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Legal theorists have made significant contributions to our understanding of the concept of promising. But their focus has almost invariably been on the law of contract. In light of the minimal degree of opprobrium that usually attaches to promise-breaking in that context, the idea that such moral wrongfulness might play a role in defining the moral content of crimes seems at first thought improbable. This chapter presents a brief examination of the norm against promise-breaking to explain how it differs from the other norms. It turns out that the moral content of a small but interesting collection of white-collar and regulatory offenses does in fact owe something to the concept of promise-breaking.

This chapter focuses on those penal statutes that make it a crime to engage in prohibited conduct, subject to regulation, that would not be viewed as entailing significant moral wrongfulness independent of its prohibition — regulatory offenses characterized as mala prohibita. It considers certain generic forms of regulatory crime, such as engaging in one or another activity without a license, failing to file forms required by the government, or failing to comply with some testing requirement. The question is: when, if ever, is it morally wrong to violate a statute prohibiting some regulated conduct that would not be viewed as morally wrong independent of its prohibition? Even if there is no generally applicable moral obligation to obey the law, there might still be specific cases in which conduct that is otherwise morally neutral becomes wrongful as a result of its prohibition. The chapter examines the possibility that such offenses are informed by the norms against cheating, promise-breaking, and disobedience.

The last piece of the puzzle needed by a rational, retributivist legislator is a theory of the restraints she should observe in prohibiting moral wrongs. Promise-breaking may be morally wrong, for example, but it should not be criminally prohibited. Prominent among such restraints is the general right to liberty, making it worse for a legislator to prohibit some moral wrongs than it would be to allow citizens to choose (even wrongly) whether to do such morally wrongful actions. This chapter develops a presumption of liberty (and of the values that stand behind it). It defends a derived right to liberty (where the citizen's right is derived from the more basic legislative duty to enact legislation for some reasons and not others). It also defines a sphere of basic liberty (immune to state regulation for all but the most compelling of reasons) in terms of self-identity. By way of example, these three notions are applied to the legal prohibition of recreational drug use.