How can we know whether we are punishing the same corporation that committed some past crime? Though central to corporate criminal justice, legal theorists and philosophers have yet to address the basic question of how corporate identity persists through time. Simple cases, where crime and punishment are close in time and the corporation has changed little, can mislead us into thinking an answer is always easy to come by. The issue becomes more complicated when corporate criminals (...) undergo any number of transformations—rebranding, spinning-off a division, merging, changing ownership, changing management, swapping lines of business, etc. These changes are common among all corporations, including those trying to conceal or limit liability for past crimes. This article takes a first step toward developing a workable and philosophically satisfying theory of corporate personal identity and discusses its prospects for fulfilling the retributive, rehabilitative, and deterrent purposes of criminal law. (shrink)

This article provides a brief introduction to some contemporary challenges found in the intersection of bioethics and international criminal law involving genetic privacy, organ trafficking, genetic engineering, and cloning. These challenges push us to re-evaluate the question of whether the international criminal law should hold corporations criminally liable. I argue that a minimalist and Strawsonian conception of corporate responsibility could be useful for deterring the wrongs outlined in first few sections and in answering compelling objections to (...) class='Hi'>corporate criminal liability. (shrink)

Respondeat superior is a legal doctrine conferring liability from one party onto another because the latter stands in some relationship of authority over the former. Though originally a doctrine of tort law, for the past century it has been used within the criminal law, especially to the end of securing criminal liability for corporations. Here, I argue that on at least one prominent conception of criminal responsibility, we are not justified in using this doctrine in this way. (...) Firms are not answerable for the crimes committed by their employees, because firms cannot answer as to why the crime was committed; they lack the authority to offer the employee’s reasons for action. Though this rules out respondeat superior as a general principle, I show contexts in which vicarious liability is still appropriate in the criminal law, and I respond to a number of other concerns raised by this picture. (shrink)

The willful ignorance doctrine says defendants should sometimes be treated as if they know what they don't. This book provides a careful defense of this method of imputing mental states. Though the doctrine is only partly justified and requires reform, it also demonstrates that the criminal law needs more legal fictions of this kind. The resulting theory of when and why the criminal law can pretend we know what we don't has far-reaching implications for legal practice and reveals (...) a pressing need for change. (shrink)

Some progress has been made in recent decades to articulate corporate social responsibility (CSR) and, more recently, to associate CSR with international enforcement of human rights. This progress continues to be hampered, however, by the ability of a multinational corporation (MNC) that violates human rights not only to shift liability from itself to a nation-state but even to win compensation from that nation-state for loss of profits due to restrictions on its business activities. In the process, the nation-state’s sovereignty (...) is diminishing; and, in effect, though still attributed to nation-states, it is being transferred to the MNC. The main aim of this article is (1) to draw on normative considerations to claim that this MNC proto-sovereignty should be modified and (2) to contend that this can eventually be accomplished by adding to corporate adoption of CSR guidelines a regimen of global human rights enforcement. I base this contention on expectations about the internationalization of corporate criminal law and the globalization of civil society in general and of NGOs in particular. I consider various jurisdictions but I focus on US jurisprudence. (shrink)

The Law Society recently published a practice note titled 'Prosecutions of victims of trafficking'. This practice note comes many years after many lawyers had highlighted the problem and after the government machinery had chuntered into action and passed the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 with explanatory notes and non-statutory guidelines for corporations. Since 2012 there had been issued warnings about the way defence lawyers, the Crown Prosecution Service and the UK police were dealing with trafficking and the Criminal Cases (...) Review Commission as far back as 2012 had note the severe failings by defence solicitors, prosecution and police, leading to many appeals and potential miscarriages of justice. Even in 2012 there were 946 known human trafficking victims, including 234 children. There was an attempt at a Human Trafficking Bill in 2010 which came to a halt and several reports including one by the Prison Reform Trust and Cambridge University Press, notwithstanding many books by notable academics for many years before today. This article examines the inadequacies of the Law Society practice note on defending victims and the jumble of high-ideals but short-sighted and impractical parts of the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015. (shrink)

