Doing Justice to Dignity in the Criminal Law

An important task for any community is to find a source of principled limits on the criminal law. This search is frustrated by the fact that the concept of wrongdoing, just like the contested concept of a crime itself, is open and empty of factual content. The ordinary definitions of wrongdoing, as conduct that deviates from a rule, standard or norm of conduct that is thought to be right, and of a crime as ‘a legal wrong that can be followed by criminal proceedings which may result in punishment’ both leave undone the hard work of identifying in precise factual terms the conduct that ought to be forbidden by the criminal law and providing acceptable reasons why it is thought to be right to punish offenders who are responsible for that conduct.