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1 Mod. Crim. L. Rev. 1 (2024-2025)

handle is hein.journals/mncllarw1 and id is 1 raw text is: Reconstructing Criminal Law Revisited Nicola Lacey* Progressive legal scholarship in recent decades has often been expressed in terms of an aspiration to construct, deconstruct, and/or reconstruct particular areas of law. Mark Kel- man, an influential voice in the critical legal studies movement, wrote in the early 1980s of the need for Interpretive Construction of the Substantive Criminal Law, deconstructing key criminal law doctrines so as to reveal their underlying assumptions and the vectors of power implicated in their operation.' In 1990, Celia Wells, Dirk Meure, and I framed our critical text as a project of Reconstructing Criminal Laa,2 and in explicitly interdisciplinary terms.3 In an effort to supplement an internal, deconstructive critique of legal doctrine with a socio-legal analysis, we set criminal law firmly within its historical, political, social, and institutional context, and sought to re-read criminal law's significance by approaching law through a social lens, and by giving a central place to areas and aspects of criminalization public order laws, so-called regulatory offenses, the criminal process, for example-typi- cally marginalized within conventional texts.4 But what does it mean to reconstruct criminal law today? On the one hand, we have a burgeoning, far more methodologically diverse, and ever more cross-jurisdictional aca- demic conversation than we did fifty years ago. On the other, systems of criminal law in * School Professor of Law, Gender and Social Policy, Law School, London School of Economics. My warm thanks to Valeria Ruiz-Perez for exemplary research assistance. 1 Mark Kelman, Interpretive Construction in the Substantive Criminal Law, 33 Stan. L. Rev. 591 (1981); Markus Dirk Dubber & Mark G. Kelman, American Criminal Law: Cases, Statutes and Comments (1st ed. 2005, 2d ed. 2009); see more generally Neil MacCormick, Reconstruction After Deconstruction: A Response to CLS, 10 Legal Stud. 539 (1990). 2 Nicola Lacey, Celia Wells & Dirk Meure, Reconstructing Criminal Law (1990); Nicola Lacey & Celia Wells, Reconstructing the Criminal Law (2d ed. 1998); Celia Wells & Oliver Quick, Reconstructing the Criminal Law (3d ed. 2003). For discussion, see Kate Leader, Nicola Lacey, Celia Wells & Dirk Meure, Reconstructing Criminal Law, in Leading Works in Criminal Law 173 (Chloe Kennedy & Lindsay Farmer eds., 2024). 3 See also Alan Norrie, Crime, Reason and History (1st ed. 1993, 3d ed. 2014); Simon Bronitt & Bernadette McSherry, Principles of Criminal Law (1st ed. 2001, 4th ed. 2017). The field of interdisciplinary criminal law scholarship has grown steadily. See, e.g., Nicola Lacey, On the Subject of Sexing the Subject ... , in Sexing the Subject of Law 65 (Ngaire Naffine & Rosemary J. Owens eds., 1997); Alan Norrie, Punishment, Responsibility and Justice (2000); Peter Ramsay, The Insecurity State (2012); Lindsay Farmer, Making the Modem Criminal Law (2016); Nicola Lacey, In Search of Criminal Responsibility (2016); Markus D. Dubber, The Dual Penal State: The Crisis of Criminal Law in Comparative-Historical Perspective (2018); Ngaire Naffine, Criminal Law and the Man Problem (2020); Arlie Loughnan, Self, Others and the State (2020); Henrique Carvalho & Anastasia Chamberlen, Questioning Punishment (2024); Chloe Kennedy, Inducing Intimacy: Deception, Consent and the Law (2024); Alan Norrie, CriminalJustice and Moral Psychology: From Violation to Abolition (forthcoming). 4 Lacey, Wells & Meure, supra note 2, preface & ch. 1. M CLR+

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