A quiet revolution has been taking place within the US criminal court system. Independent of any congressional legislation, judicial reformers are advocating, and slowly implementing, a new court model broadly described as ‘problem-solving courts’.1 In policy terms, problem-solving courts aim to ‘use the authority of the court to maintain the social health of the community’ (Butts, 2001: 121), and this is achieved by ‘broaden[ing] the focus of legal proceedings, from simply adjudicating past facts and legal issues, to changing the future behavior of litigants and ensuring the future well being of communities’ (Berman and Feinblatt, 2001: 126). In theoretical terms, this goal explicitly redefines the criminal courtroom and its outcomes as more than a judicial procedure for determining guilt, innocence, and an appropriate sentence: this agenda now reconceptualizes the criminal court into an institution whose processes and outcomes affect other social spheres. While this goal is not unusual within the ideals of constitutional law, nor within academic debates emanating from the law and society movement or critical legal studies (see Silbey and Sarat, 1987), the explicit statement of these policy goals within a criminal court setting entails an unusual expansion of state power as I will show below, albeit now clothed in the language of accountability and the public good. Legal anthropology originated with the study of law as a system of norms and regulation across societies (see Nader, 1969), where order was maintained through mechanisms of formal social control as well as through ideological and cultural channels (Merry, 1992: 330). US ethnographies documented how the law is constituted through practice as opposed to existing as a set of fixed ordinances imposing social control from above (see, for example, Ewick and Silbey, 1998; Greenhouse et al., 1994; Merry, 1990). These studies rejected the idea of the law as epiphenomenal to social life, and showed how competing visions of legality engender social relations and social practice (Ewick and Silbey, 1998: 34–9). By necessity, US ethnographies primarily focus on a state-centered legal model, looking at Article