Results for 'ignorance, responsibility, excuses, punishment, mens rea, criminal law, Douglas Husak'

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  1.  21
    Review of Ignorance Of Law: A Philosophical Inquiry, by Douglas Husak[REVIEW]Stephen Bero - 2017 - Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books 2017 (March).
  2.  17
    Ignorance of Law: How to Conceptualize and Maybe Resolve the Issue.Douglas Husak - 2019 - In Larry Alexander & Kimberly Kessler Ferzan (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Applied Ethics and the Criminal Law. Springer Verlag. pp. 315-333.
    Under what circumstances should ignorance that someone is violating a moral or criminal rule preclude or lessen his moral responsibility and/or penal liability? In this chapter, I first construct a schema or framework for how to think about this issue. Quite a bit of confusion and uncertainty, I am sure, derives from a failure to understand exactly what this question is asking. I next defend some substantive views about how this question should be answered. If my defense is cogent, (...)
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  3.  97
    The philosophy of criminal law: selected essays.Douglas N. Husak - 2010 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Does criminal liability require an act? -- Motive and criminal liability -- The costs to criminal theory of supposing that intentions are irrelevant to permissibility -- Transferred intent -- The nature and justifiability of nonconsummate offenses -- Strict liability, justice, and proportionality -- The sequential principle of relative culpability -- Willful ignorance, knowledge, and the equal culpability thesis : a study of the significance of the principle of legality -- Rapes without rapists : consent and reasonable mistake (...)
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  4.  22
    Key Concepts: Criminal Responsibility.Carl Elliott - 1996 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 3 (4):305-307.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Key Concepts: Criminal ResponsibilityCarl Elliott (bio)AbstractMentally disordered persons occasionally do things for which we would ordinarily blame or even punish a non-disordered person. We often do not blame mentally disordered persons for these actions, however, because we regard mental disorders, at least in some circumstances, as an excuse from moral responsibility. For moral philosophy and the law, the challenge is to understand the specific circumstances under which a (...)
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  5.  27
    Criminal Law at the Margins.Douglas Husak - 2020 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 14 (3):381-393.
    I describe how our understanding of some of the central principles long held dear by most criminal theorists may have to be interpreted in light of the need to devise lenient responses for low-level offenders. Several of the most plausible suggestions for how to deal with minor infractions force us to take seriously some ideas that many legal philosophers have tended to resist elsewhere. I briefly touch upon four topics: whether informal can substitute for or count against the appropriate (...)
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  6.  46
    Ignorance of Law: A Philosophical Inquiry.Douglas N. Husak - 2016 - Oxford University Press USA.
    This book argues that ignorance of law should usually be a complete excuse from criminal liability. It defends this conclusion by invoking two presumptions: first, the content of criminal law should conform to morality; second, mistakes of fact and mistakes of law should be treated symmetrically.
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  7.  37
    Ignorance of law: A philosophical inquiry. [REVIEW]Katrina L. Sifferd - 2018 - Jurisprudence 9 (1):186-191.
    Douglas Husak’s book is an intelligent, wide-ranging exploration of the legal principle ‘ignorance of law is no excuse’. This principle is one of the few pieces of legal doctrine known by many regular folks, along with the criminal standard of proof ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’. The traditional approach to the doctrine might be explained in this way: in some cases, ignorance of the law fails to excuse offenders from culpability because as a matter of policy we feel (...)
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  8.  55
    Mens Rea Element in Superior Responsibility under Customary International Law and the Rome Statute.Justinas Žilinskas & Tomas Marozas - 2011 - Jurisprudencija: Mokslo darbu žurnalas 18 (4):1519-1541.
    Superior responsibility has been a widely recognised form of responsibility for omission in both treaty and customary international law. Superiors are held responsible for the acts of their subordinates when they fail in fulfilling their duties to prevent or punish crimes of subordinates. Duties to prevent and punish arise only after the superior knows about the subordinate’s crimes or has a reason to know about it. ‘Has a reason to know’ is a form of constructive knowledge and could be defined (...)
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  9. Christianity, Mens Rea and the Boundaries of Criminal Liability.David McIlroy (ed.) - 2020 - London: Routledge.
    Christian theology’s concern for the individual whatever their station expanded the scope of criminal law from protection of the interests of the regime to the security of all in society. The concept of mens rea was first mentioned by Augustine of Hippo and became a key part of the Church’s canon law. From there it was adopted by the secular legal systems of both civil law and common law. Such systems imposed criminal liability on those whose state (...)
