What counts as evidence? What is accepted as true in court given the evidence admitted? How are subordinated peoples further oppressed in courts because they cannot demonstrate that their experience is fact? Drawing on the confirmation brings for Clarence Thomas as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and the testimony of Anita Hill in those hearings, the author explores the ways in which representations of sexual violence against women can be seen as not “real.”

Nietzsche is a notoriously difficult philosopher to follow. As he himself wrote, he was not interested in followers. Those who read Nietzsche and care to engage in his thought, then, cannot say that they have not been warned as to its inhospitable character.

That that character is still an issue becomes manifest in two of the four responses to “Genealogy and Jurisprudence.” The responses of Frank Munger and of Christine B. Harrington and John Brigham fail to grasp what is at stake in the claim that Nietzsche can help us to think about “the complicated character of current relations between law and social science” (GJ4 at 554).

David Lynch nicely captures what John Langbein has denounced as the “torture” of plea bargaining. Langbein's wickedly suggestive essay traced modem criminal trial practice back to medieval criminal systems in which the body of the defendant became the victim in a social sacrifice. The modern analog, for Langbein, is that the Warren Court due process revolution “guaranteed” defendants a wide variety of procedural rights that society simply cannot afford (or, Lynch would say, refuses to afford) them. The result is the outrageously generous offer the state makes to the defendants. Put somewhat differently, this sort of “incentive system” plays mind games with the much-touted principle of autonomy built into the due process/waiver model. If trials establish an automatic “risk-preferring” principle on defendants, plea bargaining tempts them with a risk-averse alternative they might well wish they had never been offered. It is both more choice and less freedom. Plea bargaining forces a “normatively thinking” defendant into the world described by Judge Easterbrook in a parallel wickedly suggestive essay, in which he portrays bargaining as the cost system for rendering into usable averages all the predictive doubts we may have about the defendant's chances of winning on both substantive and procedural grounds.

In ordinary conversation, speakers are often called on to defend their assertions. In talk that takes place in institutional settings, speakers must often account for their claims as well. This study concerns the methods of argumentative support employed by participants in a particular institutional setting: jury deliberations. Micro-interactional analysis of transcripts of two actual deliberations—using the theore tical and methodological perspectives of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis-reveals that when jurors present defenses or accounts of their positions, they often reference mundane experience and practical reasoning. Jurors do not, then, merely weigh strictly “legal” considerations. Three of the jurors' discursive methods are scrutinized: Normative assertions, claims of expertise, and declarations of knowledge. These techniques serve not only to establish “evidence” in support of a juror's position but also to deflect other jurors' disagreement

This article compares U.S. and Kenyan media representations of an incident at a Kenyan boarding school during which many young women were raped and several killed by their male schoolmates. The author's analysis of print media accounts reveals that how the press constructed the identities of “rapists” and “victims” relied on nationally specific stereotypes, myths, and scripts of rape and its relation to differences of culture, race, and rationality. U.S. accounts simultaneously explain the rapes by emphasizing difference and foreground legal constructions of rape identities that meat experiences of rape as essentially similar. The tension over difference and law in the U.S. accounts parallels the highly visible, though largely unproductive, debate among feminists pitting cultural relativism against legal universalism, and such dichotomized approaches preclude the development of politically useful conceptions of rape and rape identities. The analysis suggests that issues raised in the Kenyan press-the relation between sexual practices and rape and the state's role in furthering sexual violence-directed attention to complexities of rape and power elided by the m o w legal models pervasive in U. S . media and scholarly representations of rape. She concludes that fighting rape more effectively entails exposing limited representational practices and also attending to a broader range of understandings of rape and rape identities in various contexts