While most discussions of corruption focus on administration, institutions, the law and public policy, little attention in the debate about societal reform is paid to the “internalities” of anti-corruption efforts, specifically to character-formation and issues of personal and corporate integrity. While the word “integrity” is frequently mentioned as the goal to be achieved through institutional reforms, even in criminal prosecutions, the specifically philosophical aspects of character-formation and the development of corporate and individual virtues in a rational and (...) systematic way tend to be neglected. This paper focuses on the “internalities” of anti-corruption work with special emphasis on the pre-requisites that need to be ensured on behalf of the social elites in order for proper individual and collective character- formation to take place throughout the society. The author argues that a systematic pursuit of socially recognised virtues, both those pertaining to society as a whole and those specific to particular professions and social groups, is the most comprehensive and strategically justified way of pursuing anti-corruption policy, while institutional and penal policies can only serve an auxiliary role. The pursuit of institutional and criminal justice policies against corruption in a society that is subject to increasing relativism with regard to values and morality is at best ineffective, and at worst socially destructive. Thus the paper suggests a re-examination of the social discourse on the level of what the author calls “value strategy” and the gradual building of a plan to create and solidify specifically designed features of “corporate character” for key sectors of the society. This approach can serve as the main long-term strategy to improve the public profile of integrity and reinforce morality in both the public and civil sectors. (shrink)

Purdue Pharma was being investigated by United States Civil and Criminal compliance agencies for many years and a conclusion has now been reached. Although successful , this author feels that such extremely serious corporate frauds must also punish senior individual executives with long jail sentences -in this case-corporate manslaughter.

Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 5, May 2022.

Criminal law practices in the US, including policing and incarceration, have drawn heavy criticism for their disproportionate impact on black people, particularly black men. At the same time, some feminist scholars and activists advocate for increases in criminal law responses to sexual assault, including expanding criminal statutes to cover more instances of sexual assault and increasing sentencing guidelines. These reforms are often justified by claims that criminal law should express more feminist values and reject sexist social (...) schemas. This paper makes the case that criminal legal interventions aimed at changing sexist social schemas, such as ‘rape culture,’ are unlikely to be successful because criminal law is effective at maintaining existing social norms, but bad at introducing novel ones. Similarly, in the US, criminality has been ideologically linked to blackness, so attempts to use the stigma of criminality to combat sexual violence are likely to reinforce anti-black racism. The very meaning of a criminal law depends on related social schemas, and the racist social schemas associated with criminality undermine the ability of criminal legal responses to present anti-sexist values. At best, criminal legal reforms aimed at expressing the equal dignity of women will be ambiguous because their meaning is negotiated by existing sexist and racist social schemas. Thus, penal expressivism cannot offer a justification for using criminal law to combat sexual assault. (shrink)

Whether causing flash crashes in financial markets, purchasing illegal drugs, or running over pedestrians, AI is increasingly engaging in activity that would be criminal for a natural person, or even an artificial person like a corporation. We argue that criminal law falls short in cases where an AI causes certain types of harm and there are no practically or legally identifiable upstream criminal actors. This Article explores potential solutions to this problem, focusing on holding AI directly criminally (...) liable where it is acting autonomously and irreducibly. Conventional wisdom holds that punishing AI is incongruous with basic criminal law principles such as the capacity for culpability and the requirement of a guilty mind. -/- Drawing on analogies to corporate and strict criminal liability, as well as familiar imputation principles, we show how a coherent theoretical case can be constructed for AI punishment. AI punishment could result in general deterrence and expressive benefits, and it need not run afoul of negative limitations such as punishing in excess of culpability. Ultimately, however, punishing AI is not justified, because it might entail significant costs and it would certainly require radical legal changes. Modest changes to existing criminal laws that target persons, together with potentially expanded civil liability, are a better solution to AI crime. (shrink)

