The most obvious fact about is that the term is employed in many different senses. The basic difficulties concern the meaning of crime. Many words in everyday discourse are to some extent and in some contexts, ambiguous. This is especially true of words having to do with affairs, human relationships, where what is most significant meets neither eye nor ear. But and are loaded with even greater burdens than are most of these terms. Here one quickly recognizes that communication of ideas is not the only function of language; for, plainly, is a term that is much more than description. It is also a word of reproach, of condemnation, of obloquy, of stimulation to action and to repression. In recent months has entered the common vocabulary of international propaganda; the leaders of the warring countries call each other criminal. The speaker wishes to arouse emotion, to move his audience in a desired direction. It has become abundantly evident that is a tag to be placed on political enemies-not merely or even especially on those who injure person or property. Much too frequently it has been an instrument to mask the torture of great benefactors of mankind. In a number of countries we find new criminal codes expressed in the broadest possible terms constructed on a sweeping axiom of social defense. Criminal behavior is, accordingly, any antisocial conduct, and in actual administration, antisocial becomes any conduct that runs counter to the politics of the regime. The meaning of is thus determined by authority, i.e., by force. Some of our criminologists are beginning to wake up to the fact that there are political and ethical problems involved in that the term is sometimes chiefly an index of who has power to wield the maximum force. In addition, we are familiar with equally loose usages in everyday talk, where the speaker means to say that certain persons or behaviors are unethical, unprincipled, degenerate, or even stupid. It might be imagined that within the confines of the law there would be few such troublesome questions. But unless one is content to run in a circle, it is plain that even here the accepted definition of is only superficially precise. This may be seen by reference to the perennial issue of the differences between and tort. A crime is a violation of a penal law, it is said, while torts are proscribed by civil or private law. Yet so great a scholar as Austin contended that there were no substantial differences between the two, perhaps least of all on the basis of the degree or importance of the public interest. Nor is it easy to demonstrate that punishment characterizes the one, compensation the other. Punitive damages and penal actions are only the most salient of the difficulties in the way of this thesis. The law has been largely directed by procedure in its early history, and by the purposes of litigants and their lawyers; perhaps only by the suggested functional differences can the two be