Lindsay Farmer: Making the Modern Criminal Law: Criminalization and Civil Order Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016, hardcover $99, ISBN 9780199568642 Making the Modern Criminal Law is one of several volumes to emerge from a major project on criminalization undertaken by Lindsay Farmer, Antony Duff, Sandra Marshall, Massimo Renzo and Victor Tadros. In keeping with these works, and indeed the rest of the ever-expanding literature on this topic, the central problems with which Farmer is concerned are “what and who should be treated as criminal under the law and the ways this can be justified” (p. 1). These shared concerns are where the similarities end, however, for the core of Farmer’s argument is that the prevailing tendency to treat them as problems of moral or political philosophy is inadequate. In his view, we must consider the phenomenon of criminalization from an altogether different perspective. Rather than posing questions about the proper relationship between the role and limits of the state, we should instead be asking prior questions about how the debate over criminalization has attained such prominence and what legal concepts and institutional structures have facilitated this development. The central thesis developed throughout the book is that our contemporary understanding of criminalization is inextricably bound up with the emergence of the modern criminal law, conceived of as a unified body of rules that perform a distinctive social function. As such, we can only begin to grasp both the nature of criminalization, and its attendant challenges, if we pay proper attention to the aims and purposes of the criminal law in the modern age and how these have changed over time. This requires that we acknowledge and examine the ways in which criminal law is directed towards securing civil order, rather than focusing solely on the interests that it seeks to protect. Connectedly, this requires that we should avoid treating the task of determining the proper scope of the criminal law as if it were co- extensive with the task of justifying punishment. The modern tendency to conflate these two enterprises has, in Farmer’s view, obscured the broader picture of criminalization, of which punishment is only a part. Precisely what this change in focus entails is the subject of the first of the three parts of Farmer’s monograph. Building on Neil MacCormick’s conception of law as an institutional normative order, he argues that we need to direct our attention towards legal norms, and recognize that these norms are invariably purposive. According to this view, laws are always directed towards facilitating some aim, even if this is nothing more than the very general aim of protecting individual liberty. As already mentioned, Farmer’s depiction of the modern criminal law holds its central aim to be securing civil order. More specifically, as chapter two makes clear, the notion of civil order at play is more expansive than the minimal degree of order necessary to sustain social life; it is a dynamic concept that refers to ongoing institutional efforts to guarantee social and normative order. It is therefore intimately linked to the rise of the modern state and is, in Farmer’s view, severable from other forms of social ordering, such as the market, the family and the church. Since this notion of civil order describes the process of institutional governance, it does not imply anything about the particular aims or outcomes of that process or the form of normative order that is protected. Yet there are general features that Farmer takes to be characteristic of civil order in “Western modernity” (p. 44), including, inter alia, state monopoly on the legitimate use of physical violence and the articulation of action-guiding norms. 1