  For defenders of the Kantian view, criminal law’s value derives from a relationship it helps create. On another view, the value of criminal law derives from a relationship that pre-exists it: the relationship in which we stand as members of a political community (Duff 2011). Any such community has values in terms of which it is understood by its members. If this self-understanding is to be more than a charade, the community must actually value its defining values—it must do what those values are reasons to do. Imagine that life is one such value, and a member takes another’s life. Part of what it is for a community to value life is for it to respond to the taking: for the killer to be required to account to fellow members, thereby communicating the community’s judgment that the killing was wrong. Criminal law is a body of law that requires the accounting. Functionally, this is a version of the curial view. But the value of fulfilling that function is relational: it is the value of making the community one that is true to itself—one that does not betray the values in terms of which members understand what it is and who they are (Duff and Marshall 2010, 83–84). This line of thought lends support to what I earlier called the communitarian view. On that view, criminal proceedings discharge secondary duties owed to the community as a whole. That such duties are part and parcel of a valuable form of relationship helps explains why we should think that they exist.