     
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  10. Mistake of Law and Obstruction of Justice: A 'Bad Excuse' ... Even for a Lawyer!Lucinda Vandervort - 2001 - University of New Brunswick Law Journal 50: 171-186.
    In Regina v. Murray, (2000, Ont S.Ct.J.) the learned trial judge, Justice Gravely, errs in his interpretation and application of the law of mens rea in the offense of willfully attempting to obstruct justice under section 139(2) of the Criminal Code of Canada. In view of his findings of fact and law, including the determination that the accused knowingly and intentionally committed the actus reus of the offense and the absence of any suggestion that he lacked awareness of (...)
     
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  11. Mistake of Law and Culpability.Douglas Husak - 2010 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 4 (2):135-159.
    When does a defendant not deserve punishment because he is unaware that his conduct breaches a penal statute? Retributivists must radically rethink their answer to this question to do justice to our moral intuitions. I suggest that modest progress on this topic can be made by modeling our approach to ignorance of law on our familiar approach to ignorance of fact. We need to distinguish different levels of culpability in given mistakes and to differentiate what such mistakes may be about. (...)
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  12.  40
    Comments on Doug Husak: The Low Cost of Recognizing (and of Ignoring) the Limited Relevance of Intentions to Permissibility.Alec Walen - 2009 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 3 (1):71-78.
    Doug Husak frames a worry that makes sense in the abstract, but in reality, there is not much to worry about. The thesis that intentions are irrelevant to permissibility (IIP) is a straw man. There are reasons to think that the moral significance of intentions is not properly registered in criminal law. But the moral basis for criticism is not nearly as extreme as the IIP, and the fixes are not that hard to make. Lastly, if they are (...)
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  13.  32
    Is Akrasia Necessary for Culpability? On Douglas Husak’s Ignorance of Law.Gideon Yaffe - 2018 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 12 (2):341-349.
    This paper discusses Douglas Husak’s view that ignorance of the law always reduces culpability since the only fully culpable agents are those who are akratic—who act, that is, in a way that they judge to be wrongful, all things considered. The paper argues that this position is in tension with Husak’s avowed commitment to a reasons-responsiveness theory of culpability, given a plausible way of understanding what that means, and what a reason is.
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  14.  36
    Abetting a Crime.Douglas Husak - 2014 - Law and Philosophy 33 (1):41-73.
    I focus on the set of problems that arise in identifying both the actus reus and (to an even greater extent) the mens rea needed by an abettor before she should be criminally liable for complicity in a crime. No consensus on these issues has emerged in positive law; commentators are enormously dissatisfied with the decisions courts have reached; and critics disagree radically about what reforms should be implemented to rectify this state of affairs. I explicitly deny that I (...)
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  15.  21
    Is Fair Opportunity a Comprehensive Theory of Responsibility?Douglas Husak - forthcoming - Criminal Law and Philosophy:1-10.
    I challenge the adequacy of David Brink’s “master principle” of culpability. I allege that it fails to account for the moral relevance of ignorance of wrongdoing. I describe three cases in which I believe that Brink’s theory of normative competence cannot account for the significance of a variable that bears on culpability. In most of this paper I attempt to anticipate and reply to the various responses Brink might offer to my challenge.
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  16.  82
    Justifying Punishment: A Response to Douglas Husak[REVIEW]Kimberley Brownlee - 2008 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 2 (2):123-129.
    In ‘Why Criminal Law: A Question of Content?’, Douglas Husak argues that an analysis of the justifiability of the criminal law depends upon an analysis of the justifiability of state punishment. According to Husak, an adequate justification of state punishment both must show why the state is permitted to infringe valuable rights such as the right not to be punished and must respond to two distinct groups of persons who may demand a justification for the (...)
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  17. Unconscious Mens Rea: Criminal Responsibility for Lapses and Minimally Conscious States.Katrina Sifferd - 2016 - In Dennis Patterson & Michael Pardo (eds.), Philosophical Foundations of Law and Neuroscience. Oxford University Press.
    In a recent book, Neil Levy argues that culpable action – action for which we are morally responsible – is necessarily produced by states of which we are consciously aware. However, criminal defendants are routinely held responsible for criminal harm caused by states of which they are not conscious in Levy’s sense. In this chapter I argue that cases of negligent criminal harm indicate that Levy’s claim that moral responsibility requires synchronic conscious awareness of the moral significance (...)