Legal epistemology has been an area of great philosophical growth since the turn of the century. But recently, a number of philosophers have argued the entire project is misguided, claiming that it relies on an illicit transposition of the norms of individual epistemology to the legal arena. This paper uses these objections as a foil to consider the foundations of legal epistemology, particularly as it applies to the criminal law. The aim is to clarify the fundamental commitments of legal (...) epistemology and suggest a way to vindicate it. (shrink)

In this paper we introduce the nascent literature on Moral Uncertainty Theory and explore its application to the criminal law. Moral Uncertainty Theory seeks to address the question of what we ought to do when we are uncertain about what to do because we are torn between rival moral theories. For instance, we may have some credence in one theory that tells us to do A but also in another that tells us to do B. We examine how we (...) might decide whether or not to criminalize some conduct when we are unsure as to whether or not the conduct is morally permitted, and whether or not it is permissible to criminalize the conduct. We also look at how we might make sentencing decisions under moral uncertainty. We argue that Moral Uncertainty Theory can be an illuminating way to address these questions, but find that doing so is a lot more complicated than applying Moral Uncertainty Theory to individual conduct. (shrink)

The state has always authoritatively used criminal law to give effect to its policy of condemning acts either antisocial or unacceptable to the conscience of the law and society. The existence of criminal law is well justified on grounds of ‘social welfare’ or “reinforcement of those values most basic to proper social functioning”. This initiates or sustains the process of criminalization. The relativity of ‘social welfare’ makes law ‘dynamic’ as well as ‘varying’, vis-à-vis its ambit and scope. Current (...) scholarship is critical of what is referred to as the trend of overcriminalization or rapid increase in criminalizing of acts, as leading to ‘uncertainty’ in criminal law. The rationale for such a critique is that there are activities that need not be labeled as offences if they do not possess the potential to cause damage that criminal law seeks to protect. In light of the overcriminalization critique, this paper examines the criminalization of certain offences labeled as public welfare offences. (shrink)

The prosecution of international crimes is a challenge both under international and domestic law. Taking the example of international criminal law (ICL) , the fullest realization of its objectives is influenced by many factors including; (a) the adoption of appropriate laws by states, (b) the adequacy of the ICL framework on definitions of crimes and principles of criminal responsibility, (c) the level of political control and involvement in decision making related to investigation, prosecution or extradition, (d) Problems with (...) exclusion including restrictions on the rights of victims with regard to the proceedings and to reparation, and (e) The application of provisions for amnesties and similar measures of impunity. -/- Over the years, the mandate of States under ICL has expanded. Key reforms under ICL and domestic laws have been led by the above mentioned concerns. The scope of state obligations, in particular, has been shaped by the standards adopted under the ICL framework including the "duty to prosecute" international crimes. The article discusses the normative significance of the "duty to prosecute". (shrink)

This Article defines four distinct conceptions of cruelty found in underdeveloped form in domestic and international criminal law sources. The definition is analytical, focusing on the types of agency, victimization, causality, and values in each conception of cruelty. But no definition of cruelty will do justice to its object until complemented by the kind of understanding practical reason provides of the implications of the phenomenon of cruelty. -/- No one should be neutral in relation to cruelty. Eminently, cruelty in (...) criminal law, a human-created phenomenon, vigorously calls for responses in the form of preventive and corrective action on the part of private and public actors. It is in this sense that cruelty is a problem of practical reason, one of action preoccupied with its legal or moral obligations, rational grounds, value commitments, and actual consequences. -/- However, the connection between conceptions of cruelty and the implications practical reason can draw from the correct application of a conception of cruelty to phenomena in the world remains too detached to be able to capture and explain people's actual experiences both of seeing cruelty in the world and of confronting the question of what to do about cruelty and how to address its cultural and institutional aspects. Something is missing. -/- What is missing is the integration of conceptions of cruelty and the practical reason implications of detecting cruelty in the world into normative models which operate as meaning matrixes for cognition, meaning, and action. This Article undertakes this explanatory task through an exercise of reconstructing seminal philosophical ideas about cruelty. The result is that the four conceptions of cruelty are placed within three distinct normative models, which ultimately render intelligible legal conceptions of cruelty and legal reactions to it. (shrink)

