Approaching or Re-thinking the Realm of Criminal Law?

Abstract

Abstract In his latest monograph, The Realm of Criminal Law, Antony Duff gives us a further, magisterial statement of the vision of criminal law, its procedural framework, and its sanctioning system, which he has been developing over the past 35 years. This is Duff’s own book-length contribution to the tremendously fruitful collaborative Criminalization project. That project has already generated four edited volumes (Duff et al. in The boundaries of the criminal law, 2010; The structures of the criminal law, 2011; The constitution of the criminal law, 2013; Criminalization: the political morality of the criminal law, 2014) and two fine monographs by Farmer (Making the modern criminal law: criminalization and civil order, 2016) and Tadros (Wrongs and crimes, 2016; see also Tadros in The ends of harm: the moral foundations of criminal law, 2011). It will shape the field for decades to come; and it has decisively laid to rest a longstanding puzzle about why, within criminal law theory, the principles underlying criminalisation had received relatively little attention as compared with those underlying, most obviously, criminal responsibility (cf. Lacey in Frontiers of criminality, 1995).