The 19th century proved to be an important moment for a discursive capture through which—as Foucault (1995) has famously described—diverse disciplinary powers expanded omnisciently to form modern, “carceral” societies. Included here was a regulatory focus on crime, capturing (identifying) criminals, and correcting them. The following paper examines specifically how Patrick Colquhoun approached such regulation by emphasizing “immoral habits” as a cause of crime that could be regulated, in concert, by civil society and criminal law. He called for the development of effective discipline-based policing to capture and control criminals in civil society, and to enable their subsequent arrogation by criminal law. Alongside Bentham’s panoptic surveillance, Colquhoun’s views on criminal habits called for expanding disciplined criminalization that tied social and legal governance. Two aspects of Colquhoun’s influential ideas are highlighted; namely, the social formation of immoral habits as the cause of crime, and the need for “energetic” systems of policing to embrace habits of criminalization. Together, these approaches to habit fostered massive, costly, and unequal criminal justice institutions that today form tenacious, marginalizing, and unequal relations of captivity. The scope of such enduring captivities might be curtailed by recalling their contingent emergence through historically distant trends, and by questioning their costly collective effects.

Criminal law defines the system of government of which it is the political expression; thus having a normative theory of substantive criminal law is paramount. U.S. criminal law has developed in the absence of such overarching theory, and is now plagued by overcriminalization. This Article advances a model of a minimalist criminal law grounded on strong normative principles that are presented and defended not from the perspective of metaphysics or moral philosophy, but rather in a historical and comparative perspective, as a matter of political choice. Core among those principles is the idea that in a liberal democracy the criminal law should be seen as the extrema ratio , or option of the last resort. After laying out and defending the model, the Article deals with issues related to its implementation, advancing an argument for the constitutionalization of substantive criminal law. The Article argues that, on the basis of existing yet overlooked constitutional doctrine, criminal laws should be subject to at least strict scrutiny.

The article analyzes prohibitions on membership in terrorist organizations and examines their justifiability. It begins by providing a definition of a terrorist organization. It then describes the far-reaching modern prohibitions on membership in terrorist organizations in various jurisdictions. The article goes on to provide a doctrinal analysis of membership offenses. Based on similarities with conspiracy doctrine, membership offenses are analyzed as expansions of attempt law or, in some cases, of complicity doctrines. The justifiability of this expansion is examined. The article introduces a distinction between exclusively terrorist organizations, passive membership of which can be legitimately prohibited under certain conditions, and ancillary and dual-purpose organizations, passive membership of which cannot be legitimately prohibited. Next, the justifiability of prohibiting more active forms of membership in each of these types of organizations is discussed. Last, guidelines for the legislation of appropriate prohibitions are proposed.