 There has been much research in the intervening decades on how norm-subjects will respond to any potential use of the criminal law. Will they endorse it, ignore it, seek to undermine it? All of this can make a difference to the wisdom of criminalizing in the first place. Tom Tyler has argued that to a large extent obedience to the law is based on what is perceived by people to be legitimate and to be respected. The extent to which people obey because threatened by legal sanctions is, by contrast, exaggerated (Tyler 2006). Paul Robinson stresses the need for laws to be made that do not stray too far from the norms already accepted by the people. For if they do, the people will not stigmatize the conduct, which may blunt or compromise the effectiveness of the norms in question (Robinson 2000). Similarly, legal officials may find various ways of underenforcing norms if they stray too far from those generally accepted, again blunting their efficacy. Bill Stuntz points to the phenomenon of “self-defeating crimes” (Stuntz 2000). A series of factors of the sort have most recently been examined by Jacob Barrett and Gerald Gaus (Barrett &amp; Gaus 2020). The idea of potential defeating conditions is a highly flexible one, not a once-for-all set of conditions with any rigidity; the list will inevitably change and develop. A further issue of potential relevance to the question of what conduct should be criminalized (and how) focusses on the consequences of applying the criminal law in given areas. There is, for example, a differential impact of the criminal law on some races in many jurisdictions (Yankah 2019). One might add to a list of potential defeaters the problem that enforcement of a given proposed or current offence is not possible under current conditions in any tolerably fair way. In the United Kingdom, for example, the politician David Lammy has written a report on racial disparities across the criminal justice system and proposed a principle for government of “explain or reform”: if governments cannot provide an evidence-based explanation for apparent disparities, then reforms should be introduced to address them (Lammy 2017).