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The nondelegation doctrine prohibits a legislature from delegating its power to an administrative agency, yet it is famously underenforced—even when the delegation results in the creation of criminal offenses (so-called "administrative crimes"). While this practice appears to scandalize the hornbook presumption that legislatures alone define criminal offenses, it has long been ratified by the Supreme Court and has received little scholarly attention. The few commentators who have addressed administrative crimes highlight the intuition that criminal sanctions are uniquely severe and thus deserving of a more rigorous nondelegation analysis, but they stop there. They do not precisely link the severe aspects of criminal punishment with a requirement for the type of institutions that can create criminal law. This Article provides that link. I argue that the two most significant dimensions of criminal punishment—community condemnation and liberty deprivation—implicate the concerns of two prominent political theories of punishment: expressivism and liberalism. A latent but mostly unstated premise of both theories, I claim, is that criminalization must be undertaken by a democratic institution. Given this, administrative crimes should be seen as illegitimate under either conception of state punishment.

While democracy is derided for a variety of reasons in Plato's thought, his most damning critique of that regime type does not involve an observation about democracy qua democracy, but of the transition that it so easily engenders: the decline to tyranny. Regimes are composed of individuals and groups, though, and Plato is anxious to ascribe culpability for the degradation. Two actors are the primary focus of his analysis — the political leaders and the demos. At times he emphasizes the puissance of the demos, but in other passages he suggests it is the leaders who are most authoritative. This paper discusses these apparently contradictory passages, and works towards a reconciliation. It argues that neither is assigned sole culpability, as both work in complex synrgy, and that the underlying cause of the decline—and the motivator behind both actors — is not simply freedom, but greed for material wealth.