We use this article to argue for greater recognition of legally imposed spatial exclusion—banishment—as a (re)emerging and consequential social control practice. Although the new social control techniques that entail banishment are buttressed by a blend of civil, administrative, and criminal law, they are best understood as punitive in nature. This argument is supported by two empirical findings. First, interviews with the banished indicate that spatial exclusion often has significant negative consequences akin to those identified by Sykes (1958) in his seminal account of the pains of imprisonment. Second, court data show that the growing use of civil and administrative banishment has increased the number of criminal cases involving allegations of noncompliance. These findings suggest that analysts of punishment might usefully broaden their focus to include phenomena that combine civil, criminal, and legal authority, and are not defined as punishment by their advocates.

The bifurcation of capital trials into determinations of guilt and sentencing presents defense advocates with what seem to be two distinct domains of knowledge—one apparently “legal” in character, the other “human.” But this epistemological division is actually not so clear in practice. This article dissects the procedural and strategic mechanisms through which these two domains unsettle and reconstitute the other. I provide a historical, empirically grounded account that explicitly articulates the connections between developments in legal procedure, prevailing standards of care concerning the need to conduct humanistic investigations of mitigating factors, and the on‐the‐ground trial practice of “frontloading” as a defense strategy. Drawing from documentary research, interview data with leading capital defense practitioners, and analytical observations based on my own experience as a mitigation specialist, this article presents itself as a case study of the processes of mutually constitutive rupturing that reconfigure the categories of the legal and the human.

This article traces cultural defense as a discursive realization‐in‐context, rather than as a legal‐doctrinal figure, in a Belgian real‐life criminal trial. In examining the defense plea for a Turkish man accused of battery, three discursive techniques are identified for making Cultural Otherness visible: de‐individualization, reporting preparatory meetings with the client, and supplying ethnographic “expert” knowledge that transforms the client into the “object” of discourse. Apart from providing information about the defendant's background, cultural defenses also involve particular modes of behaviorally orienting toward the defendant in the courtroom. Otherness must be enacted in court, and to this end attorneys often actively disaffiliate themselves from their clients, marking them as impenetrable, mute, and unemancipated. In doing so, they draw extensively upon the indexical and iconic modalities of talk, which is convenient because the matrix of sameness and difference on which the cultural defense is founded escapes formal legal definition.

Since the detention of General Pinochet in London in 1998 on charges of crimes against humanity, Chile's judges have sentenced more former officials of the military regime for human rights violations than judges of any other country in Latin America. This article argues that the prosecutorial turn reflects the judiciary's attempt to atone for its complicity with the dictatorship. The London arrest created pressure for prosecution of Pinochet‐era human rights violations; but it is the contest over the judiciary's legacy, as an important piece of postauthoritarian memory struggles, that explains why Chile's notoriously illiberal judiciary ceded to that pressure. By reconceptualizing judicial culture as contested, heterogeneous, and dynamic, this article opens the door to richer understandings of judicial politics, transitional justice, and the reception of international human rights.

The demeanor exhibited by a judge is a key element in criminal proceedings, especially in direct interactions with the defendant, defense representatives, and prosecutors. The judicial demeanor(s) displayed must meet the normative confines of the judicial role—primarily impartiality—within the practical constraints of long case lists, when interactions are subject to considerable time pressure.

Drawing on findings from an extensive national court observation study, this article examines the varied demeanors displayed by magistrates—the presiding judicial officers—in Australia's lower courts. It explores the complex meanings of these demeanors, and considers how they may enhance or undermine the legitimacy of judicial authority.

Individual choice is a central feature of the psychological portrait drawn by nearly every established school of thought in modern American jurisprudence. Legal scholars are increasingly interested in piercing the conceptual surface of choice to inquire into its actual psychological workings. The study of choice in this emerging behavioral legal scholarship draws primarily from cognitive psychology. This article argues that this important inquiry into choice should be broadened to include modern psychoanalytic ideas about imagination. An example of the importance of a psychoanalytic perspective on imagination is provided by the law governing the enforceability of prenuptial agreements. As this discussion illustrates, psychoanalytic psychology, in conjunction with research from the cognitive sciences, provides a valuable framework for examining assumptions about individual choice in law.

Noah Feldman's 2008 book, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, provides a sweeping review of the constitutional history of the Islamic polity that connects the past to developments in the Middle East today. The Ottoman Empire is vital to his argument. This essay critically evaluates Feldman's treatment of the Ottoman period, within the larger context of Islamic history, and in so doing considers the understudied constitutional history of the empire. Without denying the importance of the ulema and the shari'a, it argues that the empire was a hybrid of many different traditions and the centrality of Islamic law should not be overstated.

Risa Goluboff's The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (2007) advances the historiographical idea that a long civil rights movement, beginning well before the mid‐1950s, had a robust and innovative legal dimension. Her study of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) itself, demonstrates that lawyers in those organizations took guidance from many working‐class clients to successfully deploy a conception of civil rights rooted on the farm and in the factory to challenge the economic and social edifice of Jim Crow, in the North as well as the South.