Shaming is back!

Law professors of a certain age will remember that back in the 1990s, there was a debate about whether courts should impose shaming sanctions on offenders. This debate was caught up in larger discussions about the relationship between social norms, nonlegal sanctions of all sorts, and the law. But there was always an academic quality to this debate. It seemed at the time that shaming could not be an effective tool of social control in a huge, mobile, mostly anonymous society. So we all imagined shame and other social sanctions in confined settings: neighborhoods and communities, merchant and professional groups, and so on.

That was then. One Internet later, everything has changed. I discuss on Slate.