Chapter 6 looks at the ways in which frenzy was weaponized during the many religio-political upheavals of the period. As a figure of speech, it offered rich material for English polemicists, who knew that questioning their opponents’ sanity was more effective than simply refuting their claims. As a literal diagnosis, frenzy also had a practical use: it could silence politically inconvenient people without making a show. This chapter shows how its conferral was used to justify the incarceration of prophets, mystics, and kings. Yet the diagnosis had one serious drawback: it gave its recipients the gift of innocence. Frantic persons were incapable of crime, and could neither be convicted nor punished for their actions. If a recipient later became not just inconvenient but too dangerous to live, any previous diagnosis – no matter how spurious – had to be redacted from the record. This was a problem for the religious polemicists too: the aim was to pathologize ‘heretics’ ‘papists’, ‘puritans’, and ‘sectarians’, not to excuse them from all wrongdoing. Eventually, this chapter argues, that flaw drove Anglican polemicists to abandon frenzy for a new diagnosis: ‘melancholy enthusiasm’.

On 27 April 2015, Jamie Maynard and Courtney Penix met in a strip mall parking lot in Columbus, Ohio, a city in the Midwestern United States (US). Earlier that day, Courtney had sent Jamie a series of text messages asking if she could get her $150 worth of heroin. Jamie said that she could, plus two ‘rigs’ (equipment to inject the drug), for $175 total. They arranged to meet that evening to make the trade before Jamie headed to work at a local casino. Jamie and Courtney, both White women in their mid twenties, met earlier that spring through a friend-of-a-friend. They initially connected to exchange drugs: heroin, to which both had developed habits, and the pharmaceuticals Suboxone, used to ease painful opioid withdrawal symptoms, and Xanax, used to ease anxiety and sometimes used in combination with opioids to amplify the effects of the drugs. They quickly developed a casual friendship, communicating regularly by text messages and phone calls. They vented about their jobs, shared stories about their struggles to maintain their drug habits, and offered drugs to one another to keep each other ‘well’ (i.e., to stave off withdrawal) (Williams, 2020).

Moving beyond the structural antagonism of criminal law, this chapter explores the subject positions of actors in scenarios of sexual harm. If the sex offender emerges as a felon bearing the head of a wolf, the victimized white child emerges as the exemplary figure of vulnerability. While tropes of vulnerability are mobilized to justify paternalistic state coercion, they are also a powerful reminder of humans’ interdependence and mutuality. Thinking with vulnerability as an analytical category focuses attention on the lingering traumatic effects of sexual assault, as well as the severe punitiveness toward sex offenders. Addressing sexual violence does not require draconian penalties; conversely, addressing carceral expansion does not necessitate minimizing sexual violence. Centering vulnerability may allow us to rethink the foundations of our social contract in ways that acknowledge both our precariousness and the sovereign violence that holds us in its thrall.

The crimes of murder and manslaughter as well as any statutorily created offences involving the death of a person, such as dangerous driving causing death or assaults causing death are homicides in the sense of unlawful killings. Homicides may, however, be lawful insofar as being justified by, for example, self-defence or acting in the defence of another person; or being excused as a result of duress. They may be the consequence of an accident or an accused may not be criminally responsible because they suffer from a mental illness.This chapter will explore and analyse the crimes of murder, manslaughter and various statutory crimes involving particular types of conduct which cause the death of another person, including assaults, driving vehicles and administering drugs or other acts to hasten death. Murder is the most serious form of unlawful homicide and, with culpability rooted largely in the intentional nature of the killing, it attracts severe punishment up to a maximum of imprisonment for life. This penalty may be mandatory and may mean for the term of the offender’s natural life in some jurisdictions or in specific circumstances.

Provincial governance was never of great interest to Roman administrators or jurists. This begins to change only when jurists increasingly became administrators exposed to provincial claim. Jurists had to begin thinking about provincial contexts as raising important questions of governance - in particular, that key assumptions about law might be different in a world marked by extractive governance. Key among these is the late second/early third century jurist Ulpian of Tyre. Ulpian begins the process of transforming governance from an array of untheorized practices into something amenable to traditional juristic analysis. As a successful administrator, he did this knowing that such an account was otherwise lacking. His magnum opus, On the Office of the Proconsul, can be seen as an attempt to capture what was distinctly provincial about provincial governance. But Ulpian’s key text can also be read as a response to the challenge of provincial legalism.

