RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Beyond the Penal Code: The Legal Capacity of Monetary Sanctions in the Corpus of California Law JF RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences FD Russell Sage Foundation SP 36 OP 62 DO 10.7758/RSF.2022.8.1.02 VO 8 IS 1 A1 Verma, Anjuli A1 Sykes, Bryan L. YR 2022 UL http://www.rsfjournal.org/content/8/1/36.abstract AB Knowledge about legal financial obligations in American punishment has been largely confined to criminal law and the penal codes of a few states. Yet in the nation’s most populous state, California, there is reason to believe that a wider expanse of law beyond the penal code harbors the legal capacity to impose monetary punishments and indebtedness. A legal census of the entire corpus of California’s civil and criminal statutory law identifies the presence and distribution of monetary sanctioning statutes within each and across all of the state’s twenty-nine legislative code sections. Results show that one in twenty-three statutes in California law concern monetary sanctions and that they are dispersed throughout every section of the legislative code. Our investigation reveals that monetary sanctions are embedded within the broader architecture of state law, and that variations in the structure, as much as the substance, of statutory schemes must figure into empirical and theoretical accounts of racial disparity in the imposition of monetary punishments.