Censure, blame and harms are central concepts in sentencing that have evolved over the years to take into account social context and experiential knowledge. Flexibility, however, remains limited as the current analysis in sentencing focuses on the offender while failing to engage with the state's contribution in creating wrongs and harms. This risks giving rise to defective practices of responsibility since the state can also contribute to their production. The following article presents a complementary and additional framework within sentencing to account for state censure, blame and harms. The framework is rooted in communicative theories of punishment that integrate a responsive understanding of censure and a relational account of responsibility.

This article examines Canada’s first internet gambling website blocking scheme, which was enacted in Quebec as part of the implementation of the province’s 2015 budget. Using qualitative research methods, the article illustrates the complexities of regulating online gambling. Influenced by critical sociological and anthropological studies of gambling, and taking a socio-legal, governmentality perspective, it shows how socio-legal studies can illuminate research on the regulation of gambling, and how the study of online gambling can, as a sentinel site for the regulation of online consumption, contribute to the development of socio-legal studies. Our analysis shows that the governmentality of online gambling is framed so as to exclude 1) a range of risks (e.g., related to consumer profiling and the capacity to stimulate “addictive consumption”), 2) the heterogeneity of everyday experience that connects online gambling with online addictive consumption more generally, and 3) a range of possibilities for governing online gambling otherwise.

Appointment and Censure of the European Commission — Development of Rules of Constitutional Practice — Parliamentary committee hearings 2004 — Guidelines on Approval Procedure of the Commission — Framework Agreement 2005 between European Parliament and Commission — Clash between Parliament and Council on control of European Commission — Responsibility of individual Commissioners.