The dissertation analyzes the discourse and development of the British anti-sex trafficking movement. Following the European Union's largest expansion in 2004, the United Kingdom experienced a surge in immigration from Eastern Europe, which was greeted by fears about losing British culture, stolen jobs, and rising criminal activity. From this welter of concerns, I argue, the issue of sex trafficking coalesced into a moral panic about the dangers of immigration and the sexual exploitation of women. Using qualitative research and discourse analysis, I examine the movement's depiction of the trafficking victim and its reliance on punitive policing and anti-immigration policies. Although anti-trafficking advocates claim the abolition of the African slave trade as their historical precedent, I contend that the conceptual roots of contemporary discourse lie in the white slavery panic of the Victorian era. Today's description of the trafficked woman as young, naïve, and Eastern European recalls the figure of the white slave at the same time that it demonizes migrant sex workers who do not fit the feminized and culturally-bound profile of helpless victim.

This analysis of the United Kingdom's response to a changing demographic landscape reveals how a reaction can define the phenomenon to which it ostensibly refers. In other words, the anti-trafficking campaign produces its opposing object, "sex trafficking," by delimiting the discursive field and determining the appropriate course of defensive action. In light of the political and economic crises wracking post-millennial Britain, the realm recast itself as a hostile environment for sex trafficking and inaugurated a series of unprecedented policing measures and prostitution policy shifts. To interrogate these events I perform a contrapuntal reading that troubles both the conceptual basis of the anti-trafficking movement and its legal and tactical operations. Through this analysis, my dissertation reveals that the anti-trafficking campaign is not a reaction to the sexual traffic in women; it is part of a larger socio-legal response to Eastern Europeans seeking access to the United Kingdom as full members of the European Union. This project constitutes an expansion and repositioning of studies of sex work and migration, offering a specific analysis of the British context while emphasizing the intersection between standardized narratives and cultural ruptures.

Recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Citizens United (2010) and Hobby Lobby (2014) have brought the concept of corporate personhood into mainstream discourse. By and large, the public reaction to corporate personhood has ranged from confused disapproval to partially informed outrage. The general suspicion focuses on the belief that individual persons are using the corporate form to cover up their own misdeeds and to shield themselves from personal liability. My investigation into the origin and nature of corporate personhood in the United States supports these suspicions. This study reveals that the legal fiction of corporate personhood has functioned as a prosthesis for natural persons from its inception in American law and society. This legal fiction’s foundations, history, and social impact are more complex and controversial than many contemporary critics suspect. In this dissertation, I explain corporate personhood’s origins in U.S. law and society so that we may better understand how this paradoxical person functions in American culture. My dissertation examines the nineteenth-century foundations of corporate personhood and the socio-cultural ramifications of its emergence through the lenses of corporate law, legal history, modern rhetorical theory, and the American naturalist novel. Corporate personhood’s paradoxical nature lies in the fact that the corporation is simultaneously a legal fiction and a social reality; it is an artificial and invisible person, yet is composed of natural persons and tangible objects. This person enjoys perpetual life, an internal structure designed to aggregate wealth, limited liability for its deeds and debts, and a fictional body that at once enjoys legal rights and legal impunity. The corporate person, I argue, creates a rupture in nineteenth-century personhood more generally, whereby the Gilded Age corporate form produces additional “corporate persons” in its wake.

These various nineteenth-century corporate persons (consolidation companies, financiers, married women, and labor unions) are the subject of this study. I examine these persons – these legal fictions – through the lens of nineteenth-century literary fiction (in particular, American naturalist novels). The naturalist novel’s fictive space represents, portrays, and characterizes these emergent corporate personalities and goes beyond the basic categories of black-letter law. My chapter-long case studies of legal fictions in literary fiction reveal that corporate persons like the Southern Pacific Railroad Corporation were able to dominate law, society, and the economy due to the seemingly fictional powers they derived through the legal act of incorporation. Natural persons who learned to navigate these networked bodies – like the robber baron financiers – emerged rich and powerful. Other persons, like married women subject to coverture’s erasure of personhood, could reclaim their legal personhood simply by imitating new corporate forms that emerged throughout the course of the nineteenth century. However, labor unions, the one group who could not access of emulate the corporate personality, faced socio-economic marginalization and constant defeat at the hands of the law and its corporate progeny. Legal history alone is an insufficient site for fully grasping the corporate person. Together with various theoretical and critical sources, the imagination space of the naturalist novel allows legal fictions to come to life before the mind’s eye, which gives the reader a chance to study corporate persons in all their complexity. The corporate person is a powerful legal fiction, and literary fiction helps reveal just how real the power of incorporation was in nineteenth-century America and beyond.

Combining historical, juridical and ethnographic analysis, my dissertation traces a history of evidence of reproductive bodies and the not-yet born in the Maghrib over the course of the last century through a case study of a regional phenomenon known as the "sleeping baby in the mother's womb" (al-raqid; l-raged; bu mergud). Women with sleeping babies experience pregnancies that can last for years beyond the standard nine months accepted in Western law and medicine. According to the belief in the sleeping baby, a sudden traumatic experience or the return of menstrual blood can arrest the development of a fetus in the womb. The fetus will then "sleep" in the womb--"neither living nor dead"--for an indefinite period of time until it is awoken by another traumatic shock, sexual intercourse, or spiritual and herbal treatments.

