Studies of prostitution have overlooked the role of law in constituting the identities and sexual practices of women in the sex trade and defining the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate violence in the sexual economy. Drawing on field work with sex trade participants in a northwestern United States city, this paper explores how the cultural logic of modern liberal law shapes women's identities and interpretations of their actions. In positioning women in the sex trade as “sexual outlaws” to be managed and subjected to the full scope of legal authority, the law simultaneously limits women's citizenship and withdraws its protection. Moreover, in restricting women's capacity to invoke fundamental legal rights, the law effectively sanctions “private” or extralegal forms of discipline and creates a space for violence. Given the paradoxical position these women hold as sexual outlaws on the one hand and frequent victims of physical and sexual assault on the other, I explore how they negotiate consent and resist violence.

In this paper I approach the European Union Treaties (Rome and Maastricht) and the European Court of Justice's jurisprudence from a Marxist standpoint. I argue that the treaties and case law of the European Union (EU) revolve around the rights of things (commodities), rather than of people. People primarily gain rights within the EU by demonstrating that they embody exchange value and are therefore personified commodities; people are not accorded rights merely for being human. In essence, the treaties and case law have enshrined Marx's notion of commodity fetishism, which Marx asserted to be a social mystification, into transparent law. Focusing on the grand scheme of the treaties' jurisdiction in this manner also illuminates the role of the court as it struggles to balance the demands of capital's self-valorization with fundamental human rights. I then consider the consequences of this balancing act for the EU integration process. I argue that this phenomenon as a whole also carries implications for EU civil society and for notions of legal equality among persons.

Despite professional norms of being socially responsible and providing service to the underprivileged, the attitudes of law students toward ethical duties and public service bear similarities to those of business students. Using data from multiple interviews with law and business school students at one university, I find that these attitudes develop in response to the expectations of peers and professors during school experiences. Ethics courses are marginalized by the schools, and courses focus on such pragmatic issues as the professional code of conduct (law school) or how the appearance of social responsibility affects the bottom line (business school). Provided with little guidance on what they might do when they encounter real ethical dilemmas, students larn vocabularies of motive concerning how lawyers and managers should balance profits, carry out responsibilities to various stakeholders, and weigh ethical concerns, and they then moderate their own expressions of extreme self-interest or self-sacrifice. Both groups learn to maintain social responsibilities only within reason, emphasizing the separation of work from personal convictions. These elements have implications for the performance of public service in their future careers, as well as for a scholarly understanding of professionalism.