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While sociologists have focused on the national adoption of public-sphere women’s rights such as the right to vote in elections or participate fully in economic matters, less work has examined the diffusion of private-sphere women’s rights, rights of women in the home. We address this gap by examining the cross-national adoption of laws that criminalize marital rape. Building on prior research that finds that women’s rights organizations and women’s rights focused treaties, we explore the cross-national determinants of the criminalization of marital rape. Using an event history analysis covering 131 countries from 1979 to 2013, we find support for the global institutionalist framework that contends that socialization into the global system and direct advocacy efforts of global organizations contribute to faster rates of criminalization of marital rape. Further, we suggest that these global institutionalist processes become amplified when they are focused by events that set the agenda for international organizations. Implications for world-society scholarship on the global adoption of women’s rights are further discussed.
Following an analysis of key colonial accusers, Chapter six focuses attention on the target of Alberta’s performances at theatres of accusation: criminally accused individuals. It reveals a politics through which accused subjects were formed at police-guided accusatory theatres – including information gathering, arrest, and examination. These theatres required targeted subjects to perform roles, under the threat of force, as law’s accused persons. Referring to three paradigmatic examples, the discussion centres on how colonial law recognized criminally culpable individuals. Underscoring individually based accusations, this law moulded accused personas through at least two key techniques. First, its justices transcribed what could be legally ‘heard’ and translated complex relations into idioms of law – thereby attributing degrees of culpability for crimes to accused individuals and deflecting attention away from conflict-generating social structures. Secondly, the theatres managed avowals of legal truth, thus subtly promoting obedience to colonial law and thence settler social order.
The introduction provides an indepth overview of the book's focus, theoretical orientation, critical methodology, significance, originality, and chapter synopisis. It begins by noting that while many analysts may have a sense that accusations initiate criminal matters, neither sociology, history, nor criminal law have focused critical attention on the socio-political forces which first select people to face criminal trials. This is in many the overlooked foundation of criminal law, and state criminalization. In an attempt at redress, examines though socio-political foundations by analyzing (criminal) cases a 'paradigmatic' examples of how criminalization begins. It does so by turning to a unique context and time -- Alberta, Canada circa 1874 –1884 –- where the Dominion of Canada deliberately formed a police force to enforce colonial law. Relying on Wittgenstein and Foucault, and 'law as performance' scholars it indicates how one might approach the idioms, powers, and performances through which pretrial criminal accusations translate social lore into law.
Low-income women and, disproportionately low-income women of color seeking reproductive and pregnancy care are increasingly subject to what this article terms carceral care – care compromised by its’ proximity to punishment systems. This article identifies the legal and health care practice mechanisms leading to carceral care and proposes solutions designed to stop criminalization at the bedside.
This chapter centers the liberated African Adelino Mwissicongo’s biography from slavery to apprenticeship and from apprenticeship to incarceration for theft in the context of the struggles for “full freedom” by liberated Africans between 1850 and 1864, the radical transformation of Rio’s urban economy and social landscape, and the discourse on vagrancy and criminality that distinctly identified free people of color and Portuguese immigrants as objects of police surveillance in the last decades of slavery in Brazil. The chapter places Adelino’s story in relation to the problem of petty criminality and poverty as Rio underwent a rapid demographic transformation that saw a significant decrease in its slave population to under 17 percent by 1872, according to the first national census. I argue that the penitentiary became complicit in constructing a pathologizing discourse that branded liberated African men and women as “incorrigible” by collecting and providing documentary support for the denial or concession of freedom certificates.
Social conflicts stemming from industrial mining projects in Peru have increasingly been fought in court cases in recent years. This article analyzes the dark side of this judicialization of mining conflicts, a process through which state authorities criminalize participation in social protests and attempt to prevent the mobilization of social movements. This use of the law by public authorities is an example of the so-called shrinking space in which the scope of action of civil society actors is increasingly restricted and constrained worldwide. This article presents an in-depth analysis of a specific court case against a group of mining opponents in the Cajamarca region of Peru. Based on ethnographic field research conducted in Peru, the article discusses three different modalities of the law’s domination, exploring the various ways the law rules those who oppose large-scale extractive projects.
