In his 1950 movie Rashomon, the famed Japanese director Akira Kurosowa presented a tale of a deadly crime that took place in a grove, which was witnessed by four individuals. Each of these individuals then proceeded to report what they saw in mutually contradictory ways. The movie has since received the ultimate honor of having a phrase coined in popular culture to describe its central message. The “Rashomon effect” is used to describe those occasions when a single event is perceived in contradictory, although perhaps equally plausible, ways by the different witnesses on hand, telling us at least as much about the internal dynamics within the witnesses to the event as about the event itself.

In 1522, Marie Quatrelivres, accused of adultery by her husband and found guilty, was condemned to be beaten with sticks on three Fridays and afterwards enclosed in a convent. The court allotted her husband 2 years to decide if he wanted to take her back. If he did not choose to reconcile with her, she was to be enclosed for life and lose all of her property. So wrote eminent jurist Jean Papon (1505–1590) in his collection of notable cases heard before the royal courts of France. Papon described a handful of other sixteenth century adultery cases similarly decided, and then cited a contemporary and fellow eminent jurist, Nicolas Bohier, as having stated that another common punishment for adultery in France was to cut off an adulterous woman's hair, tear her clothes, and parade her in shame throughout the town or city in which she lived.

Academics have traditionally associated capital punishment most closely with authoritarian regimes. They have assumed an incompatibility between the death penalty and the presumably humane values of modern liberal democracy. However, recent scholarship on the United States by David Garland has suggested that a considerable degree of direct democratic control over a justice system actually tends to favor the retention and application of the death penalty. The reason why the United States has retained capital punishment after it has been abolished in other Western nations is not because public opinion is more supportive of the death penalty in America than in Europe or in Canada. Rather, it is because popular control over the justice system is greater in the United States than in other countries and this strengthens the influence of America's retentionist majority. However, the experience of the United States in this regard has not been unique. The same link between democratic control and retention of the death penalty can be seen in the history of the effort to abolish capital punishment in France. In 1908, a bill in the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of the French Parliament) to abolish capital punishment was defeated, in large part because of strong opposition from the public. In 1981, majority public opinion in France still favored retention of the death penalty, but in that year, the nation's Parliament defied popular sentiment and outlawed the ultimate punishment. Historians have so far provided little insight into why abolition succeeded in 1981 when it failed in 1908. The explanation for the different outcome appears to have been the greater degree of influence public opinion exerted over the nation's justice system at the turn of the twentieth century than at its end.

While serving in the New York Assembly in 1787, Alexander Hamilton identified a problematic clause in New York's constitution. Remarking on an act for settling intestate estates, Hamilton asked, “The question is what is meant in the constitution, by this phrase ‘the common law’?” He went on to describe an important distinction in his legal and constitutional thought:

In 1847, Raymond-Theodore Troplong, one of France's most distinguished legal minds, presented his recently finished work on debt imprisonment to Paris's prestigious Académie des sciences morales et politiques. He started his narrative with an imaginative reconstruction of debt imprisonment's origins in the “barbaric law” of “primitive peoples.” In such societies, Troplong explained, “the person responds corporally, and principally, to contracted engagements. On one hand, insolvency is assimilated to crime. The debtor who dishonors his word in not paying his creditor differs little from a thief. In dishonoring his word, he has dishonored the gods whom he has taken as witnesses of his oath; his body is therefore engaged by his offense; it belongs to its expiation. On the other hand, in order to make him pay with his possessions, the creditor must seize, first of all, his person.”

Medieval and early modern rulers commonly proclaimed that protecting the legal entitlements of the personae miserabiles, who included widows, orphans, the chronically ill and “the poor,” was among their principal duties. The entitlement of the poor to legal services was not a matter of grace but was in fact their “good right.” For example, widows, orphans, and other personae miserabili had the privilege of being heard in first instance before high courts, so as to save time and costs in pursuing their legal claims. Another example of manifest commitment to legal entitlement for the poor was the refusal of Philip II of Habsburg to consent to measures that would limit the jurisdiction of his Castilian chanceries; the measures had been proposed so as to limit the chanceries’ ever-increasing workload, but, because they could also restrict indigents' access to such courts, were rejected by the monarch. At first glance, such inclusiveness appears to have been achieved, particularly in view of the large numbers of petty conflicts brought before formal law courts during the long sixteenth century, leading to a so-called “legal revolution.” Historians generally acknowledge that broad layers of early modern society made abundant use of civil adjudication in arranging their social and economic relations and interests.