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  18.  72
    Philosophy of criminal law.Douglas N. Husak - 1987 - Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield.
    This volume collects 17 of Douglas Husak's influential essays in criminal law theory. The essays span Husak's original and provocative contributions to the central topics in the field, including the grounds of criminal liability, relative culpability, the role of defences, and the justification of punishment. The volume includes an extended introduction by the author, drawing together the themes of his work, and exploring the goals of criminal theory.
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  19.  12
    On Blame and Punishment: Self-blame, Other-Blame, and Normative Negligence.Alec Douglas Walen - 2022 - Law and Philosophy 41 (2):283-304.
    Punishment should, at least normally, be reserved for blameworthy actions. But to make sense of that claim, we need an account of blame and of why it might license or even call for punishment. Doug Husak, in whose honor this paper is written, rejects quality of will theories of blame as relevant to criminal punishment – what I call ‘criminal blame’. He offers instead a reason-responsive account of blameworthiness, according to which blame applies to wrongful actions chosen (...)
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  20.  73
    The Criminal Law as Last Resort.Douglas Husak - 2004 - Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 24 (2):207-235.
    In this article I examine one condition a minimalist theory of criminalization might contain: the criminal law should be used only as a last resort. I discuss how this principle should be interpreted and the reasons we have to accept it. I conclude that a theory of criminalization should probably include the (appropriately construed) last resort principle. But this conclusion will prove disappointing to those who hope to employ this principle to bring about fundamental reform in the substantive (...) law. I argue that the last resort principle may not help to reverse the growth of the criminal law to any degree that could not be achieved more directly and less controversially by other principles that a theory of criminalization is generally thought to include. Unless we reject others parts of conventional wisdom about crime and punishment, the application of a last resort principle is unlikely to bring about sweeping changes that theorists might have anticipated. (shrink)
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  21.  89
    Why Criminal Law: A Question of Content? [REVIEW]Douglas Husak - 2008 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 2 (2):99-122.
    I take it as obvious that attempts to justify the criminal law must be sensitive to matters of criminalization—to what conduct is proscribed or permitted. I discuss three additional matters that should be addressed in order to justify the criminal law. First, we must have a rough idea of what degree of deviation is tolerable between the set of criminal laws we ought to have and the set we really have. Second, we need information about how the (...)
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  22.  40
    Mens rea, the Achilles’ Heel of Criminal Law.Michal Zacharski - 2018 - The European Legacy 23 (1-2):47-59.
    The evolution of criminal law in Western legal systems is often portrayed as a path leading from objective to subjective notions of criminal responsibility. By examining the historical development of the notions of subjective responsibility, this article suggests that the function of a wrongdoer’s subjective mental state, in both its substantive and procedural aspect, as an element in the process of attributing criminal responsibility, remains much the same today as it was in antiquity. This is indicated by (...)
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  23.  54
    The Nature and Significance of Culpability.David O. Brink - 2019 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 13 (2):347-373.
    Culpability is not a unitary concept within the criminal law, and it is important to distinguish different culpability concepts and the work they do. Narrow culpability is an ingredient in wrongdoing itself, describing the agent’s elemental mens rea. Broad culpability is the responsibility condition that makes wrongdoing blameworthy and without which wrongdoing is excused. Inclusive culpability is the combination of wrongdoing and responsibility or broad culpability that functions as the retributivist desert basis for punishment. Each of these kinds (...)
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  24.  15
    In Search of Criminal Responsibility: Ideas, Interests, and Institutions.Nicola Lacey - 2016 - Oxford University Press UK.
    What makes someone responsible for a crime and therefore liable to punishment under the criminal law? Modern lawyers will quickly and easily point to the criminal law's requirement of concurrent actus reus and mens rea, doctrines of the criminal law which ensure that someone will only be found criminally responsible if they have committed criminal conduct while possessing capacities of understanding, awareness, and self-control at the time of offense. Any notion of criminal responsibility based (...)
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  25.  30
    Gardner on the Philosophy of Criminal Law.Douglas Husak - 2008 - Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 29 (1):169-187.
    Offences and Defences is an outstanding collection of eleven of John Gardner's previously published papers in the philosophy of criminal law. I briefly examine his views on five central issues: his claims about basic responsibility and whether it should be construed as relational; his positions on agent neutrality; his arguments about whether moral and criminal wrongs are typically strict; his thoughts about the structure of defences, and, finally, what his account of rape reveals about the content of the (...)