In 1996, the year Infinite Jest was published, the Federal Drug Administration approved Oxycontin as a prescription drug, a move that would have dire repercussions for Americans’ relationship to opiates. Indeed, Wallace’s novel appeared at a pivotal moment in what is now considered the opiate crisis. Drug use, of course, appears throughout Wallace’s fiction, including the pot-smoking LaVache of The Broom of the System, the numerous addicts in Infinite Jest, and the amphetamine-popping Chris Fogle in The Pale King. Wallace’s work fits into a long tradition of drug use and recovery in fiction, a genre that reaches back to Homer, Thomas De Quincey, William Burroughs and many more. This chapter will argue that Wallace’s fiction marks a sociopolitical shift in this genre: the commercialization of addiction under late capitalism. This approach to Wallace’s work will, like the recent Cambridge Companion and Marshall Boswell’s latest monograph, further thicken our understanding of Wallace’s literary and sociocultural context.
There is little scholarship on museums and heritage sites that memorialize courts, judges, and law. Engaging with literatures on penal history and law and culture, we explore representations of law and power in court museums across Canada. Based on observations and interviews, we examine the meanings of the artifacts curated at court museum sites. In a post-Truth and Reconciliation Commission context, where heritage sites have been called upon to account for the atrocities experienced by Indigenous peoples in colonial institutions, we show how court museums in Canada continue to be curated in ways that naturalize the Canadian state and law, deny colonialism, and reproduce myths regarding the Canadian penal system. In our discussion, we reflect on the implications of our findings for literatures on representations of penality and law. We contend penal history museums must learn from critical, decolonizing trends in museological studies.
It is a huge pleasure to engage with Prof. Shaw’s careful and close reading of my article. Though almost a decade old, many of the issues are becoming only more relevant as it seems that Roe v Wade will be overruled in the U.S. and travel for abortion will become a sad reality.1 I appreciate how deeply Prof. Shaw interacts with my article and am full of praise for his work, but given the small space allocated here I only focus on our few places of disagreement.
States make decisions to allocate resilience to (or withhold resilience from) stakeholders across these networked interests through the lens of the state’s own vulnerability and resilience needs. We have revealed how the state’s “other-regarding” responsibility to govern in the “collective interest” – allocating resilience to shore up particular (competing) individual, aggregated and/or institutional claims – and the state’s own “self-regarding” need to shore up its resilience vis-à-vis citizens, markets, and society – interact to produce and provoke state responses to squatting. Finally, because Resilient Property analyses seek to explore as much as possible of the “problem space,” we have looked beyond the horizontal scale of national legislation or litigation to investigate how multi-scalar states craft complex solutions to complex problems. This includes tailoring responses to the specific needs and priorities, pressures and strains, commitments and constraints, that come to fore at the local, regional, national or supra-national level. Multilayered responses to squatting allow scope for normative hybridity within state responses to “wicked” property problems, in ways that can support systemic equilibrium. In the first part of this chapter, we reflect on three types of state responses to squatting: (1) property/private law responses; (2) criminal justice/law-and-order responses; and (3) responses deploying other administrative functions of the state. We consider how state responses reflect alignments between state self-interest and selected aspects of the state’s other-regarding responsibilities; and how they contribute (or not) to restoring equilibrium and shoring up the authority and legitimacy of the state in moments of crisis. These national-jurisdiction level legal responses are embedded within a polycentric, multimodal, and multi-scalar matrix. In the second part of the chapter, we examine two city-level case studies: New York City and Barcelona – to reflect on moments in which local- or city-level responses were key to restoring equilibrium, or triggering tipping-points for change.