Belief-state ascription — determining what someone “knew,” “believed,” was “aware of,” etc. — is central to many areas of law. In criminal law, the distinction between knowledge and recklessness, and the use of broad jury instructions concerning other belief states, presupposes a common and stable understanding of what those belief-state terms mean. But a wealth of empirical work at the intersection of philosophy and psychology — falling under the banner of “Experimental Epistemology” — reveals how laypeople’s understandings of mens (...) rea concepts differ systematically from what scholars, courts, and perhaps legislators, have assumed. -/- As implemented, mens rea concepts are much more context-dependent and normatively evaluative than the conventional wisdom suggests, even assuming that jurors are following jury instructions to the letter. As a result, there is less difference between knowledge and recklessness than is typically assumed; jurors consistently “over”-ascribe knowledge to criminal defendants; and concepts like “belief,” “awareness,” and “conscious disregard” mean different things in different contexts, resulting in mens rea findings systematically responsive to aspects of the case traditionally considered irrelevant to the meaning of those terms. -/- This Article provides the first systematic account of the factors driving jurors’ ascriptions of the specific belief states criminal law invokes. After surveying mens rea jury instructions, introducing the Experimental Epistemology literature to the legal literature on mens rea, and examining the implications of that literature for criminal law, this Article considers ways to begin bridging the surprisingly large gap between mens rea theory and practice. (shrink)

Could it be right to convict and punish defendants using only statistical evidence? In this paper, I argue that it is not and explain why it would be wrong. This is difficult to do because there is a powerful argument for thinking that we should convict and punish defendants using statistical evidence. It looks as if the relevant cases are cases of decision under risk and it seems we know what we should do in such cases (i.e., maximize expected value). (...) Given some standard assumptions about the values at stake, the case for convicting and punishing using statistical evidence seems solid. In trying to show where this argument goes wrong, I shall argue (against Lockeans, reliabilists, and others) that beliefs supported only by statistical evidence are epistemically defective and (against Enoch, Fisher, and Spectre) that these epistemic considerations should matter to the law. To solve the puzzle about the role of statistical evidence in the law, we need to revise some commonly held assumptions about epistemic value and defend the relevance of epistemology to this practical question. (shrink)

This articvle describes the fire, its probable cause and corporate criminal responsibility -whether reckless manslaughter or criminal act manslaughter.

The Human Rights Studies Programme, School of International Studies (JNU), in collaboration with the Centre for Inner Asian Studies, School of International Studies (JNU), and the Indian Law Institute (Delhi), organized a Human Rights Day Webinar on the Intersections of Human Rights and Criminal Law on December 9-10, 2021. Experts and young scholars from the field shared their insights and research on the webinar theme. The presentations were organized under four sessions, including Session I on Rights Jurisprudence and (...) class='Hi'>Criminal Law, Session II on Proposals for Criminalisation and Decriminalisation, Session III on Crimes, Victims, and Punishments, and Session IV on Reforms in the Future. The Webinar was conceptualized keeping in view the responsibility of states under international human rights law to prohibit and punish for the protection of human rights and the redressal of violations. The obligations of States to prohibit and punish inform the development of criminal rules and procedures under different legal systems, leading to the near universalization of legislative frameworks, legal justifications, and punishments. In the working of international human rights institutions, the criminal laws adopted by States are an indicator or marker of the level of compliance of States with the international mandates. In recent years, the interface between the two fields, i.e., international human rights and domestic criminal laws, has sparked great jurisprudential, political, and constitutional debates in different parts of the world. Against this backdrop, the Webinar was organized on Human Rights Day to discuss the relevant issues. (shrink)

