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Dual Penal State is about the collective failure to address the fundamental challenge of legitimating the threat and use of penal violence in modern liberal states. The first part of the book investigates various ways in which criminal law doctrine and scholarship have managed not to meet the continuing challenge of legitimating state penal power: the violent violation of the autonomy of the very persons upon whose autonomy the legitimacy of state power supposedly rests in a state under the rule of law (Rechtsstaat). Part I focuses primarily on German criminal law, and German criminal law science, with regular comparative glances beyond the German penal system. Chapter 2 highlights several key rhetorical strategies in modern criminal law doctrine that divert attention from the troubling—and possibly irresolvable—paradox of state punishment in a modern liberal democracy.

This chapter focuses on how we should conceive of the inquiry into the foundations of criminal law, whether legal, philosophical, historical, genealogical, or political. It argues that we cannot hope to develop a foundational account of the criminal law without an account of what, if anything, legitimizes the state power that underlies the criminal law — an inquiry that has mostly escaped the attention of American thinkers both at the time the nation was founded and in the years since. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 1 considers various ways of conceiving of an inquiry into the foundations of criminal law. Section 2 explores the distinction between modes of foundational inquiry by considering the significance of the Rechtsgut principle in German criminal law science, on one hand, and in the jurisprudence of the German Constitutional Court, on the other. Section 3 presents preliminary remarks on an inquiry into the foundations of American criminal law.

Dual Penal State is about the collective failure to address the fundamental challenge of legitimating the threat and use of penal violence in modern liberal states. The first part of the book investigates various ways in which criminal law doctrine and scholarship have managed not to meet the continuing challenge of legitimating state penal power: the violent violation of the autonomy of the very persons upon whose autonomy the legitimacy of state power supposedly rests in a state under the rule of law (Rechtsstaat). Part I focuses primarily on German criminal law, and German criminal law science, with regular comparative glances beyond the German penal system. Chapter 1 explores the failure of a parochial and self-referential conception of criminal law as science to engage with fundamental questions of legitimacy.

This chapter makes use of the analyses set forth in the book to cast light on our legal practices of holding people responsible for their actions. The focus is on criminal responsibility. Criminal accusations and convictions everywhere are markedly defeasible, in the relevant sense of the term. But the difference between offences and defences, long recognized as a central issue in criminal law theory, has yet to be satisfactorily explained. The chapter looks critically at both the dominant Continental theoretical approach to criminal law (the German ‘Verbrechenslehre’, or doctrine of crime) and at several prominent attempts at elucidating the notion of a criminal defence by authors working in the Anglo-American tradition, and offers an alternative account of the offence/defence distinction and the idea of a prima facie wrong.

Dual Penal State is about the collective failure to address the fundamental challenge of legitimating the threat and use of penal violence in modern liberal states. The introduction introduces key notions that frame the discussion throughout the book, including the dual penal state and the concepts of penal law and penal police that constitute it, and the idea of the penal paradox of state punishment in a modern liberal democracy ostensibly grounded in the fundamental commitment to the autonomy of each person as such. The introduction also introduces the comparative-historical approach driving the book’s analysis and lays out the basic argument of the book, divided into three parts.