Over the past decades, multiple areas of law – including anti-money laundering (AML), counterterrorist financing (CTF) and sanctions rules – have emerged that regulate the interactions of the legitimate economy with known or suspected criminals. These rules impose significant compliance burdens on regulated sectors and their effectiveness is often contested. Furthermore, they raise profound civil liberties questions, such as whether one can be excluded from banking or other services based on a mere suspicion of crime or what the permissible extent of financial surveillance is. Despite the growing recognition of the extraordinary role that AML/CTF and sanctions laws play in shaping our societies, there have been few attempts to trace in detail the historical evolution of global thinking about the dilemmas that those laws present, with a focus on key policy tensions rather than the mere development of laws and institutions. This chapter offers an introduction to the overall book project and outlines the policy intentions it studies.