Public Wrongs Research Articles

Discrimination as a Public Wrong

Abstract The enforcement mechanisms of anti-discrimination law manifest a puzzle: while the dominant view is that discrimination is a wrongdoing against individuals, which suggests that discriminatees should have the power to vindicate their rights, legal provisions sometimes authorise public officials to file claims against alleged discriminators, regardless of discriminatees’ preferences. Seeking to make sense of this puzzle, this article draws on theories of state enforcement under criminal law to explore the justification of public enforcement under anti-discrimination law and reflect on the nature of discrimination more broadly. It claims that an instrumental justification of public enforcement of anti-discrimination law is left wanting. Instead, it argues that public enforcement in this domain is warranted because discrimination is not only a private wrong against individuals, but is also a public wrong, namely a wrong against the community as a whole.

Public Wrongs and Power Relations in Non-Democratic & Illiberal Polities

One of the influential contributions to criminalisation theories is Duff’s work on public wrongs, which offers a thin master principle of criminalisation, proposing that we have a reason to criminalise a type of conduct if it constitutes a public wrong; one that violates a polity’s civil order and forms part of that polity’s proper business. The nature of the civil order, the scope of its proper business, and the distinction between the public and private realms of wrongs are context-relative to each polity, structured by their legal, institutional, and informal values and ways of life. Such a context-relative view led to problematic criminalisation examples raised by Duff and his critics. This article engages more fully with the relativism of the civil order and public wrongs in non-democratic and illiberal contexts. It draws on examples such as Saudi Arabi and Iran, and Beetham’s work on the legitimation of power to argue that conceptualising the civil order as an undifferentiated whole that represents a polity’s chosen way of life overlooks the ways in which the civil order’s values and practices are shaped by relations of power and exclusion rules and processes. This, in turn, exposes the theory to the risk of mirroring and legitimising unequal relations of power and impeding efforts to change them. This is also due to the theory’s lack of proper normative guidance on the legitimacy of criminalisation. The potential commitment to – instead of a preference for – democracy and guarantees of equality and freedoms might help strengthen the theory normatively, but it is insufficient to guard against the raised problems.

CRIMES AS PUBLIC WRONGS

ABSTRACTDespite the notion's prominence, scholarship has yet to offer a viable account of the view that crimes constitute public wrongs. Despite numerous attempts, some scholars are now doubting whether a viable account is forthcoming whereas others are reeling back expectations for what the concept itself can offer. This article vindicates crime's public character while asserting the relevance of political theory in doing so. After critiquing prior attempts and clarifying expectations, the article offers a novel account, relying on both key doctrinal features and a deliberative democratic framework through which to interpret their public significance. In doing so, it demonstrates how this framework explains the public nature of censure, and ultimately argues that crimes are public wrongs not because such actions themselves necessarily wrong or harm the public, but instead because they are the type of wrong that the public has a stake in addressing. This gives rise to an understanding of sentencing as public decision-making within which citizens and their representatives decide how best to use public power to manage public interests.

Defending the Realm of Criminal Law

This is a response to ten critiques of my 2018 book The Realm of Criminal Law, by Stephen Bero and Alex Sarch, Kim Ferzan, Stuart Green, Doug Husak, Nicola Lacey, Sandra Mayson, Victor Tadros, Patrick Tomlin, Alec Walen, and Gideon Yaffe. I take the opportunity to explain the main aims and themes of the book, to clarify some of its arguments, and to note some of the ways in which those arguments need expansion, development, or revision. Topics discussed include: the usefulness and limits of ‘rational reconstruction’ as a method of normative theorising; public wrongs and the scope of the criminal law; the idea of civil order as central to a political theory of criminal law; wrongness constraints on criminalization; mala prohibita and regulatory offences; the ‘De Minimis’ principle; and criminal law ‘abolitionism’.

The Public Realms: On How to Think About Public Wrongs

The Public Realms: On How to Think About Public Wrongs

Criminal Law, Civil Order and Public Wrongs

Criminal Law, Civil Order and Public Wrongs

Democratic dialogue, multiculturalism and “public wrongs”

Democratic dialogue, multiculturalism and “public wrongs”

Criminal law and the constitution of civil order

Some of those who theorize criminal law in essentially political terms, as a species of ‘public law,’ argue that we should therefore reject legal moralism. I argue that they are right to reject the kind of legal moralism espoused by theorists such as Michael Moore (partly because such moralists cannot give a plausible account of the ambit and jurisdiction of domestic criminal law), but that we can construct a plausible version of legal moralism within the framework of a public law conception. This is a ‘political,’ or ‘public,’ legal moralism, according to which criminal law is properly concerned with public wrongs that violate the polity’s civil order. I explain these ideas of civil order and public wrongs, and the way in which criminal law can both help to constitute, and to sustain, a particular kind of civil order.

