDP) Millennium Development Goals, with a focus on the elimination of poverty in China; Section IV emphasises the importance of a capability approach to the measurement of poverty and outlines what needs to be done to reduce poverty in China; while Section V discusses what still needs to be done to promote an effective anti-po...