Norms, Harms and Disorder at the Border: The Legitimacy of Criminal Law Intervention through the Lens of Criminalisation Theory

State criminal law interventions must have good, valid normative reasons behind them in order to be legitimate. In the area of criminal law and criminal law philosophy, which has been a driving force behind the developments in the normative criminalisation theory, the notion of legitimacy has to do with the internal reasonableness and normative justification for criminalisation (understood in the broadest sense). What interests criminalisation theory, in other words, is what sort of human conduct, and for what reasons or under which conditions, it is legitimate to criminalise (and consequently punish) within a certain normative (legal, social, political, moral) orientation of a given society. This conception of legitimacy is therefore linked to the normative grounds for criminalisation and to the content of criminal law norms, and it is this notion of legitimacy that will be used in this chapter.