Criminal Law and Penal Law: The Wrongness Constraint and a Complementary Forfeiture Model

Antony Duff’s The Realm of Criminal Law offers an appealing moral reconstruction of the criminal law. I agree that the criminal law should be understood to predicate punishment upon sufficient proof that the defendant has committed a public wrong for which she is being held to account and censured. But the criminal law is not only about censoring people for public wrongs; it must serve other purposes as well, such as preventing people from committing serious crimes and more generally from violating reasonable regulations. These purposes, and perhaps retributive justice, require the criminal law also to mete out harsh treatment, but only insofar as such treatments are proportional to the culpable wrong committed. The problem for the criminal law is that many mala prohibita crimes consist of a minor wrong but also call for a relatively severe punishment. To accommodate that mismatch, it is necessary to complement the criminal law, as Duff and I conceive of it, with what I call “penal law.” Penal law relies on forfeiture to explain why hard treatment is permissible. The forfeiture must be fair, and it comes with its own proportionality limits. But those limits are not as strict as the limits implicit in the criminal law. It allows for penalties that are harsher than the punishments that could justifiably be meted out for many mala prohibita offenses. One and the same act can count as a crime and a penal infraction, and one and the same criminal justice system can and should handle both crimes and the penal infractions. It is, I think, only in that way that we can accommodate both the need to prevent public wrongdoing and the distinct importance of holding people accountable for the commission of public wrongs.

Duffing Up the Criminal Law?

R.A. Duff’s The Realm of the Criminal Law advances the literature on criminalization by providing the most thorough exploration and defence yet provided of the intuitively attractive idea that criminalization is properly limited to public wrongs only. I outline here six concerns I have with the view, as presented in this book, and suggest where the account needs further elaboration, defence, or rethinking.

Drs Bramhall and Bawa-Garba and the rightful domain of the criminal law

In the wake of two recent high-profile, controversial cases involving the prosecution and conviction of Drs Bramhall and Bawa-Garba, this article considers when it is socially desirable to criminalise doctors’...

Public Wrongs that Violate Human Rights—Following Duff, The Realm of Criminal Law

In his book The Realm of Criminal Law,1 Duff offers a theory of criminalization grounded on political theory. According to that theory, criminal law is concerned with public, rather than with moral, wrongs. Public wrongs violate the polity’s civil order. The civil order defines which activities of its citizens are the polity’s business and as such belong within the public realm. The primary addressees of the criminal law are citizens, who are bound by the criminal law, and in whose name the criminal law calls those who commit public wrongs to account. In this comment, I will argue that a political theory of criminalization ought to grant “human rights” a more central role. Such a role requires distinguishing between two kinds of duties violated by crime: duties that we owe to our fellow citizens and duties that we owe to each other as human beings. When calling to account wrongdoers, who violate their duties quo citizens, as in cases of election malpractice, tax evasion, the polity speaks in the name of its citizens. When calling to account wrongdoers, citizens and non-citizens alike, who violate within the polity’s jurisdiction, what we owe to each other quo human beings, as in cases of murder and rape, the polity speaks in the name of human beings. The idea that while calling to account a polity can speak in different voices is not entirely new. When domestic courts exercise their universal jurisdiction over wrongdoers who commit international crimes (such as crimes against humanity, genocide), the domestic courts speak in the name of the international community.2 In such cases, the wrongdoers are accountable to the international community in whose name the domestic courts speak. The claim of this comment is that the polity can speak in different voices while calling to account wrongdoers that are accountable to the polity itself.

Criminal Law and the Constitution of Civil Order

Some who theorise criminal law in essentially political terms, as a species of ‘public law’, argue that we should therefore reject legal moralism. I argue that they are right to reject the kind of legal moralism espoused by theorists such as Michael Moore (partly because such moralists cannot give a plausible account of the ambit and jurisdiction of domestic criminal law), but that we can construct a plausible version of legal moralism within the framework of a public law conception. This is a ‘political’, or ‘public’ legal moralism, according to which criminal law is properly concerned with public wrongs that violate the polity’s civil order. I explain these ideas of civil order and public wrongs, and the way in which criminal law can both help to constitute, and to sustain, a particular kind of civil order; and I respond briefly to four objections to this account.

Crimes, Public Wrongs, and Civil Order

The idea that crimes can usefully be understood as ‘public wrongs’, and that this can generate a plausible principle of criminalisation, has found some support in recent years; it has also been subjected to some sharp criticism. This paper aims to sketch the most plausible version of that idea, and to show how, once properly explained, it is not vulnerable to those criticisms. After a brief defence of the negative principle, that we may not criminalise conduct that does not constitute a public wrong, it explains the positive principle, that we have reason to criminalise conduct if it constitutes a public wrong, by drawing an analogy between criminal law and codes of professional ethics, and by appealing to the idea of civil order, as the normative structure of a polity—a structure that criminal law helps both to constitute and to sustain. Four objections are then met: that this account implies an unacceptable relativism; that it distorts the reasons that bear on criminalisation; that it cannot make room for those who do not identify themselves with the polity in which they live; and that it implies an unrealistically demanding conception of what is required for a polity to exist.