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  26.  17
    The Role of Mens Rea in Mediating the Scope of Prohibitions.Doug Husak - forthcoming - Criminal Law and Philosophy:1-14.
    Among the most noteworthy and impressive aspects of A.P. Simester’s monumental Fundamentals of Criminal Law is its pervasive pluralism. Many philosophers of criminal law, I have frequently complained, are excessively monistic on a number of basic questions about which pluralism is the more defensible option. I fear, however, that Simester’s views are sometimes too pluralistic. In particular, he assigns five separate functions to mens rea, and advances the novel claim that “mens rea is not, uniquely or (...)
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  27.  34
    The Philosophy of Criminal Law: Extending the Debates. [REVIEW]Douglas Husak - 2013 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 7 (2):351-365.
    Larry Alexander and Peter Westen each critically examine different topics from my recent collection of essays, The Philosophy of Criminal Law. Alexander focuses on my “Rapes Without Rapists,” “Mistake of Law and Culpability,” and “Already Punished Enough.” Westen offers a more extended commentary on my “Transferred Intent.” I briefly reply to each critic in turn and try to extend the debates in new directions.
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  28.  55
    Recklessness, Willful Ignorance, and Exculpation.Michael J. Zimmerman - 2018 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 12 (2):327-339.
    In Ignorance of Law, Douglas Husak’s main thesis is that ignorance of the law typically provides an excuse for breaking the law, but in the case of recklessness he claims that the excuse it provides is only a partial one, and in the case of willful ignorance he claims that it provides no excuse at all. In this paper I argue that, given the general principle to which Husak appeals in order to support his main thesis, he (...)
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  29.  11
    Unconscious mens rea : lapses, negligence, and criminal responsibility.Katrina L. Sifferd - 2016 - In Dennis Michael Patterson & Michael S. Pardo (eds.), Philosophical Foundations of Law and Neuroscience. Oxford University Press UK.
    This chapter considers arguments by Neil Levy for the proposition that direct conscious awareness is a prerequisite for responsibility. It argues that cases of negligent criminal harm indicate that Levy’s claim that moral responsibility requires synchronic conscious awareness of the moral significance of an act is too strict. Furthermore, the chapter claims that tracing conditions cannot be successfully used to bolster Levy’s account. Instead, current legal practices indicate that criminal responsibility requires the capacity for diachronic agency and self-control, (...)
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  30.  22
    Larry Alexander and Kimberly Kessler Ferzan on Omissions and Normative Ignorance: A Critical Reply.Douglas Husak - 2022 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 16 (3):441-454.
    Reflections on Crime and Culpability seeks to elaborate, extend, and occasionally qualify the insights reached by Larry Alexander and Kim Ferzan in their influential prior collaboration, Crime and Culpability. They deftly explore any number of new issue that all criminal theorists should be encouraged to address. In my essay, I discuss and challenge their positions on omissions as well as on moral ignorance. Their treatment of the latter issue is a clear improvement over that in their earlier book. But (...)
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  31. Negligence, Belief, Blame and Criminal Liability: The Special Case of Forgetting.Douglas Husak - 2011 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 5 (2):199-218.
    Commentators seemingly agree about what negligence is—and how it is contrasted from recklessness. They also appear to concur about whether particular examples (both real and hypothetical) portray negligence. I am less confident about each of these matters. I explore the distinction between recklessness and negligence by examining a type of case that has generated a good deal of critical discussion: those in which a defendant forgets that he has created a substantial and unjustifiable risk of harm. Even in this limited (...)
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  32.  32
    The Objective(s) of Responsible Brains.Douglas Husak - 2022 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 16 (2):267-281.
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  33. Why Punish Attempts at All? Yaffe on 'The Transfer Principle'.Douglas Husak - 2012 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 6 (3):399-410.
    Gideon Yaffe is to be commended for beginning his exhaustive treatment by asking a surprisingly difficult question: Why punish attempts at all? He addresses this inquiry in the context of defending (what he calls) the transfer principle: “If a particular form of conduct is legitimately criminalized, then the attempt to engage in that form of conduct is also legitimately criminalized.” I begin by expressing a few reservations about the transfer principle itself. But my main point is that we are justified (...)
