In 1685, the Swedish nobleman Per Sparre instituted legal proceedings against the printer Niclas Wankyf. The dispute had been triggered by Sparre having let his tenants erect houses for themselves on what Wankyf regarded as his private property. Wankyf had consequently torn down the buildings, causing Sparre to bring the case to court. However, Wankyf clearly saw himself as the aggrieved party and regarded Sparre as a trespasser. Arguing his case before the court, Wankyf emphasized that Sparre had never been able to prove that he held the contested area by virtue of urminnes hävd (“immemorial prescription”). To this Sparre retorted—with some irritation—that Wankyf argued as if “there are no other means of defending one's legal property than to invoke immemorial prescription.”

On July 17, 1791, a crowd of Parisians gathered at the Champ de Mars, in the western part of the city, for the third time in as many days to make clear to the National Assembly their position on the question of the king's constitutional standing. They carried with them a petition that demanded, in unequivocal terms, the suspension of the king, pending his trial on charges of betraying the French nation and the Revolution. According to the testimony of several witnesses, the day began on a tumultuous note when two men were found hiding in some bushes. Members of the crowd attacked the two men and killed them. Condemned as spies by the crowd, they were defended as innocent bystanders by the National Assembly. As soon as the Assembly heard about the killings, they dispatched the National Guard, under the command of General Lafayette, to disperse the petitioners and restore order. When the troops arrived at the Champ de Mars, a number of those present threw stones at them. The tense troops reacted by firing on the crowd, and Bailly, the mayor of Paris, took the opportunity to declare martial law in an attempt to restore order in an increasingly volatile city.

One day in late February 1873, the comisario of section 10 in Buenos Aires arrived at the home of Jacobo Varela to investigate reports that Varela had been involved in a duel with another young man, Julio Benites. Varela's brother met the policeman at the door and reported that, lamentably, Jacobo was ill and could not see him. When asked if he knew anything about a duel, the brother replied that he most certainly did not. Yes, Jacobo was bedridden because of a sword wound, but that was an accident: he had slipped while playing with the weapon and had fallen on top of it, the blade entering his right side below the shoulder and passing through his body. The additional wounds on his hands came when he attempted to pull the sword out.

In the wake of Foucault's provocative philosophical contributions to the study of discipline and punishment, social and legal historians no longer narrate penal history as a straightforward tale of moral and political progress. In its place is a schematic picture of a large-scale retreat from the body to the prison as the prime site of punishment. Historiographical proclivities perpetuate that image: early modernists tend to concentrate on the Bloody Code and similar régimes of terror, whereas historians of the twentieth century specialize in studies of regulatory modes of punishment and “normalization.” These latter works include histories of reformatories, family courts, social workers, psychiatric experts—in short the institutions and agents that best instantiate the reorientation toward disciplining the soul and governing the self. Scholars who study corporal and capital punishment in the twentieth century would seem to have nothing to add, other than to remark that there were exceptions in the wider history of penal change.

In 1953 a musical titled The Adventures of Nasseradin opened in Tel Aviv. One of its tunes, the “Song of Law,” had music and lyrics so appealing that overnight it became the most popular song in Israel. The subject of the lyric was a tyrant, the Emir of the Kingdom of Buchara. Two brothers were arguing over a pot, and the Emir in his capacity as judge, presided over their trial. His decree: plaintiff and defendant should be executed and the pot thrown into the royal treasury.