As a legal doctrine in Islamic law, the sleeping baby admitted protracted pregnancies lasting up to five, and in some cases seven, years after conception. Prior to the codification of Islamic family law between 1957-9, which banished the sleeping baby from official law, the sleeping baby phenomenon and discourse addressed the intersection of the psycho-biological and socio-legal aspects of human reproduction. The biological aspects include false or "hysterical" pregnancies (i.e., pseudocyesis), abortion induced by the mother, ectopic pregnancies, and various kinds of miscarriages--both those that are expelled from the mother's uterus and those that are retained--as well as viable, full-term pregnancies in which women give birth to a living baby. The socio-legal aspects include claims to paternity, contestations of paternity, inheritance disputes, spousal and child maintenance claims, adultery, and the status of the children of slave mothers (um walad), and free mothers based on their marital situation. The discourse of the sleeping baby enabled women to express any of the various contingent combinations that could arise from these biological and social contingencies.

The dissertation knits together detailed archival analysis of selected published and unpublished family and criminal law cases in French and Arabic from the colonial and postcolonial periods, with ethnographic data gathered from participant observation and extensive interviewing in courts and a public maternity hospital in urban Morocco. In my analysis, I track and examine the diverse forms of evidence in colonial Islamic law (1912-1959) and post-colonial state family law (1959-present) that have taken reproductive bodies and the not-yet born as objects of legal knowledge--a process I term "legal embodiment." By legal embodiment, I mean how human reproductive bodies and their bodily materials emerge in and from historical forms of law, as viable evidentiary objects carrying signifying force. Legal embodiments indicate how reproductive bodies interact with, emerge from and are given value by particular geo-historically circumscribed knowledge, authority and technologies. From women's testimony about their own bodies and midwives' sensory expertise in colonial Islamic courts, to visualizing biomedical technology and DNA testing in postcolonial state family law courts--the diverse set of bodily evidence reveals how diverse legalities that regulate women's reproduction intersect with knowledge, technologies and authority under colonial and post-colonial political-economic power. By tracing legal embodiments, I show how evidence and expertise in Moroccan law have transformed women with sleeping babies from legally-viable reproductive bodies to extra-legal unproductive bodies. Extra-legal embodiment indexes historically minor discourses and practices that law does not value as evidence, and which are deemed irrelevant in law's bodily valuations.

The Special Court for Sierra Leone, established in 2002 to adjudicate crimes committed during a decade-long conflict, represents a new form of tribunal. Its "hybrid" structure was designed to address the domestic populace more directly than at previous international criminal tribunals. The Special Court's architects claimed that the Court's physical location in Sierra Leone and its inclusion of domestic law would generate greater awareness of and participation in its transitional justice objectives. This study examines the role of the Special Court for Sierra Leone in the emerging field of transitional justice.

The Special Court claims its authority and defines its objectives through appeals to jurisdiction. As the "speaking of law," jurisdiction involves both the language through which a court argues for its legal power and the domain in which it exercises power. In the horizontally structured field of international law, where unprecedented institutions must establish their legitimacy, jurisdiction is particularly contentious.

Chapter one describes the domestic and international factors that led to the Special Court's establishment and discusses its work in the context of the conflict. Chapter two compares the Court's claims of authority to those of earlier generations of international criminal tribunals. Chapter three assesses the self-proclaimed hybridity of the Court and its law. Chapter four shows how the Court's unique character - as a specifically juridical institution whose claims to authority are grounded in hybrid sources of law - makes it especially vulnerable to criticism in its dealings with West African heads of state, as both witness and as defendant. Chapter five argues that the paradigm of post-conflict justice manifested in the Special Court requires it to go beyond narrow retributive aims and to disseminate the rule of law. Such governmental functions, together with the Court's reliance on voluntary state donations, suggest that international criminal justice projects such as the Special Court for Sierra Leone provide conduits for strong states to pursue their own security and governance objectives under the banner of the rule of law.

The dissertation examines how Colombian professionals have developed reproductive laws and policies during the past century in the name of being modern. I focus on four moments of reproductive lawmaking from 1936-2006, analyzing legal and sociolegal texts that record or inform the lawmaking process. These four moments of reproductive lawmaking are the 1936 Colombian Criminal Code, which increased penalties for men’s sexual crimes as well as abortion; two 1960s policies that promoted family planning; the 1991 Constitutional Assembly and the debate whether to include a comprehensive reproductive right, libre opción a la maternidad (free motherhood) in the new constitution; and the 2006 Colombian Constitutional Court decision C-355, which decriminalized abortion in three instances.