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  34. Beyond the Justification/Excuse Dichotomy.Douglas Husak - 2011 - In Rowan Cruft, Matthew H. Kramer & Mark R. Reiff (eds.), Crime, Punishment, and Responsibility: The Jurisprudence of Antony Duff. Oxford University Press.
     
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  35. Character, purpose, and criminal responsibility.Michael D. Bayles - 1982 - Law and Philosophy 1 (1):5 - 20.
    This paper explores analyzing criminal responsibility from the Humean position that blame is for character traits. If untoward acts indicate undesirable character traits, then the agent is blameworthy; if they do not, then the actor is not blameworthy — he has an excuse. A distinctive feature of this approach is that that voluntariness of acts is irrelevant to determining blameworthiness.This analysis is then applied to a variety of issues in criminal law. Mens supports inferences to character traits, (...)
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  36.  7
    Criminal Responsibility (Insanity Defense).Besa Arifi & Rina Zejneli - 2022 - Seeu Review 17 (2):120-138.
    Criminal responsibility refers to a person’s ability to understand his action, behavior at the time a crime is committed, what a person is thinking when he commits a crime or the expected result when a crime is committed. Crime is defined in terms of an act or omission (actus reus) and a mental state (mens rea). In this paper, is presented the general concept of irresponsibility and essentially reduced responsibility as a reason to be exempted from the punishment (...)
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  37.  21
    Luck in crime and punishment: essays in metaphysics and legal theory.Di Yang - 2019 - Dissertation, University of Edinburgh
    This thesis examines some of the legal philosophical issues that are implicated in the problem of outcome luck. In the context of criminal law, the problem asks whether we should hold agents criminally liable for the consequences of their actions given that those consequences are never wholly within anyone’s control. I conclude that outcomes should matter to an agent’s liability and punishment, and I make this argument indirectly by examining some of the foundational questions in legal theory. The thesis (...)
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  38.  4
    Overcriminalization.Douglas Husak - 1996 - In Dennis M. Patterson (ed.), A Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory. Blackwell. pp. 621–631.
    This chapter contains sections titled: The Meaning of Overcriminalization Why Overcriminalization Is Worrisome Political and Scholarly Causes of Overcriminalization A Normative Theory of Criminalization References.
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  39.  44
    Drug Proscriptions as Proxy Crimes.Douglas Husak - 2017 - Law and Philosophy 36 (4):345-366.
    Our drug policy has been widely deemed a failure because the criminalization of drug use has not succeeded in reducing prevalence rates. I contend that the most promising basis to defend the justifiability of drug offenses is to construe them as proxy crimes: offenses designed to prevent the commission of other, more serious crimes. I make a case that many law enforcement officials use drug proscriptions for this purpose in the real world. When construed as proxy crimes, drug prohibitions are (...)
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  40.  92
    Mens Rea in tort law.Cane Peter - 2000 - Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 20 (4):533-556.
    In ethical terms, intention is widely felt to be the strongest basis for the attribution of personal responsibility for conduct and outcomes. By contrast, in tort law intention is a much less important ground of liability than negligence. This article analyses the meaning of intention in tort law and its relationship to other concepts such as voluntariness, recklessness, motive, and belief. It also discusses difficulties associated with proving intention and other mental states, and the idea of a general principle of (...)
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  41.  30
    Aspiration, Execution, and Controversy: Reply to My Critics.Douglas Husak - 2018 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 12 (2):351-362.
    I respond to Michael Zimmerman and Gideon Yaffe, both of whom have written thoughtful and constructive criticisms of my “Ignorance of Law”. Zimmerman believes I do not go far enough in exculpating morally ignorant wrongdoers; he accuses me of lacking the courage of my convictions in allowing exceptions for reckless wrongdoers and for willfully ignorant wrongdoers. Yaffe, by contrast, thinks I rely on a defective foundation of moral blameworthiness. He proposes an alternative account he alleges to conform more closely to (...)
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  42.  57
    Social Engineering as an Infringement of the Presumption of Innocence: The Case of Corporate Criminality. [REVIEW]Douglas Husak - 2014 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 8 (2):353-369.
    I examine how deferred-prosecution agreements employed against suspected corporate criminality amount to a form of social engineering that infringes the presumption. I begin with a broad understanding of the presumption itself. Then I offer a brief description of how these agreements function. Finally I address some of the normative issues that must be confronted if legal philosophers who hold retributivist views on punishment and sentencing hope to assess this device. My judgment tends to be favorable. More importantly, I caution against (...)