Donelson argues that pragmatism is a valuable tool in our thinking about three issues surrounding punishment. The first is how punishment should be defined; he argues in favor of understanding punishment in terms of practical criteria, e.g., ensuring that the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is interpreted in a just fashion. The second issue concerns debates about policing and prisons; Donelson argues that pragmatism, and in particular James’s pragmatic method, can help reframe those debates. He describes the respective positions of reformers and abolitionists and suggests, from a Jamesian deflationary perspective, that the reform-versus-abolitionist debate should be approached as a debate over how we should think and speak about policing and imprisonment. The third issue is how best to understand “mass” incarceration. Donelson’s view is that the concept of mass incarceration is normative and that natural facts alone cannot settle the question of what levels of incarceration count as mass and what levels count as unproblematic; on his view, we cannot understand whether a given level counts as mass incarceration without assuming some normative criterion.

The introduction provides an overview of the analysis of the dialogue.

The treatment of alleged “spiriting” victims in London courts versus colonial American courts further reveals presumptions of consent to work. The lower courts in London offered redress to people targeted by illicit transatlantic servant brokers when they escaped before transportation. Early modern notions about how people’s behavior flowed from their intentions meant that contemporaries sympathized with rescued or escaped spiriting victims in London precisely because they had avoided transportation. By contrast, spirited servants who arrived in the colonies struggled to shift the perception that the mere fact of their arrival indicated that they had wanted to come. The colonial magistrates presumed that newly arrived servants had been complicit in their own transportation and oversaw the belated creation of servants’ indentures. Far fewer servants found redress for spiriting in the colonies than in London, because of this presumption and further procedural obstacles.

This chapter explores, in a roundabout way, whether Kant’s legal philosophy relies on his mature ethics of autonomy and respect. The normativity of the law must be externally enforced by coercive measures. The proportionate and credible threat that transgressions will be punished acts as a deterrent and make the rights of individuals comparatively secure – the law is occasionally broken. Now, the Kantian state does not concern itself with why in particular citizens break or comply with the law. In that sense, Kant’s philosophy of law does not rely on his ethical theory or moral psychology. But agents must be in a position to comply with the law. They must face a meaningful choice, which can only be secured by the availability of the motive of ethics: respect for the law. Without respect, agents would be exposed to prudential considerations only. Those who break the law take their criminal act to be prudentially justified. Viewed from this limited perspective, their actions turn out to be imprudent if they are punished for them. But punishability and imprudence are different. So, making what the law prohibits properly illegal requires an ethical foundation after all.

If Kant’s Doctrine of Right is an integral part of his moral philosophy and thus the categorical imperative is the basis of his Universal Law of Right, then this Law of Right must be derived from the Universal Law of Morals due to the provisions of Kant’s concept of Right. This chapter shows how this works in the framework of the natural law tradition.

In 1651 Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan announced that the ‘question…by what door the Right, or Authority of Punishing…came in’ was one of ‘much importance’. In this he echoed Hugo Grotius who, while differing from Hobbes in the answer he provided, had written in 1625’s De Jure Belli ac Pacis [The Rights of War and Peace], that the ‘Origine and Nature’ of punishment had been ‘misunderstood…[giving] Occasion to Many Mistakes.’ This right to punish was seen by early modern political thinkers as needing justification. This was particularly true in the context of voluntarist models of legitimacy according to which individuals chose to become members of the political community and the right to enforce obedience wielded by the governors of these communities had its roots in the equal and natural rights of subjects themselves.

Chapter 7 culminates in 1848 with a study of Mexican women’s varied strategies in dealing with the occupation. It argues that US officers and enlisted men misunderstood women’s actions in war to characterize Mexican women as affectionate friends, and surveys the harmful consequences of that misconception. The core cultural belief that the army protected women was powerful enough that soldiers were unable or unwilling to see what was in front of them: pervasive evidence of women’s combatancy. The chapter concludes by uncovering the violence of protection – how army depictions of Mexican women as nonthreatening and sexualized allies both generated violence against women and encouraged officers to exclude evidence of that violence from official records.

This chapter compares the impact of different regulatory tools (command and control, mandates, and incentives relative to reasoning, honesty oath, and nudge) on the crowding out of different types of intrinsic compliance motivations.