The relationship between the rule of emergency, expansion of executive authority and formation of the public sphere is a common theme in political science and sociology. Scholars have studied how under states of martial law, military authority’s powers extend into the civil sphere suspending constitutional norms that protect individual liberties; or how under governments encouraging a security regime the public sphere is contracted through direct repressive measures such as censorship, newspaper taxes and arrests. Concerning the aftermath of such crisis situations, a group of scholars have argued for a roll-back effect in which experiences gained through crisis time expansion of executive authority force decision makers to put an end to crisis time oppressions.In response, others have argued for a positive feedback (normalization) as they demonstrated incorporation of emergency measures into ordinary times. In this paper, concentrating on a case of legal institutional change in Turkey between 1980-2014, I investigate whether institutions founded by emergency rule are made into part of the ordinary, leading to a continuity in the contraction of the public sphere at ‘normal’ times. The legal institutional change under study is the transition from military courts to state security courts, from state security courts to heavy penal courts and finally the abolition of heavy penal courts. Specifically, I focus on the negotiation of limits of freedom of expression within these three judicial systems over three decades. From each of the three afore mentioned periods, I analyze one court case and the struggles that surround it, namely the case of Yalçın Küçük’s book ‘For a New Republic’ from 1983, the case of “The book of Freedom to Thought” from 1995, and the case of the book “Imam’s Army” from 2010. With this study, I demonstrate that the continuities in the spatial performances of both the state and the right to freedom of expression since 1980 point at the normalization of military judicial space into civilian judicial space, which then accounts for the continuity in the pressures put on writers and intellectuals by the judiciary in Turkey.