  We can now see that criminalizing \(\phi\)ing does much more than make \(\phi\)ing a legal wrong. It also makes it the case that \(\phi\)ing triggers a set of legal rights, duties, powers, and permissions, the existence of which distinguishes criminal law from the rest of the legal system. Those rights, duties, powers, and permissions are constitutive of a criminal process via which suspected \(\phi\)ing turns into arrest, charge, trial, conviction, and punishment. Obviously suspicions are sometimes misplaced. Innocent people’s lives are sometimes ruined in consequence. So it is no surprise that the most destructive powers and permissions are jealously guarded by the criminal law. Trials held in a university’s moot court might be meticulously fair to defendants. But a moot court has no power to detain us in advance, to require us to appear before it, or to sentence us to imprisonment. Force used to achieve any of these things would itself be criminal, however proportionate the resulting punishment might be. As this example shows, criminal law is characterised by an asymmetry—it bestows powers and permissions on state officials (and delegates) which are withheld from private persons, such that the latter are condemned as vigilantes for doing what the former lawfully do (Thorburn 2011a, 92–93; Edwards forthcoming). This remains the case—often to the great frustration of victims and their supporters—even if the official response, assuming it comes at all, will be woefully inadequate.