Books in the Criminalization series

Offering an historical and conceptual account of criminal law, this volume provides insight into how legal concepts such as responsibility, wrongdoing, intent, and punishment emerged out of debates and sensibilities from the 18th Century to the present day, and explores how the State exerts its power and secures civil order through criminal law.

The fourth book in the landmark Criminalization series examines the political morality of the criminal law, exploring general principles and theories of criminalization.

We are said to face a crisis of over-criminalization: our criminal law has become chaotic, unprincipled, and over-expansive. This book proposes a theory of criminal law, as an institution that can play an important but limited role in the civil order of a political community: it shows how criminal law could be ordered, principled, and restrained.

This is the first book of a series on criminalization - examining the principles and goals that should guide what kinds of conduct are to be criminalized, and the forms that criminalization should take. The first volume studies the scope and boundaries of the criminal law - asking what principled limits might be placed on criminalizing behaviour.

The second book in the Criminalization series examines the 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 structures and social and political structures.

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.

Offering a philosophical investigation of the relationship between moral wrongdoing and criminalization, this book provides an account of the nature of moral wrongdoing, the sources of moral wrongdoing, why wrongdoing is the central target of criminal law, and the ways in which criminalization of non-wrongful conduct might be permissible.