Abstract
Criminal Law, Civil Order and Public Wrongs
Highlights
I would like to thank the other contributors to this symposium for their critically constructive responses to my book (Duff 2018): I cannot do justice to all their comments here, but will tackle their most significant criticisms
Duff offers an alternative account of the central idea of public wrongs (s. 3); to Kimberley Brownlee, who criticizes the use that I make of an analogy between criminal law and codes of professional ethics (s. 4); to Roberto Gargarella, who argues that my account of public wrongs cannot be sustained in the context of radically plural societies (s. 5); to Tatjana Hörnle, who argues that we should replace my single, thin, principle of criminalization by a more pluralist account grounded in three distinct principles (s. 6); and to Gustavo Beade, who develops the suggestion that public wrongdoers have a “right to be prosecuted” (s. 7)
One central conclusion is that any plausible master principle will be very thin: it will provide, that is, not substantive criteria for criminalization, but formal criteria that leave most of the substantive normative work in deciding what kinds of conduct are to be criminalized still to be done. This is true of the master principle that emerges in the book: we have good reason to criminalize a type of conduct if and only it constitutes a public wrong;6 and it constitutes a public wrong if and only if it violates the polity’s civil order
Summary
I would like to thank the other contributors to this symposium for their critically constructive responses to my book (Duff 2018): I cannot do justice to all their comments here, but will tackle (what I take to be) their most significant criticisms. They certainly expose some of the ways in which I failed to make my claims and arguments clear enough (to myself as well as to others), and they bring out some of the ways in which the book’s central themes need to be further developed; but I hope to show that they do not threaten the central ideas that I tried to explain and defend. Duff offers an alternative account of the central idea of public wrongs (s. 3); to Kimberley Brownlee, who criticizes the use that I make of an analogy between criminal law and codes of professional ethics (s. 4); to Roberto Gargarella, who argues that my account of public wrongs cannot be sustained in the context of radically plural societies (s. 5); to Tatjana Hörnle, who argues that we should replace my single, thin, principle of criminalization by a more pluralist account grounded in three distinct principles (s. 6); and to Gustavo Beade, who develops the suggestion that public wrongdoers have a “right to be prosecuted” (s. 7)
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