Individual freedom and the supremacy of law: Alan Brudner on criminal justice

This article considers Alan Brudner’s contribution to criminal law theory. Part I makes clear just how distinctive his Hegelian account of criminal law is from the two accounts that dominated the field over the past half century. Part II considers the important connection between criminal justice and the authority of law that stands at the centre of Brudner’s Hegelian account. We need not go as far as Hannah Arendt and insist that ‘authority has vanished from the modern world,’ but it has largely disappeared from discussions of criminal law, and the subject is much the poorer for that. Brudner’s work leads the way to a recovery and recentring of authority in our account of the field. Part III considers the significance of Brudner’s insistence that his is a distinctively liberal account of criminal law. Although his account is distinctively liberal, the connection he draws between criminal law and political authority speaks not only to liberals but to anyone who recognizes the importance of legal ordering.