Antony Duff argues that the criminal law’s characteristic function is to hold people responsible. It only has the authority to do this when the person who is called to account, and those who call her to account, share some prior relationship. In systems of domestic criminal law, this relationship is co-citizenship. The polity is the relevant community. In international criminal law, the relevant community is simply the moral community of humanity. I am sympathetic to his community-based analysis, (...) but argue that the moral community must play a greater role in the domestic case and that the collection of individual political communities must play a greater role in the international case. (shrink)

Alex Sarch’s recent book, Criminally Ignorant: Why the Law Pretends We Know What We Don’t is a wonderfully rich work.1 Sarch provides and defends an explanatorily powerful theory of criminal culpab...

Law-enforcement agencies are increasingly able to leverage crime statistics to make risk predictions for particular individuals, employing a form of inference that some condemn as violating the right to be “treated as an individual.” I suggest that the right encodes agents’ entitlement to a fair distribution of the burdens and benefits of the rule of law. Rather than precluding statistical prediction, it requires that citizens be able to anticipate which variables will be used as predictors and act intentionally to avoid (...) them. Furthermore, it condemns reliance on various indexes of distributive injustice, or unchosen properties, as evidence of law-breaking. (shrink)

Prominent theories of the criminal law borrow heavily from the two leading theories of temptation—the evaluative conception of temptation, which conceives emotion and desire as essentially involving a kind of evaluation, and the mechanistic conception of temptation, which conceives emotion and desire as essentially involving felt motivation. As I explain, both conceptions of temptation are inconsistent with the possibility of akratic action, that is, action contrary to a person’s conscious better judgment. Both are inconsistent with the possibility of akratic (...) action because both are covertly inconsistent with a two-fold psychological assumption that undergirds common beliefs about human action and lies at the heart of the law of criminal responsibility: that resisting a powerful temptation is extremely difficult yet not ordinarily impossible. I reveal these inconsistencies and offer in place of the leading theories of temptation a theory of affective desire as primitive psychic attraction, an elemental psychological state typically accompanied by evaluation and motivation but not reducible to either one. I then show how this theory of desire is consistent with the possibility of akratic action, with the two-fold psychological assumption at the heart of the law of criminal responsibility, and, in particular, with the defense of provocation. (shrink)

A review of Douglas Husak, Philosophy of Criminal Law: Selected Essays (Oxford University Press, 2010).

The author examines two proposals to expand legal recognition of individual control over physical integrity. Protections for individual autonomy are discussed in relation to the right to die, euthanasia, medical treatment, and consensual and assaultive sexual behaviours. The author argues that at present, the legal doctrine of consent protects only those individual preferences which are seen to be congruent with dominant societal values; social preferences and convenience override all other individual choices. Under these conditions, more freedom to waive rights of (...) physical integrity can only place socially vulnerable persons at great risk of abuse. (shrink)

This article reviews three books written by Larry May concerning the foundations of international criminal law: Crimes Against Humanity: A Normative Account (2005), War Crimes and Just War (2007), and Aggression and Crimes Against Peace (2008).

This is a review of an anthology on international criminal law edited by Larry May and Zack Hoskins, published by Cambridge University Press.

