The law on the books includes judicial action—but that’s distinct from the enforcement actions of law in action
Aaronson* and Shaffer** 21, *senior lecturer at the University of Haifa, and ** Chancellor's Professor and Director of the Center on Globalization, Law, and Society (GLAS) at the University of California, Irvine. (Ely* and Gregory**, May 2021, ARTICLE: Defining Crimes in a Global Age: Criminalization as a Transnational Legal Process, 46 Law & Soc. Inquiry 455, 457. Lexis accessed online via KU libraries)
We offer a way forward by developing and applying a processual theoretical framework for studying transnational criminalization. We define criminalization as a set of processes through which actors construct legal norms that label certain activities as crimes. This definition encompasses both formal processes of statutory and judicial lawmaking that define criminal behavior ( law on the books) and everyday practices of law enforcement that determine the application of criminal prohibitions ( law in action) (Lacey and Zedner 2017, 59). Criminalization processes are transnational when they involve interactions between actors operating beyond and across national boundaries. We posit that the internationalization of criminal law is best understood through a theoretical lens that not only assesses how prohibition norms are being formalized at the international level, but also evaluates the domestic impacts of these norms. To facilitate such inquiry, we seek to bring criminalization theory into dialogue with sociolegal scholarship on transnational legal ordering and the development of transnational legal orders.