Douglas Husak, Overcriminalization. The Limits of the Criminal Law: Oxford University Press, New York, 2008, 248 pp., Hardback ISBN 978-0-19-532871-4, £28.99, Paperback (estimated January 2010) ISBN 978-0-19-539901-1, £13.99

Crim Law and Philos (2010) 4:99104

DOI 10.1007/s11572-009-9084-7

BOOK REVIEW

Douglas Husak, Overcriminalization. The Limits of the Criminal Law

Oxford University Press, New York, 2008, 248 pp., Hardback ISBN 978-0-19-532871-4, 28.99, Paperback (estimated January 2010) ISBN 978-0-19-539901-1, 13.99

Alfonso Donoso M.

Published online: 24 September 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Overcriminalization is an ambitious book. It not only offers a description of the current sorry state of affairs of the criminal law in the United States and a persuasive explanation of the wrongness of this condition (Chap. 1), but it also develops the foundations of a normative theory of criminalisation that may retard this situation (Chaps. 2 and 3) and discusses why this account fares better than alternative theories (Chap. 4). There is too much criminal law and philosophers have not said much about it. Douglas Husaks excellent book begins to remedy this.

Husaks book opens with a convincing discussion of the phenomenon of overcriminalisation and the problems related to it. Husak exposes with clarity how a system char-acterised by overcriminalisation puts at stake basic principles of the rule of law by making people unaware of what types of conduct are criminally proscribed; precluding them from having adequate notice of some of their legal obligations; and, ultimately, by undermining one of the main goals of the system of law, namely, to guide peoples behaviour (p. 11). Overcriminalisation also breaks principles of legality by making the criminal law out-source from non-criminal branches of the law (p. 13), which runs the serious risk of making the criminal law even less intelligible for the layperson and making its limits dependent on the limits of spheres of law that are beyond its proper domain. Despite these and other reasons to be worried about overcriminalisation, Husak emphasisesguided by the peculiar American penal context (p. 14)that the principal reason to be troubled by having too much criminal law is that it produces too much punishment. That is the most urgent source of injustice on which the book focuses.

A pertinent question, then, is how it is that too much criminal law produces too much punishment. The beginning of the explanation is obvious: more criminal law produces more punishment because it expands the types of actions that are subject to...