  Some writers seek criminal law’s distinctiveness in a different place. What is distinctive about criminal law, they claim, is that it publicly censures or condemns. This expressive function is sometimes associated with criminal punishment (Husak 2008, 92–95). Because other bodies of law sometimes punish, and because punishment typically—perhaps necessarily—expresses censure (Feinberg 1970), the expressive function is at least partly shared. But the message sent by criminal law is not sent only at the sentencing stage. It is sent the moment a guilty verdict is reached by a criminal court—by the declaration that \(D\) has been criminally convicted (Simester 2005, 33–36). The social significance of conviction is very different to that of (say) the verdict that \(D\) is a tortfeasor: the former verdict conveys, in and of itself, that \(D\)’s conduct reflects badly on \(D\). Though additional detail may generate the same conclusion in the case of a civil verdict, such detail is not required in the case of criminal conviction. If this is right, the distinctiveness of criminal law turns out not to consist in the fact that it provides for punishment. It turns out to consist (at least in part) in the provision of a technique for condemning wrongdoers which does not require that we punish in order to condemn.