Why Criminal Law?
PROGRAMME It is all too easy to take the criminal law for granted, as an essential or ineliminable aspect of our social lives. Even those who do take the criminal law for granted, however, face a range of questions about its proper role and scope. The obvious question is that of criminalisation: what kinds of consideration or principle should guide legislative decisions about what to criminalise? The Harm Principle, long seen by liberals both as a protection against an over-expansive and over-moralised criminal law and as a positive guide to the criminal law’s proper concerns, has come under attack: its central problem is that of providing an account of ‘harm’ that will equip the principle to set substantive and plausible limits on the scope of the criminal law. But what other principles or values should guide decisions about criminalisation? However, the question of criminalisation is not one question, but many. Criminal law can be contrasted with a range of other kinds of legal regul
