A Political Jurisprudence of Inchoate and Pre-emptive Criminal Liability

The paper first reviews the normative debate about pre-emptive offences to identify the unresolved difficulties that these offences present to criminal law theory. It then offers a taxonomy of inchoate and pre-emptive offences framed in the terms of ‘political jurisprudence’. The taxonomy identifies two families of pre-emptive offences, distinguishing them legally from each other and from inchoate offences. This taxonomy lays the basis for an assessment of pre-emptive offences from the point of view of their implications for the authority of the state.

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