Studying each moment reveals Colombian professionals – lawyers, politicians, highly educated feminists, doctors, and others – participating in knowledge discourses which construct a particular approach to reproduction as the necessary course of action if Colombia would be modern. In 1936, Colombian lawyer-politicians employed legal positivist science to scrutinize sexual crimes and develop a rule of law in keeping with other liberal, modern states. During the 1960s, a community of Colombian doctors and politicians developed family planning policies in an attempt to curb rapid population growth. Grounded in the ideas of transnational population studies, the Colombian professionals feared “overpopulation” would undermine Colombia’s ability to prosper socially and economically, leaving Colombia “behind” modern nations. The 1991 Colombian Constitutional Assembly shows a commitment to inclusive democratic politics and women’s equality to counter representations of the country as violent and the state as incapable of governance. Finally, the 2006 Constitutional Court decision decriminalizing abortion portrays Colombia as an equal partner with other states in promoting women’s rights through international human rights.

The dissertation shows how Colombian professionals’ understandings of current challenges facing the state interact with knowledges based in other countries or developed in transnational circles; and that the discursive construction of these knowledges as the “modern” approach towards law and women’s reproduction generates both pressure and enthusiasm among professionals to enact these knowledges in reproductive lawmaking. Based in transnational feminisms, I use the term “geopolitics of knowledge” to refer to how social, economic, and political forces shape the circulation of knowledge discourses and effects across transnational space; as well as to how relations of power at a transnational scale affect how knowledges circulate and how, when, and who participates in a given knowledge, or “takes it up.” The dissertation shows that conceptions of modernity change over time, with implications for legal approaches towards reproduction and women’s reproductive lives.

Left critiques of professionalized liberal social change actors such as human rights groups, development organizations, and philanthropic foundations accuse them of depoliticizing or coopting radical social movements. But what happens when the professionals in these third sector institutions take up these critiques and reimagine human rights, development, and philanthropy in their light while maintaining and rearticulating their liberal commitments? This dissertation locates and investigates a search for a more ambitious and political kind of liberal social change by elite progressive civil society professionals in the first two decades of the 21st century. By examining the discourses, tools, and practices these professionals construct to support social movements, it considers the epistemological assumptions, elite self-fashioning, and metaphorical structures that underwrite the entrance of movements into liberal social change projects. The dissertation finds that the terms for progressive third sector elite to support social movements involve assimilating them to ‘civil society’, which they imagine as an ‘ecosystem’ made up of different kinds of organizations and actors, each with a role to play. The function of movements, as the actor assumed to be most insulated from and oppositional to the encroachment of market and state power on civil society, is to provide cohesion, direction, and legitimacy to the other, more professionalized and compromised, actors. To avoid coopting movements, these professionals argue that grassroots activists possess privileged knowledge of social problems, while simultaneously fashioning themselves as neutral instruments used by movements to realize their solutions. The dissertation thus analyzes tools including participatory grantmaking and the social change ecosystem framework that third sector professionals develop to secure a non-coopting solidarity relationship with movement actors. These tools are ultimately designed to ensure the autonomy of social movements from elite influence so that the movements can redeem a civil society sphere in crisis. In the process, however, these tools and discourses engender a distinction between elite and ‘authentic’ political actors, cede responsibility for securing social change to the latter, while framing the telos of that action as the redemption of a space (civil society) that exists alongside rather than as a fundamental challenge to the power of capital and state. The dissertation theorizes this set of discourses and practices as a key aspect of ‘movement liberalism’, and argues that it remains to be seen the extent to which actually existing movements are conscripted to its project, but that critiques of liberalism nonetheless need to account for both its enchantment with and aversion to ‘the political’.

This dissertation explores the role of the history of conquest in the formation of American legal institutions. The histories it presents begin during the early colonial period, and argue that American legal practices—of property-making, contract, and the creation of federal alliances, for example— grew out of colonial relationships and practices aimed at resource extraction, colonial expansion, and indigenous removal. The dissertation also describes how colonial practices of land dispossession developed to become the basis of basic social, political and legal formations in the United States. It considers the relationship between and the past and the present, and how conquest informs an American social world divided by race, class, ancestry and different relationships to money and speculation.

Specifically, the chapters examine 1) the history of mortgage foreclosure, 2) the relationship between contracts and social contracts, 3) an early federal tort system, which showcases one aspect of the nation’s civil-military approach to war, and 4) how removal policies that constitute the genealogical antecedents of administrative immigration law first emerged in the context of colonial and then federal laws of Indian Affairs. Each chapter examines these histories through the lens of a well-known narrative about American legal and political institutions: respectively, the ideas that speculation and credit can be a healthy fount of economic growth, without concomitant costs; that by virtue of its democratic social contract, America is a government by, for and of the people, based on their consent; that the U.S. has the duty of benevolent intervention in conflicts abroad to keep the world safe from terror; and the idea that the United States is a nation of immigrants, with a long and proud history of offering asylum to the world’s tired and poor.

The chapters thus together, by performances and analysis, emphasize knowledge production as a form of agency and of historical event. Each chapter presents a counter-narrative to a “settled” legal story that integrates the story of the conquest of America into it. At the same time, each also offers a meditation on the transmission of narratives and concepts and how these carry historical matter into the present.