Overview

Criminal law contains a set of powers and permissions that enable it to fulfil its functions. Although not all these normative incidents are unique to the criminal law, it is in this body of law-and this body of law alone-that they are made systematically available in respect of most of the wrongs regulated. Consider permissions first. Permissions exempt their beneficiaries from duties to perform or not to perform certain actions. As a consequence, conduct that would normally be wrongful is rendered legally permissible when undertaken by these beneficiaries. A distinguishing feature of the permissions contained in the criminal law is that they correspond to negative duties the violation of which often constitutes a criminal wrong. Let us note just a couple of examples to illustrate.1 The most recognisable is the infliction of punishment. The modes of hard treatment typically used as forms of punishment often amount to intentional and grave interferences with the offender's rights to freedom, property, or her bodily integrity which we are ordinarily under a duty, backed up by the criminal law, to refrain from. The same is true about the force deployed to perform an arrest, the restriction of freedom involved in a detention, and the infringement of the rights to property, privacy, or to our own bodies, attendant to a search. Permissions also attach to actions not generally thought of as coercive, the commission of which is nonetheless also often criminal

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9781835201268

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