The definition of crime

The perceived need to produce a definition of crime has been one of the most extraordinary preoccupations of modern criminal lawyers. The debates on this question are difficult and impenetrable for beginners and more experienced criminal lawyers alike. The definitions that have been produced are not only uniformly technical in character but also seem ultimately to be trite and uninformative in their conclusions. Although viewed by many as a ‘sterile and useless’ exercise the question has none the less exerted a strange fascination over criminal lawyers. Between the beginning of this century and the late 1950s it was the subject of much debate. Even now the standard books on the criminal law almost invariably begin by attempting to define crime, and hence the scope of the criminal law. The most immediate feature of these scholarly definitions of crime and the criminal law is their circularity: a crime is that which is proceeded against in the criminal courts, and the criminal law deals with those acts that are crimes. However, this apparently unpromising insight reveals much about nature of the modern criminal law and its relationship with legal theory.