Cite as: 512 U. S. 821 (1994)
Opinion of the Court
onment of more than six months, these protections include the right to jury trial. Bloom, 391 U. S., at 199; see also Taylor v. Hayes, 418 U. S. 488, 495 (1974). In contrast, civil contempt sanctions, or those penalties designed to compel future compliance with a court order, are considered to be coercive and avoidable through obedience, and thus may be imposed in an ordinary civil proceeding upon notice and an opportunity to be heard. Neither a jury trial nor proof beyond a reasonable doubt is required.2
Although the procedural contours of the two forms of contempt are well established, the distinguishing characteristics of civil versus criminal contempts are somewhat less clear.3 In the leading early case addressing this issue in the context of imprisonment, Gompers v. Bucks Stove & Range Co., 221 U. S., at 441, the Court emphasized that whether a contempt is civil or criminal turns on the "character and purpose" of the sanction involved. Thus, a contempt sanction is considered civil if it "is remedial, and for the benefit of the com-2 We address only the procedures required for adjudication of indirect contempts, i. e., those occurring out of court. Direct contempts that occur in the court's presence may be immediately adjudged and sanctioned summarily, see, e. g., Ex parte Terry, 128 U. S. 289 (1888), and, except for serious criminal contempts in which a jury trial is required, Bloom v. Illinois, 391 U. S. 194, 209-210 (1968), the traditional distinction between civil and criminal contempt proceedings does not pertain, cf. United States v. Wilson, 421 U. S. 309, 316 (1975).
3 Numerous scholars have criticized as unworkable the traditional distinction between civil and criminal contempt. See, e. g., Dudley, Getting Beyond the Civil/Criminal Distinction: A New Approach to the Regulation of Indirect Contempts, 79 Va. L. Rev. 1025, 1033 (1993) (describing the distinction between civil and criminal contempt as "conceptually unclear and exceedingly difficult to apply"); Martineau, Contempt of Court: Eliminating the Confusion between Civil and Criminal Contempt, 50 U. Cin. L. Rev. 677 (1981) ("Few legal concepts have bedeviled courts, judges, lawyers and legal commentators more than contempt of court"); Moskovitz, Contempt of Injunctions, Civil and Criminal, 43 Colum. L. Rev. 780 (1943); R. Goldfarb, The Contempt Power 58 (1963) (describing "the tangle of procedure and practice" resulting from this "unsatisfactory fiction").
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