Glanvill is the supposed author of this treatise on the laws and customs of England, a work that was a twelfth-century precursor to the legal compendium of Bracton, composed in the thirteenth century. Glanvill introduces the concept of law and justice and explains the different Latin legal terms, many drawn from contemporary French, in use at the time and the different legal procedures that had developed since the Conquest.

Since the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, James Baldwin’s life and work have undergone a renaissance in and outside of the academy. His penultimate novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, which recounts the story of a young African American man who is falsely imprisoned, resonates not only with the Black Lives Matter movement but with the history of mass incarceration. As scholars such as Elizabeth Hinton have demonstrated, draconian prison sentences and police surveillance were inextricably linked to the Civil Rights Movement. If Beale Street Could Talk can be read as a novel that responds directly to the oppressive shifts in policing measures during the 1960s. In fact, as scholars such as D. Quentin Miller have argued, much of Baldwin’s work is preoccupied with what the writer called “the criminal power” of white authority. Examining one of Baldwin’s least studied novels through the lens of carceral studies sheds light on his development as a writer at a point in his career when critics were dismissing him as out of touch with the harsh realities of American political life.

Chapter 4 provides the first empirical assessment of the pathways developed earlier in the book. It focuses on access to judicial remedy mechanisms, defined as any process initiated in the court of law. This chapter asks: how does confrontation shape governance outcomes in terms of access to legal remedy efforts? I draw from political science and legal scholarship on the logic of deterrence to illustrate how Institutional Strength represents an important pathway to judicial remedy mechanisms. The Corporate Characteristics pathway is developed by engaging with political economy and management scholarship to explain the ways in which firm-level characteristics (e.g. foreignness, profitability, and size) explain variation in access to judicial remedy. Finally, the Elevating Voices pathway draws from the human rights scholarship, which illustrates how civil society participation (e.g. NGO or INGO involvement) can shape governance outcomes. Using case studies from the CHRD, this chapter also provides rich illustrations of victims’ access to judicial remedy mechanisms.

Day-by-day and hour-by-hour, in the weeks and months leading up to the crime, Aldama, Blanco, and Quintero made decisions which eventually fated them to become New Spain’s most infamous killers. The deaths of Dongo and his family shocked New Spain. But after a close examination of the lives of all three of the perpetrators, it does not seem so surprising that they resorted to brutality to satisfy their greed. In the conquistador tradition, these killers had a pattern of seeking material rewards through violence. Even their favorite hobby – gambling on cockfights – involved fighting and death for the purpose of winning money. Years before the Dongo massacre, Blanco, Quintero, and Aldama traveled across the Atlantic to New Spain, imagining that they would find wealth and success like so many Spanish immigrants had done since Cortes stepped on the beach at Veracruz in 1519. Instead, they drifted through agricultural towns in the provinces, or skulked around the shadows of Mexico City’s busy streets and bustling businesses, scamming off of the hard work of the people who had the misfortune of meeting them.

This chapter examines the identity construction and related stigmatization within the framing contest of desmovilizados (deserters) versus reincorporados (loyalists). While this contest is primarily amongst groups of ex-combatants themselves, the government also plays a role not only by encouraging desertion, but also by contesting both sides, grouping all ex-combatants under the same criminal label, and discrediting any frame constructed by combatants and/or ex-combatants. While this contest is much less structured and the frames emerged more organically – particularly as the deserters do not have a clear leadership constructing a strategic frame for them, nor a clearly defined audience – it was still having a powerful influence on reintegration experiences. In this last contest, which overlaps with all the others, language and labelling are key, as these components both create stigma and help ex-combatants fight against it.

China’s judicial clampdown on divorce has diverted marital disputes into the criminal justice system. When judges failed to protect battered women, domestic violence sometimes escalated to criminal battery or homicide. When judges ignored and subverted the law by routinely denying divorce petitions, divorce cases sometimes transformed into criminal cases after abusive husbands murdered their wives and after abused wives, in self-defense, murdered their abusive husbands. Endemic failure on the part of courts and the police to uphold their legal mandates to protect abuse victims has cost lives. So far, China’s criminal courts appear not to recognize domestic violence as a sufficiently mitigating factor to merit probation, much less acquittal, in homicide cases. In trials of women charged with killing their abusive husbands, criminal courts have steadfastly eschewed the concept of “battered woman syndrome,” and have therefore been averse to acquit—or even to sentence to probation in lieu of prison time—the very women they affirmed to be victims of domestic violence. Nonetheless, reforms introduced in 2015 have clearly turned the tide toward leniency in sentencing.

Chapter 4 further considers the ways in which prison medical officers provided evidence in court that might conflict with that of other medical witnesses and debated the applicability of the terms ‘criminal lunatic’, and ‘lunatic criminal’. The chapter discusses the establishment of institutional facilities for criminal lunatics, including Dundrum and Broadmoor, and legislative changes designed to establish whether individuals were ‘mad’ or ‘bad’. Prison medical officers now dealt with increasing numbers of cases of mental disorder among prisoners missed at the time of their trial or who became ill in prison. Though reluctant to relinquish prisoners and move them to asylums, many prisoners were transferred out of convict and local prisons and into criminal, district and county asylums, in a process often triggered by violence or disruptive behaviour rather than psychiatric diagnoses. The chapter explores how such transfers, and delays in making them, might trigger tensions between prison medical officers and asylum doctors and prison commissioners and lunacy commissioners and inspectors, evidenced in well-documented cases.

In the eighteenth century, the Massachusetts House criminalized speech, and the general sessions courts prosecuted it, for being impolite as well as ungodly. Politeness became a core element of social order and elite white masculine identity. This study identified more than 1,600 criminal speech prosecutions in the records of justices and courts. These include any document that specified verbal threats or abuse; profane cursing or swearing; verbal noise; lying; false reports; defamatory speech; or perjury. Criminal procedure was simple and discretionary, and required widespread community participation in order to effectively prosecute impolite speech. Such prosecutions helped to define elite identity and status around matrices of sensibility, civility, and credibility. Sensibility was a moral and genteel quality not manifested by those prosecuted for noisy or abusive speech. Civility connoted pleasurable sociability that was undermined by contempt, cursing, and defamation. Credibility was the gentlemanly reputation for truthfulness, destroyed by lying, perjury, false news, and mumpers (pretended gentlemen). The Revolution replaced this regime with one based on respectability.