I am not aware of a way to do this out of the box. Here are some things you can try...

1. Create a custom workflow action that removes the users write access after a specific step for specific locations in the content tree. The downside to this is that they will not be able edit the item after this step. So if they want to create a new version then someone would need to give them access again and they could potentially publish an unpublished item.

2. You could also create a custom workflow action that fires first during the publish action. This action would check to see if that user should be able to publish and if not stop the execution of the workflow step and show them a message.

   public void Process(WorkflowPipelineArgs args) { if (CanUserProceed()) { Sitecore.Context.ClientPage.ClientResponse.Alert("You do not have permission to proceed."); args.AbortPipeline(); } }

I am not aware of a way to do this out of the box. Here are some things you can try...

1. Create a custom workflow action that removes the users write access after a specific step for specific locations in the content tree. The downside to this is that they will not be able edit the item after this step. So if they want to create a new version then someone would need to give them access again and they could potentially publish an unpublished item.

2. You could also create a custom workflow action that fires first during the publish action. This action would check to see if that user should be able to publish and if not stop the execution of the workflow step and show them a message.

.

public void Process(WorkflowPipelineArgs args)
    {
        if (CanUserProceed())
        {
            Sitecore.Context.ClientPage.ClientResponse.Alert("You do not have permission to proceed.");
            args.AbortPipeline();
        }
    }