Preface

In June 2025, while finishing this book, I picked up Albert Camus’s The Fall, for reasons that had nothing to do with writing this book. At one point in The Fall, the protagonist says something that is very much relevant to this book, and it is this passage: Somebody has to have the last word. Otherwise, every reason can be answered with another one and there would never be an end to it. Power, on the other hand, settles everything.1 This book is an attempt to capture the tension present in the Camus passage—that on any given issue, there can be arguments and counterarguments but that what it means to have power is to cut through all that, decide once and for all, and have the last word, despite the likely presence of objections and despite the state violence that could result from the exercise of power—and examine this tension as it plays out in many different contexts of criminal law.