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Mary Sigler, The Boundaries of the Criminal Law. By R. A. Duff, Lindsay Farmer, S. E. Marshall, Massimo Renzo and Victor Tadros, eds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, 267pp. £ 50.00 hb), The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 52, Issue 3, May 2012, Pages 676–678, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azs006
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The Boundaries of the Criminal Law is an edited volume that represents the first phase in a broader project, sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which undertakes to explore the nature, grounds and scope of criminalization in contemporary Western liberal democracies. Reflecting the complexity of the enterprise, this collection offers a rich and provocative array of contributions addressing the legal, moral and political dimensions of criminalization that draw on the resources of philosophy, politics, law, psychology, history and criminology. Despite a nagging concern that the range of viewpoints here is somewhat narrow, this inaugural volume constitutes a promising start to what is sure to be a comprehensive and authoritative treatment of criminalization.
The editors begin with a wide-ranging introduction that helpfully maps the difficult terrain ahead—the moral, political and practical challenges of developing and implementing the best normative account of the boundaries of the criminal law. As an initial matter, these include sorting out what counts as ‘the law’, what counts as criminal law and what the proper ambition of criminal law theorizing should be—whether it should aspire to universal applicability or aim more modestly at illuminating the set of relevant considerations that best accord with our broader political commitments and values. At the outset, the editors locate their project squarely in the latter camp, expressing deep scepticism about the enterprise of seeking the essential features of criminal law as such.
Against this backdrop, the essays fall broadly into two categories: the first set focuses on the phenomena of over- and undercriminalization; the second set considers the suitability of various principles to serve as the touchstone for criminalization.An alternative view is that we should instead recognize that the criminal law, as an aspect of the institutional structure of the state, is at root a political matter, i.e., any account of its proper aims must begin with an account of the proper aims of the state, and of the ways in which a state should deal with and relate to its citizens. (p. 7)
