Tracing the path from temporary-residence registration through temporary-residence permits to today's residence permits, this article examines how a single document shifted from a population-control tool to a bridge between long-term residents and urban public services.

On the night of March 17, 2003, police stopped twenty-seven-year-old Sun Zhigang on a Guangzhou street. Three days later, he died in a medical center for people held in custody and repatriation. Beginning with the night Sun was taken away, this episode traces how wrongful detention, public opinion, and administrative lawmaking converged—and how a criminal case born of an enforcement error advanced China’s system for reviewing legislation.

From City of Grants Pass v. Johnson to President Trump's Executive Order 14321, this article examines how the U.S. Supreme Court redrew the line between the status of homelessness and the conduct of sleeping outside, and how the federal government is using grants, civil commitment, and program conditions to reshape street-level policy.

In 1969, four young people driving to a nightclub in Jacksonville, Florida, were arrested for “prowling by auto.” This episode follows Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville from medieval English vagrancy law and the post–Civil War Black Codes to modern camping bans, asking how vague laws can turn a police officer’s suspicion into arrest and conviction.

From the Qi Yuling and Luo Caixia cases to Chen Chunxiu’s experience, this article traces how identity substitution in school admissions evolved from an infringement of the right to a name and a set of related offenses into an independent crime, while the Education Law added a remedy for victims seeking restoration of their admission qualifications.