In Chapters 6–8, we examine how state responses to squatting, and the lenses through which the competing claims of stakeholders are seen, articulated, prioritized, and evaluated, frame debates about homeless squatting in empty land in the context of complex, competing, multi-scalar normative goals. In doing so, we continue to recognize that squatting conflicts are embedded in political, economic, cultural, social, and legal jurisdictional contexts, and that, in these contexts, assumed identities and characteristics are assigned to competing actors, as legal and extra-legal norms are applied to tackle problems and adjudicate conflicts. In this chapter we focus, firstly, on the conceptual and pragmatic meanings – and the “scaled production” – of possession in common law and civil law traditions. We then examine how the act of squatting, and the status of squatters, has been rescaled in recent years. On one axis, we read adaptations in state responses to property events – for example, the criminalization of squatting – as reflecting the upscaling or elevation of the squatting “event.” The criminalization of squatting – or any other erstwhile non-criminal activity – signals that a previously low-stake event has accrued high-stakes impact for the state. It reveals new or emerging pressures on the state to take “other-regarding” action, mediating directly between competing (erstwhile private) claims (for example, owners, squatters, investors, neighbors). And the nature of the state’s response signals to the alignment of particular resilience claims with the state’s (or the government’s) own resilience needs. In focusing on the problem of homeless squatting on empty land through the prism of the homeless squatter, we adopt the framing techniques discussed in Chapter 5: placing the squatter at the center of the network of competing stakeholders and examining the “webby relations” that shape, mediate and separate representations of squatters in accounts of homeless squatting on empty land.
Little is known about how international humanitarian law has developed around the world, other than in Europe and the USA. However, it is a topic worth researching, as it may reveal new connections, causalities and the previously unknown origins of legal institutions. Mexico is a good example of how the rules of war developed differently in different countries, since – as early as 1871 – it incorporated the law of war in its domestic criminal law. This article will explore how the idea of criminalizing violations of the laws of war flourished in nineteenth-century Mexico. A combination of factors including foreign interventions, civil wars, the liberal convictions of the drafters of the Mexican Criminal Code and their will to achieve the rank of “civilized nations” led to the creation of the crime “violations of the duties of humanity”. This development was a milestone in the history of pursuing individual criminal responsibility for violations of the laws of war and, therefore, is a missing piece in its history.
In Spain, sanctions can be of three types: (1) administrative, (2) civil or (3) criminal. The first two are the most important while the third is residual and scarce, although there has been a long-running debate, especially in the academic sphere, about the convenience of greater criminalization. (1) Competition authorities can impose administrative sanctions, mainly fines, on infringers, both on companies and their directors. Exclusion of public tenders can also be imposed on entities that have been sanctioned (final sanction) for anticompetitive behaviour. (2) Commercial courts can award compensation to victims for antitust damages. These awards are always compensatory and not punitive, so they cannot exceed the damage caused. (3) Although there is no specific cartel offence, some anticompetitive conduct can also fall into some criminal types. Although the Spanish Criminal Code has since 1848 had provisions intended to penalise individuals who carry out conduct aiming at altering or manipulating prices, recourse to criminal proceedings for the sanction of these behaviours has been highly exceptional. The current trend is towards intensifying administrative and civil sanctions (higher corporate fines, more frequent and harsher fines for directors and exclusions of public tenders, while enhancing award of damages).
Competition law sanctions in Japan are described after first dividing the issues into cartels and non-cartels. Regarding non-cartels, although the 2009 Amendment introduced administrative fine systems, there are only a few orders, arguably because the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) tends to avoid orders that addressees would be likely to contest in the courts. As a result, the JFTC stresses the importance of advocacy instead of frequently enforcing the law. In contrast, regarding cartels, the JFTC has repeatedly issued administrative fine orders. The 1977 Amendment introduced the fine system against cartels, and the 2005 Amendment introduced a leniency system. If the violator is either a repeat offender (recidivism) or a cartel ringleader, the fine becomes 1.5 times higher (if both, 2.0 times higher). There are no fining guidelines. Thus far, the sanctions related to cartels seem to work effectively; quite a few cartels seem to have been deterred. The chapter also describes the framework of the 2019 amendment that took effect in December 2020.
The chapter summarizes the most important issues of the research topic, with a special focus on the goals of sanctioning competition law infringements. Without efficient sanctions, there is a serious risk that competition rules would not be taken seriously, which would in turn undermine the performance of our market economy. Sanctions, deterrence and respect for law are inseparable friends. Although there seems to be a global consensus that the ultimate goal is optimal deterrence, this goal exists more on the policy level than in the calculation of the amount of fines and other sanctions in actual cases. The chapter discusses various options for measuring the efficiency of fines, concluding that this discussion can be pursued only at an academic level. A mix of sanctions can bring about optimal deterrence, including personal administrative sanctions. Two hypothetical cartel cases with likely fines imposed in various jurisdictions are presented to show that even similarly structured sanctioning regimes may result in a diverging level of sanctions being imposed due to diverging national approaches.
