Overview

We are said to face a crisis of over-criminalization: our criminal law has become chaotic, unprincipled, and over-expansive. This book proposes a normative theory of criminal law, and of criminalization, that shows how criminal law could be ordered, principled, and restrained. The theory is based on an account of criminal law as a distinctive legal practice that functions to declare and define a set of public wrongs, and to call to formal public account those who commit such wrongs; an account of the role that such practice can play in a democratic republic of free and equal citizens; and an account of the central features of such a political community, and of the way in which it constitutes its public realm-its civil order. Criminal law plays an important, but limited, role in such a political community in protecting, but also partly constituting, its civil order. On the basis of this account, we can see how such a political community will decide what kinds of conduct should be criminalized - not by applying one or more of the substantive master principles that theorists have offered, but by considering which kinds of conduct fall within its public realm (as distinct from the private realms that are not the polity's business), and which kinds of wrong within that realm require this distinctive kind of response (rather than one of the other kinds of available response). The outcome of such a deliberative process will probably be a more limited, and a more rational and principled, criminal law.

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9780199570195

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Reviews

In his magnificent new work, The Realm of Criminal Law, Antony Duff has important things to say about a host of central issues in the philosophy of criminal law. * Stuart P. Green, Rutgers Law School, Criminal Law and Philosophy * R.A. Duff's The Realm of the Criminal Law advances the literature on criminalization by providing the most thorough exploration and defence yet provided of the intuitively attractive idea that criminalization is properly limited to public wrongs only [...] The international community of criminal law theory owes Antony a huge debt. He is not only one of the preeminent scholars in this field, he has also done so much to build and shape it as a community. The Realm of Criminal Law Theory is a civil order in which Antony has played a leading role. And while Antony's politics are avowedly egalitarian, academic esteem is not, and he is surely one of the high priests of that community. * Patrick Tomlin, University of Warwick, Criminal Law and Philosophy * Duff's The Realm of Criminal Law offers an appealing moral reconstruction of the criminal law. * Alec Walen, Rutgers University, Criminal Law and Philosophy *

Duff's The Realm of Criminal Law offers an appealing moral reconstruction of the criminal law. * Alec Walen, Rutgers University, Criminal Law and Philosophy * R.A. Duff's The Realm of the Criminal Law advances the literature on criminalization by providing the most thorough exploration and defence yet provided of the intuitively attractive idea that criminalization is properly limited to public wrongs only [...] The international community of criminal law theory owes Antony a huge debt. He is not only one of the preeminent scholars in this field, he has also done so much to build and shape it as a community. The Realm of Criminal Law Theory is a civil order in which Antony has played a leading role. And while Antony's politics are avowedly egalitarian, academic esteem is not, and he is surely one of the high priests of that community. * Patrick Tomlin, University of Warwick, Criminal Law and Philosophy * In his magnificent new work, The Realm of Criminal Law, Antony Duff has important things to say about a host of central issues in the philosophy of criminal law. * Stuart P. Green, Rutgers Law School, Criminal Law and Philosophy *

Author Information

R A Duff is Professor Emeritus at the University of Stirling, and a former professor in the University of Minnesota Law School, where he helped to create the Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice. He works in the philosophy of criminal law, and has published on criminal punishment (Trials and Punishments, 1986; Punishment, Communication, and Community, 2001), on the structures of criminal liability (Intention, Agency, and Criminal Liability, 1990; Criminal Attempts, 1996; Answering for Crime, 2007), and on the criminal process (The Trial on Trial, co-authored, 2007). He has led major research projects on 'The Trial on Trial', and on Criminalization.

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