ABSTRACT
George Fletcher’s Rethinking Criminal Law, published in 1978, is still widely read and cited over forty years later, and the concepts and distinctions that he introduced have shaped contemporary criminal law theory. This chapter sets out the structure and some of the principal arguments of the book, showing how it is distinctive. It then goes on to look at the place of the book in different fields of criminal law scholarship. On the one hand, it can be seen as a foundational work of legal moralism through its argument that punishment is only justified where there has been moral wrongdoing. At the same time the historical analysis in the book of different patterns of liability has been central to more critical scholarship which has explored diversity or ‘polycentrism’ in the criminal law. The book is, by common agreement, a tour de force - but what is interesting is that different groups of readers and scholarly traditions have drawn on different parts of the book in developing their own arguments. It is a leading work, but it leads in many different directions.
