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.

autonomy principally in tenns of the agent's conscious choice of ends or conduct. From this, the cognitivist emphasis on mental states and their contents naturally follows. The presence of specified mental states, as signifying agent choice, thus becomes the hallmark of responsible conduct. Capacities model theorists, by contrast, interpret personal autonomy and agent responsibility in tenns of the looser notion of 'control'. From this perspective, conscious choosing is but one (highly responsible) instance of such control, and the presence or absence of mental states is primarily relevant to detennining degrees of responsibility. The examination of these two models occupies the bulk of this manuscript. Exploration of the capacities model and criticism of the orthodox view also generate treatment of legal issues such as the use of negligence liability, the nature of criminal omissions, the character of various legal defenses, and so on. Chapters 2 and 3 set out some of the thematic arguments outlined above and introduce tenninology and useful distinctions. Chapters 4 through 7 provide substantive analyses of agent responsibility and of standards of criminal liability. In these chapters, I argue for the comparative superiority of the capacities model of responsibility and offer recommendations for changes in current legal conceptions and standards of liability. Each chapter centers on an element of individual responsibility and related legal concerns. The final chapter, Chapter 8, comprises an overview of the integrated theory of responsibility and liability and its comparison with the traditional view.

The third book in the Criminalization series examines the constitutionalization of criminal law. It considers how the criminal law is constituted through the political processes of the state; how the agents of the criminal law can be answerable to it themselves; and finally, how the criminal law can be constituted as part of the international order. Addressing the ways in which and the grounds on which types of conduct can be justifiably criminalized, the first four chapters of this volume focus on the questions that arise from a consideration of the political constitution of the criminal law. The contributors then turn their attention to the role of the state, its institutions and officials, and their role not only as creators, enactors, interpreters, and enforcers of the criminal law, but also as subjects of it. How can the agents of the criminal law also be answerable to it? Finally discussion turns to how the criminal law can be constituted as part of an international order. Examining the relationships between domestic laws of different nation-states, and between domestic criminal law and international or transnational law, the chapters also look at the authority and jurisdiction of international criminal law itself, and its relationship to other dimensions of the international order. A vital examination of one of the most important topics in modern criminal legal theory, this volume raises new questions central to the study of the criminal law and offers new suggestions for addressing them.

This volume is concerned with three structures of criminal law: the internal structure of the law itself; the place of criminal law within the larger structure of law; and the relationships between legal, social and political structures.

Besides acting, we often omit to do or refrain from doing certain things. Omitting and refraining are not simply special cases of action; they require their own distinctive treatment. This book offers the first comprehensive account of these phenomena, addressing questions of metaphysics, agency, and moral responsibility.

A comparative and collaborative study of the foundational principles and concepts that underpin different domestic systems of criminal law.