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  43. Intoxication and Culpability.Douglas Husak - 2012 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 6 (3):363-379.
    I tackle the difficult problem of specifying how voluntary intoxication affects criminal culpability generally and recklessness in particular. I contend that the problem need not be conceptualized as an instance of actio libera in causa, namely the situation in which persons do something at t1 to culpably create the conditions of their own defense at t2. Instead, I argue that we need only consider intoxicated defendants at t2 in order to justify their punishment. In the course of defending my (...)
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  44. Critical Review: Douglas Husak, Overcriminalization. The Limits of the Criminal Law. [REVIEW]Alfonso Donoso - 2010 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 4 (1):99-104.
  45.  71
    Hart on Responsibility.C. G. Pulman (ed.) - 2014 - New York, NY: Palgrave-Macmillan.
    In the 1950s and 60s, H. L. A. Hart's writings were responsible for the revitalizing of legal philosophy in the UK and worldwide. This new collection of essays by distinguished philosophers and legal theorists addresses the enduring significance of Hart's work, focusing upon some of its more neglected aspects, including his work on causation and the philosophy of action. Two essays discuss Hart and Honore;'s Causation in the Law, a book that has been undeservedly overlooked in many philosophical discussions of (...)
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  46.  96
    The Point of Mens Rea: The Case of Willful Ignorance.Gideon Yaffe - 2018 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 12 (1):19-44.
    Under the “Willful Ignorance Principle,” a defendant is guilty of a crime requiring knowledge he lacks provided he is ignorant thanks to having earlier omitted inquiry. In this paper, I offer a novel justification of this principle through application of the theory that knowledge matters to culpability because of how the knowing action manifests the agent’s failure to grant sufficient weight to other people’s interests. I show that, under a simple formal model that supports this theory, omitting inquiry manifests precisely (...)
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  47. Let's Not Do Responsibility Skepticism.Ken M. Levy - 2023 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 40 (3):458-73.
    I argue for three conclusions. First, responsibility skeptics are committed to the position that the criminal justice system should adopt a universal nonresponsibility excuse. Second, a universal nonresponsibility excuse would diminish some of our most deeply held values, further dehumanize criminals, exacerbate mass incarceration, and cause an even greater number of innocent people (nonwrongdoers) to be punished. Third, while Saul Smilansky's ‘illusionist’ response to responsibility skeptics – that even if responsibility skepticism is correct, society should maintain a responsibility‐realist/retributivist (...) justice system – is generally compelling, it would not work if a majority of society were to convert, theoretically and psychologically, to responsibility skepticism. In this (highly improbable) scenario, and only in this (highly improbable) scenario, the criminal justice system would need to be reformed in such a way that it aligned with the majority's responsibility‐skeptical beliefs and attitudes. (shrink)
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  48.  24
    Negligence and Ignorance.A. D. Woozley - 1978 - Philosophy 53 (205):293 - 306.
    The purpose of this paper is to discuss and to relate to each other two topics: the admissibility of ignorance and mistake of fact as defences against negligence in crime; and the inadmissibility of ignorance and mistake of law as defences against criminal charges. I am in not concerned at all with torts negligence, only with criminal offences which can be committed negligently, where negligence suffices for liability, as in the law of homicide. This produces an untidy classification (...)
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  49.  11
    Fundamentals of criminal law: responsibility, culpability, and wrongdoing.Andrew Simester - 2021 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    Written by a noted expert in criminal law, this book explores the philosophical underpinnings of the law's major doctrines concerning actus reus, mens rea, and defences, showing that they are not always driven by culpability. They are grounded also in principles of moral responsibility, ascriptive responsibility, and wrongdoing. As such, they engage wider debates about wrongdoing, and about the boundaries between liability and freedom. This multi-textured analysis allows this book to take more nuanced positions about many important controversies (...)
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  50. The Legalization of Drugs.Doug Husak & Peter de Marneffe - 2005 - Cambridge University Press.
    In the United States today, the use or possession of many drugs is a criminal offense. Can these criminal laws be justified? What are the best reasons to punish or not to punish drug users? These are the fundamental issues debated in this book by two prominent philosophers of law. Douglas Husak argues in favor of drug decriminalization, by clarifying the meaning of crucial terms, such as legalize, decriminalize, and drugs; and by identifying the standards by (...)
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