  The above remarks concern the kind of value that justifies having criminal law. We can also ask who is capable of realizing that value. On both the views sketched above, criminal law’s value is grounded in a relationship in which all stand. If that value is to be realised, someone must act on behalf of those who stand in the relationship. In most systems of criminal law, the job is done by the state—agents of the state create, apply, and enforce criminal laws. Some argue that in a legitimate system of criminal law this is the only possibility. Criminal law’s value, it is claimed, is essentially public—it is value that can only be realised, even in principle, by agents of the state. This view can be developed in a number of ways. Consider again the Kantian view. Some claim that coercion secures independence only if the coercer speaks for all those coerced. Otherwise it is just another independence violation. Only state agents can speak for all of us. So the enforcement of the criminal law must remain in their hands (Thorburn 2011a, 98–99). Defenders of the communitarian view tell a similar story. If the value of criminal proceedings is that they express the community’s judgment about wrongdoing, and if only state agents can convey our collective judgment, trials must be carried out, and punishments imposed, by those agents (Duff 2013a, 206). On both views, it is impossible for private persons to realise the values that justify criminal law. If these arguments go through, they have obvious implications for debates about the privatization of prison and police services (Dorfman and Harel 2016). They also offer us a sense in which criminal law theory must be political. It must face up to the question of whether there are essentially public goods, and ask what role they play in justifying the existence of criminal law (Harel 2014, 96–99).