Public Wrongs and Private Wrongs

There are a set of wrongs that are normatively distinct as ‘criminal wrongs’, and yet, there is disagreement as to ‘the basic features of criminal liability’ that explain this normative distinctiveness. The only consensus has been that criminal wrongs are ‘public wrongs’. For some, they are public wrongs in the sense that they infringe the values and interests for which the community has a shared and mutual concern. For others, they are public wrongs in the sense that they are the wrongs that public officials are responsible for punishing. A third view is that they are public wrongs in the sense that there are procedural advantages of having public officials empowered to address the wrongdoing. I argue here that the first two views are analytically inseparable: the considerations that explain the wrongs that merit social prohibition are the same considerations that explain the censuring and punitive response of the criminal law. I also argue here that, contrary to the third view, the powers of public officials in criminal law procedures follow from, rather than explain, the concept of a crime being a public wrong. Procedural advantages can explain how criminal wrongs are public wrongs, but they cannot explain why criminal wrongs are public wrongs.

Supranational public wrongs: The limitations and possibilities of European criminal law and a European community

Criminal law has an inherent expressive and communitarian dimension, expressing the common values and norms of the political community. Drawing on the theory of Antony Duff, this article explores the extent to which the EU’s actions in the area of substantive criminal law can be said to express common European values by identifying actions deemed wrongful vis-à-vis the Union as a whole. The Union is limited in its capacity to express conceptions of wrong-doing through its substantive criminal law by the limited nature of its competences, its functional character and its multilevel structure. However, it does enjoy an expressive quality in two broad areas; first, the identification of European public goods, harm to which constitutes a wrong to the Union and second, common European public values. Also, substantive EU criminal law can support transnational criminal law processes, interacting with national criminal law and giving rise to the identification of certain shared wrongs amongst Member States. Thus, while certainly limited, EU criminal law does fulfil a role in the identification of wrongful behaviour and the expression of common values.

The Expansion and Fragmentation of Minor Offense Justice

This article claims that minor offense processes in the common law and the civil law, as examined through two prototypical exemplars of England and Vietnam, have been converging at a more rapid pace and in a reverse trend compared to the convergence in the mainstream, serious crime processes. Because of the notion of nonseriousness, a natural convergence between the two systems in minor offenses is more obvious and less challenging than the convergence in the process for serious crimes. It is commonplace that the goals of regulation, prevention, and efficiency have predominated over the ideal of adversarialism, even in an adversarial system like England’s. This natural convergence is accompanied by a due-process-evading justice, in which criminal fair trial rights could be disproportionately limited by ideas of triviality and the so-called noncriminal character. The article also suggests a convergence in the jurisprudential framework as minor offense justice reflects limitations on fair trial rights in dealing with less serious public wrongs.

Public Wrongs and Public Reason

The distinction between crimes that involve wrongs in themselves and crimes that are wrong because the law makes them so has long puzzled theorists. This essay argues that the distinction, while getting at something real, is based on a mistake. That mistake is made both by those who see moral wrongness as a necessary condition for criminality and by those who believe merely making something illegal is sufficient to make it criminal. Neither is correct. Rather, what makes something a criminal wrong is that it involves a violation of a law that has been justified in terms of “public reason.”

Legal Moralism and Public Wrongs

After sketching the main features of Moore’s version of legal moralism, and its connection to the type of retributivism that he espouses, I note its expansiveness, both as to the kinds of wrong and as to the range of agents that we have in principle reason to criminalise. I argue that we should instead ground a more modest legal moralism in the traditional idea of crimes as public wrongs and (in response to Moore’s criticisms of that idea) that we can begin to give it substantial content by beginning with the idea of the public realm that any polity must determine for itself; the way in which codes of professional ethics are developed on the basis of an account of the proper scope of the profession provides a useful illustration of this method.

Adultery, Criminality, and the Myth of English Sovereignty

This article argues that in England over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the understanding of adultery as a tort was complicated by an accompanying discourse of what I will call “quasi-criminality.” Specifically – while formally trivialized – adultery remained linked to a threat to English kingship. The tension between the weight of relevant monarchical history and the absence of contemporary criminal enforcement created a new cultural narrative about adultery which attempted, itself, to serve a penal function. Examining the development of this discourse alongside the relevant law illuminates the complex social process through which public and private wrongs become distinguished – or conflated.