Instability in the Code: The Legal Ambiguity of Domestic Terrorism in U.S. State Statutes
Location
PANEL: Politics Honors Pt. II
Wilder 101
Moderator: David Forrest
Document Type
Presentation - Open Access
Start Date
5-1-2026 4:30 PM
End Date
5-1-2026 5:30 PM
Abstract
“Terrorism” occupies a peculiar place in criminal law: it is a category with extraordinary legal and political force that nevertheless resists stable legal definition. This project argues that such instability is not incidental, but historically productive and politically useful. Shaped by the War on Terror, exceptional logics of governance, and an expert field that has never fully settled the term’s meaning, terrorism operates less as a determinate legal concept than as a flexible framework for marking certain acts and actors as exceptional, illegitimate, and outside the protections of ordinary legal treatment. State domestic terrorism statutes in the United States do not overcome that instability. Instead, they codify it in ways that preserve discretionary ambiguity across different statutory sites. Using a fifty-state database of terrorism-explicit operative provisions, I analyze how states operationalize terrorism through patterned statutory variation. Rather than asking whether state statutes conform to a single “correct” definition, I treat the gap between terrorism’s broader meanings—social, political, and epistemic—and its legal operationalization as a central problem of analysis. Organizing states into case-study clusters based on statutory architecture, I show how terrorism is constructed through threat, coercion, social effects, protected objects, and penalty structures. In this way, terrorism remains exceptional in rhetoric but open-textured in practice, enabling distinctive forms of stigma and punishment and allowing the label to travel beyond paradigmatic forms of mass political violence.
Keywords:
Domestic terrorism, Criminal law, Legal ambiguity, State power
Recommended Citation
Novetzke, Sahil Kalé, "Instability in the Code: The Legal Ambiguity of Domestic Terrorism in U.S. State Statutes" (2026). Research Symposium. 32.
https://digitalcommons.oberlin.edu/researchsymp/2026/presentations/32
Major
Politics; Law and Society
Project Mentor(s)
Joshua Freedman, Politics
2026
Instability in the Code: The Legal Ambiguity of Domestic Terrorism in U.S. State Statutes
PANEL: Politics Honors Pt. II
Wilder 101
Moderator: David Forrest
“Terrorism” occupies a peculiar place in criminal law: it is a category with extraordinary legal and political force that nevertheless resists stable legal definition. This project argues that such instability is not incidental, but historically productive and politically useful. Shaped by the War on Terror, exceptional logics of governance, and an expert field that has never fully settled the term’s meaning, terrorism operates less as a determinate legal concept than as a flexible framework for marking certain acts and actors as exceptional, illegitimate, and outside the protections of ordinary legal treatment. State domestic terrorism statutes in the United States do not overcome that instability. Instead, they codify it in ways that preserve discretionary ambiguity across different statutory sites. Using a fifty-state database of terrorism-explicit operative provisions, I analyze how states operationalize terrorism through patterned statutory variation. Rather than asking whether state statutes conform to a single “correct” definition, I treat the gap between terrorism’s broader meanings—social, political, and epistemic—and its legal operationalization as a central problem of analysis. Organizing states into case-study clusters based on statutory architecture, I show how terrorism is constructed through threat, coercion, social effects, protected objects, and penalty structures. In this way, terrorism remains exceptional in rhetoric but open-textured in practice, enabling distinctive forms of stigma and punishment and allowing the label to travel beyond paradigmatic forms of mass political violence.
