Abstract: This chapter presents an authoritative discussion of the criminalization of domestic violence and its implications for criminal law. It describes the legal regime that has grown up around misdemeanor offenses associated with domestic violence, emerging under the aegis of correcting the criminal justice system's past inaction, that seeks to do something meaningfully different from punishing violence. It explains how the home is becoming a space in which criminal law deliberately and coercively reorders and controls property and intimate relationships, focusing on two means by which the criminal law accomplishes this goal: protection-order criminalization and the so-called “state-imposed de facto divorce.” The chapter includes comments by some of the nation's top legal scholars from the field of criminal law, tackling topics such as privacy, neoliberalism and libertarianism, battered women, and domestic violence misdemeanor prosecutions.