The last twenty years have seen an important shift in the pattern of public service provision throughout the countries of the OECD. There has been a transfer of responsibility from the public to the private sector across a range of services. But what will market mechanisms do to the public interest aspects of these services? This chapter puts forward two alternative claims: (1) The crucial problem is not how to compensate for the loss of the public interest in privatisation but how to move out of the reductive public/private dichotomy itself and make private law responsive to a plurality of diverse ‘private’ autonomies in civil society; (2) the adequate reaction to privatisation is not to impose public law standards on private law but to transform private law itself into the constitutional law of diverse private governance regimes, something which will ultimately lead to its far-reaching fragmentation and hybridisation.

This chapter defines women’s legal status in a variety of legal jurisdictions across the Anglo-American world, and examines how colonists adopted and modified English law in the earliest decades of colonisation. It argues that the complexity of the English legal system gave English women a decisive advantage over some of their colonial counterparts. While married women were limited in common law courts by the doctrine of coverture, other legal jurisdictions provided women with alternative avenues for legal redress when defending their property and persons. The two most important jurisdictions for women in England were equity law and ecclesiastical law, which both provided some remedy for the common law’s severity toward women.

This chapter draws a bow from the self-destructive growth compulsions of social systems, over the moment of near-catastrophe, to new orientations, which cannot be effected from the outside but only through the transformation of their ‘inner constitution’. It makes four main arguments. (1) in order to understand the global financial crisis, we should not rely on factor analysis alone. Instead, we should look for the underlying self-destructive growth compulsions of information flows. (2) To ‘hit the bottom’ refers to the constitutional moment when either a catastrophe begins or societal forces for change are mobilised in such intensity that the ‘inner constitution’ of the economy transforms under their pressure. (3) Plain money reform is one of several examples that illustrate a capillary constitutionalisation of the global economy. (4) The dichotomy constitutional/unconstitutional develops into a binary meta-code within the structural coupling between the economy and law, and is ordered above both the legal code and the economic code.

The concluding chapter returns to the ‘Trojan Horse’ affair, demonstrating how it epitomises the mobilisation of the power identified in the book. The chapter situates Prevent as central to understanding contemporary academic and political debates regarding security, identity, community and the expression of politics in the UK. Further, it locates Prevent as central to an emerging security paradigm that seeks to map and secure the future, and is mobilised outside of traditional security architectures, notably through pastoral forms of power. In doing so, it outlines an analysis and a research agenda that is crucial to understanding the present and future of security policy in the UK.

This chapter demonstrates that Prevent produces an account of future violence by discursively producing certain performances of identity as ‘vulnerable’ to radicalisation due to their alienation from ‘Britishness’ and ‘British values’. It is therefore through understanding and ordering identities in the present that processes of becoming violent in the future can be conceptualised and intervened into. Analysed through a post-structuralist framework, this discursive positioning can be understood as a set of productive practices; it is through the security act that alienation from ‘Britishness’ is made manifest. ‘Britishness’ and ‘British values’ are thus produced as secure and securing; they are normalised, while that which is produced as external is rendered threatening and, therefore, in need of intervention. Prevent, therefore, establishes a boundary between those identities deemed secure, those that are contained within a ‘normalised Britishness’, and those deemed threatening, on account of the potential they may contain. The problematic of Prevent therefore brings together questions of temporality, security and identity, producing and then securing the threat of the future through an analysis of performances of identity in the present.

The conclusion brings together the different legal actions and pleas examined throughout the book to create a picture of the wide-ranging and varied means by which medieval urban women engaged with the law. It highlights the richness of the sources used throughout the book for examining women’s legal lives and enriching our understanding of urban justice through the recovery of stories that might otherwise go untold. In assessing the nature of women’s legal actions, it argues that these were often not defined primarily or solely by gender, with women being involved in the same legal actions and pleas as men. Finally, it draws together the numerous factors that determined women’s engagement with the law, including the type of plea or offence, a woman’s marital status, and the customs and practices of the town in which she lived. This means that there was no singular type of urban woman litigant and no definitive legal experience for urban women. Instead, the conclusion, and the book as a whole, highlights the importance of paying attention to the individual details contained within each legal action in order to better understand women’s experiences of and negotiation of justice within medieval towns.

Trends of constitutionalisation can be identified beyond the nation state. They follow two different directions, as this chapter shows. Outside the limits of the nation state, constitutions emerge in the institutions of international politics, and they emerge simultaneously outside the limits of politics in the ‘private’ sectors of global society. Transnationalisation confronts constitutional sociology with three different challenges: (1) to analyse empirically ongoing constitutionalisation processes beyond the nation state, (2) to develop a theory of transnational societal constitutionalism and (3) to formulate sociological preconditions for normative perspectives in politics and law.