“Legal exhaustion” and the crisis of human rights: Tracing legal mobilization against sexual violence and torture of Kurdish women in state custody in Turkey since the 1990s
Nisa Göksel and Jaimie Morse
April 2022 | Journal of Human Rights
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Kurdish women reported sexual violence in state custody during intense conflicts between the Turkish military and the guerrilla organization PKK. Drawing on archival research and in-depth interviews with lawyers and activists in Turkey, we trace the development of legal mobilization by human rights lawyers and activists who characterized state-led sexual violence in the Kurdish region as a war crime against women and brought cases before domestic courts and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Inspired by the work of Kerem Altıparmak, we develop the concept of “legal exhaustion” to characterize the emotional and relational aspects of legal mobilization in the context of war and counterterrorism politics. Bringing together scholarship in sociolegal studies and critical approaches to human rights, we argue that legal exhaustion is productive—not just an unproductive and constraining state—prompting human rights lawyers to sustain legal mobilization in/outside courts and critique national and international laws.
Personality Assessment in Legal Contexts: Introduction to the Special Issue
Tess M.S. Neal, Martin Selborn and Corine de Ruiter
January 2022 | Taylor & Francis
This special issue addresses a major gap in the literature by providing comprehensive, credible reviews of the psychometric evidence for and legal status of some of the most commonly-used psychological and personality assessment measures used in forensic evaluations. It responds to Neal and colleagues’ (2019) call for research to improve the state of and access to knowledge about psychological assessments in legal contexts, and encourages critical thinking about forensic assessment in the spirit of improvement. These articles offer clarity about the strengths and weaknesses of a number of assessment instruments to inform psychologists’ preparation for expert testimony, lawyers’ preparation for direct and cross-examination, judges’ evidence admissibility determinations, and scholars’ future research. We assembled teams of authors with different perspectives and areas of expertise to review each tool fairly, including several adversarial collaborations. Articles on the Rorschach and R-PAS, MMPI-3, PCL-R, MCMI-IV and MACI-II, PAI and PAI-A, SIRS-2, HCR-20V3, TSI and TSI-2, and the MacCAT-CA, ECST-R, and CAST*MR are included. To increase visibility, accessibility, and impact, this issue is published as free access, meaning the articles are available to download without charge. We anticipate these articles will be widely read and useful to scholars and practitioners in both psychology and law.
