Abstract
The Public Realms: On How to Think About Public Wrongs
Highlights
A central theme of Antony Duff’s scholarship is that criminal law is best understood as a communicative enterprise through which the members of a political community call one another to account for wrongdoing (See especially, [Duff 1986, Duff 2001, Duff 2007, Duff 2018]
This paper has presented a way of thinking about public wrongs, with the goal of offering an alternative to the view articulated by Antony Duff, most recently in his book, The Realm of Criminal Law (2018)
The view defended here owes much to Duff’s work as it has developed over the decades. It is grounded in Duff’s important insight that criminal law is best understood as a communicative enterprise through which the members of a political community call one another to account for wrongdoing
Summary
A central theme of Antony Duff’s scholarship is that criminal law is best understood as a communicative enterprise through which the members of a political community call one another to account for (alleged) wrongdoing (See especially, [Duff 1986, Duff 2001, Duff 2007, Duff 2018]). By criminalizing a particular wrong (Φ-ing), the political community thereby claims that it is justified in declaring Φ-ing to be a criminal wrong, calling Φ-ers to account through its criminal process, and subjecting Φ-ers to criminal punishment In his most recent book, The Realm of Criminal Law, Duff puts the third point as follows: criminalization “make[s] clear that these are the polity’s public norms, as distinct from whatever private norms citizens or groups of citizens might espouse outside the civic realm” (2018: 207). My way of thinking about public wrongs fits well within Duff’s broader project of understanding the criminal law as a matter of calling wrongdoers to account, and it emphasizes the ways in which a community’s practices of calling to account, in part, constitute the character of that community. I apply this way of thinking about public wrongs to the project of identifying various public realms and attempt to illustrate the practical difference between my account and Duff’s
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