Using insights from previous chapters we consider three issues going forward. First, we unpack varied goals of stigma change and corresponding agendas to achieve them. Second, we describe who is the best advocate for stigma change. Third, we reflect how the experience of SUD stigma is colored by national perspectives. We end viewing the status quo, on one hand, with optimism -- SUD stigma is an injustice to be erased – but nonetheless with the sobering realization that bigotry in general (not just SUD but racism, sexism, and homophobia) are stubborn enemies to beat. Still, as in other civil rights movements, we believe that grassroot anti-stigma programs led by people with lived experience are the best approach for change in the near term.
Stigma negatively shapes the lives of people who use substances through criminalization processes and criminal justice involvement. This chapter draws from the authors’ lived experiences to explore the harms created by stigma at the intersection of substance use and criminal justice. Stigma produces a social context contributing to high rates of criminal justice involvement among people who use substances through inequitable social conditions, criminalization of substances, and under-resourcing of substance use services. Substance use stigma is reinforced by harmful police practices, painful imprisonment experiences, and insufficient support offered to formerly incarcerated people living in the community. Approaches for reducing substance use stigma involve reforming drug policy to decriminalize substances, improving access to substance use treatment and harm reduction services, and involving people with lived and living experiences of substance use and criminal justice involvement in policymaking and service delivery.
In 2002, the UN Panel of Experts on Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo issued its final report.2 In it, the Panel included a list it had compiled of companies involved in the war economy of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The Panel, which had been mandated by the Security Council to examine the DRC war economy and make recommendations about sanctions and other measures, stated that ‘[b]y contributing to the revenues of the elite networks, directly or indirectly, those companies and individuals contribute to the ongoing conflict and to human rights abuses’.3 The Panel appended to its report several lists: one identified ‘companies on which the panel recommends placing financial restrictions’ and a second consisted of names of ‘persons for whom the Panel recommends travel and financial restrictions’. A third list identified businesses alleged to be ‘in violation of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises’.4
This article examines the emotional terrain and discursive frames that govern the constitution of those subject to the “dangerous offender” (DO) designation in Canada. Focusing on the emotion of remorse, we discuss four narratives involving individuals who went through the DO hearing process, gaining significant media attention. Asking what role Indigeneity and other factors play in how the media discuss the emotional comportment of DOs, we examine the persistence of particular discursive frames in these narratives, and the counter-frames that challenge or disrupt dominant understandings of what it is appropriate to feel. The expression of emotion, and its interpretation, can be critical to the outcome of cases, criminalized people/survivor stigmatization, and normalization of punishment and may also motivate community mobilization and prompt policy change. Yet, emotion, and how it may be performed and interpreted differently, is not well understood or discussed in these narratives.
Over the period of mass criminalization, social scientists have developed rigorous theories concerning the perspectives and struggles of people and communities subject to criminal legal control. While this scholarship has long noted differences across racial groups, it has yet to fully examine how racism and criminalization interrelate in the making of criminalized people’s perspectives and their visions for transforming the legal system. This article engages with Du Boisian sociology to advance a theory of subjectivity that is attuned to the way criminalization reproduces the subjective racial order and that aims to uncover subaltern strategies and visions for transforming the structure of the law and broader society. Through a critical review of interpretive scholarship across the social sciences and an original analysis of interviews with a diverse sample of criminal defendants conducted in the early years of the Black Lives Matter movement, I illustrate how a Du Boisian approach coheres existing theories of criminalized subjectivities, clarifies the place of White supremacy and racism, and provides a theory of legal change rooted in ordinary people’s experiences and needs. I introduce the concept of legal envisioning, defined as a social process whereby criminalized people and communities imagine and build alternative futures within and beyond the current legal system. Du Boisian sociology, I conclude, provides the methodological and theoretical tools necessary to systematically assess legal envisioning’s content and to explain its contradictions, solidarities, and possibilities in overlooked yet potentially emancipatory ways.