Wrongs and Crimes

The Criminalization series arose from an interdisciplinary investigation into criminalization, focussing on the principles that might guide decisions about what kinds of conduct should be criminalized, and the forms that criminalization should take. Developing a normative theory of criminalization, the series tackles the key questions at the heart of the issue: what principles and goals should guide legislators in deciding what to criminalize? How should criminal wrongs be classified and differentiated? How should law enforcement officials apply the law's specifications of offences?

The sixth volume in the series offers a philosophical investigation of the relationship between moral wrongdoing and criminalization. Considering they justification of punishment, the nature of harm, the importance of autonomy, inchoate wrongdoing, the role of consent, and the role of the state, the book provides an account of the nature of moral wrong doing, the sources of wrong doing, why wrong doing is the central target of the criminal law, and the ways in which criminalization of non-wrongful conduct might be permissible.

Victor Tadros, Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory, University of Warwick

Victor Tadros is Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory at the University of Warwick. He works in the philosophy of criminal law, just war theory, and on a range of issues in moral, legal and political philosophy. He is the author of Criminal Responsibility (OUP, 2005) and, with Antony Duff, Lindsay Farmer and Sandra Marshall, The Trial on Trial vol.3: Towards a Normative Theory of the Criminal Trial (Hart, 2007). His most recent book is The Ends of Harm: The Moral Foundations of Criminal Law (OUP, 2011). He has edited seven books, including four in the Criminalization series. He currently holds a Major Leverhulme Research Fellowship to work on the ethics of armed conflict.