ABSTRACT
This chapter challenges the normal interpretation of the absence of a relation between obligation and the criminal law, to explore in particular what it means to claim that the law seeks to 'adjust the pretensions of parties'. The chapter looks at the idea of civility and link it to the development of modern criminal law. It explores different ways in which the criminal law can be said to establish obligations of 'civility'. The chapter considers, and relates this to, the recent rise of interest in the concept of civility in social and political theory. The centrality of the idea of civility is not to be understood as a claim that the criminal law is concerned directly in the regulation of manners or social rules. In the words of an early modern historian, civility, or civil behaviour, is a 'technique for representation of personal virtue within a broader civil community'.
