Police often ask people to consent to a search of their person or possessions. Many people agree to allow such searches because they interpret the officers' ostensible “requests” as indirect commands. Yet courts routinely interpret police utterances in this situation as requests. A similar issue arises in the context of custodial interrogation. People being interrogated are inclined to invoke their right to counsel in relatively indirect or tentative terms. Yet courts often conclude that the suspect did not really “request” the presence of counsel. We refer to this inconsistency as “selective literalism,” by which we mean that courts selectively consider pragmatic circumstances in interpreting the speech of suspects. Using analytical tools from linguistic theory, this article explores how courts employ selective literalism. It further examines some of the consequences of this inconsistent use of interpretive devices, both practically and jurisprudentially.

Recent scholarship on penality describes profound changes in the ideology, discourses, and policies shaping criminal punishment in the late-twentieth-century United States. To assess the implications of these changes for those subject to criminal punishment, we examine the experiences of women in prison at two key points in the recent history of penality. We compare how imprisonment was practiced and responded to at the California Institution for Women in the early 1960s, when the rehabilitative model dominated official penal discourse, and in the mid-1990s, near the height of the “get tough” era. We find that the ways in which women related and responded to other prisoners, to staff, and to the prison regime, while in some ways specific to one or the other penal era, did not fundamentally change. Thus, penal regimes ostensibly informed by profoundly different rationalities nevertheless structured the daily lives of prisoners through a very similar set of deprivations, restrictions, and assumptions.

Russian firms are drowning in debt. Managers are increasingly turning to the courts for help. Drawing on a database of 100 non-payments cases decided by three courts in 2000, the article explores the parameters of this litigation and the motivations for filing lawsuits. The analysis shows that the docket is dominated by small-scale disputes between trading partners with short shared histories, suggesting that those who have long-term, trust-based relationships avoid the courts. Along with fear of disrupting ongoing relationships, the disinclination to use the courts is also motivated by a reluctance to open up transactions to state scrutiny. By contrast, the petty disputes that are brought to court tend to be simple and, therefore, managers are willing to risk exposure to the state. Indeed, in a world in which firms manipulate their financial records to create the impression of no income in order to avoid taxes (often putting bogus debts on the books), some of these managers bring cases even when there is little chance of recovering the debt because the decision provides convincing evidence to the tax authorities that the debt is bona fide.