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Punishment's Legal Templates: A Theory of Formal Penal Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Ashley T. Rubin Open the ORCID record for Ashley T. Rubin [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

The well-known gap between law on the books and law in action often casts doubt on the significance of changes to law on the books. For example, the rise and fall of penal technologies have long been considered significant indicators of penal change in socio-historical analyses of punishment. Recent research, however, has challenged the significance of apparently large-scale penal change of this kind. This article clarifies the significance of penal technologies' rise and fall by offering an alternative account of formal penal change, introducing the analytical concept of “legal templates,” structural models of legal activity (e.g., punishment) available for authorization and replication across multiple jurisdictions. Analyzing punishment's templates explains how new penal technologies can be important harbingers of change, even when they fail to revolutionize penal practice and are not caused by a widespread ideological shift. This article locates the significance of punishment's legal templates in their constitutive power—their ability, over the long term, to shape cognitive-cultural expectations about what punishment is or should be. This power appears only when the template is widely adopted by a plurality of jurisdictions, thereby becoming institutionalized. Ultimately, these institutionalized templates define the scope of future punishment.

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Articles
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Law & Society Review , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , June 2019 , pp. 518 - 553
Copyright
© 2019 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

†

I wish to thank the anonymous referees and LSR editors, as well as Ellen Berrey, Ronit Dinovitzer, Laurie Edelman, Malcolm Feeley, Phil Goodman, Steve Hoffman, Johann Koehler, Sida Liu, Paula Maurutto, Fergus McNeill, and Joshua Page for reading earlier drafts of this article and providing very helpful comments (extra thanks to Steve Hoffman for reading two versions of the article). I am also grateful to Kelly Hannah-Moffat, Heather Schoenfeld, and John Eason for talking through the paper's ideas. All flaws are my own. A previous version of this article was presented at the 2016 Penal Boundaries Workshop at the University of Toronto.

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