Rapid technological advancements such as fMRI have led to the rise of neuroscientific discoveries. Coupled with findings from cognitive psychology, they are claiming to have solved the millennia-old puzzle of moral cognition. If true, our societal structures – and with that the criminal law – would be gravely impacted. This thesis concerns itself with four distinct theories stemming from the disciplines above as to what mechanisms constitute moral judgement: the Stage Model by KOHLBERG, the Universal Moral Grammar Theory by (...) MIKHAIL, the Social Intuitionist Model by HAIDT, and the Dual-Process Theory by GREENE – comparing the findings of the latter to the consequentialist and retributivist theories of punishment present in the American Criminal Law Doctrine. Analysing both a direct (link to deontology) and indirect (link to incompatibilism) approach to discrediting retributivism, I come to the conclusion that while science can have an impact on our morals and thus on the law, the current state of neuroscientific findings are not capable of shattering foundational notions of the criminal law. (shrink)

While researchers in business ethics, moral philosophy, and jurisprudence have advanced the study of corporate agency, there have been very few attempts to bring together insights from these and other disciplines in the pages of the Journal of Business Ethics. By introducing to an audience of business ethics scholars the work of outstanding authors working outside the field, this interdisciplinary special issue addresses this lacuna. Its aim is to encourage the formulation of innovative arguments that reinvigorate the study of (...) corporate agency and stimulate further cross-fertilization of ideas between business ethics, law, philosophy, and other disciplines. (shrink)

Many anthropologists interpret neoliberalism as a radical break from and dangerous rupture in post-war societies that featured Keynesian economic policies and welfare provision. The allure of a mythic welfare state has boosted John Maynard Keynes’s popularity to many who embrace certain facets of socialism. Many critical social scientists have embraced Keynesianism in ways that overlook how the US used Keynesian policies to reengineer and redeploy state power. Keynes’s liberal synthesis inspired managers in the US Treasury Department to understand depression-era problems (...) of unemployment and poverty in ways that were consonant with the expansion of corporate power. For understanding Keynesianism, as it actually existed during the Cold War, we must analyse how the US Treasury and State Departments used Keynesian principles to rebuild the social reproductive capacities necessary for capitalist accumulation both domestically and in Western Europe. I focus on how the architects of postwar capitalism used full employment policies, labour laws and welfare provision to renovate the nexus of political practices and institutional structures in ways that formed a benevolent and caring image of ‘the state’ and the myth of a class compromise. Through these reforms, governmental planners and administrators used the ‘state idea’ to reorganize capital accumulation as if the post-war economy would represent ordinary people’s best interests. In the process, these sophisticated practices of power became reified as the ‘welfare state’ and the ‘Keynesian compromise’ in ways that endow these institutions and policies with a character divorced from practices of power. The post-war state embodied a dialectic of repression and reform that combined criminalizing dissent with full employment policies and welfare provision. Taking these aspects of power into account, we can see post-war Keynesianism in ways that inspire a robust and far-reaching criticism of the contemporary predicament of economic uncertainty, political instability and environmental degradation. (shrink)

On 4 December 2006, during discussions on the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill, Andrew Dismore, Member of Parliament and then Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, said, ‘Organisations can kill people … but it is the actions and omissions of people in organisations that cumulatively cause death’. However, the corporate entity is a vehicle for the communal actions of those who guide the business activities. Attempting to seek out persons or people that are solely (...) responsible for deaths and violations of human rights caused by companies is fruitless. The entity is a vehicle for those actions, it possesses its own, often deep, pockets of finance and resources, and it has a public image. It is more useful to punish the corporate entity, in instances where the corporate behaviour has led to death and human rights abuses, as it is in seeking out individual defendants. Soft law options have not brought about a sufficient reduction in instances of deaths caused by corporate behaviour across jurisdictional borders. This article will argue that the time has now come to establish an international hard law on corporate killing, and for states to ensure that there is a viable path towards a redress for victims and their families along with adopting a duty to assist the victim or their family to pursue redress to ensure a fair balance of power against transnational companies. (shrink)

We discuss the crucial, but easily missed, link between paternalism and incarceration. Legal paternalists believe law should be used to help individuals stay healthy or moral or become healthier or morally better. Criminal laws are paternalistic if they make it illegal to perform some action that would be bad for the actor to do, regardless of effects on others. Yet, one result of such laws is the punishment, including incarceration, of the very same actors—also clearly bad for them even (...) if meant to be rehabilitative. Therein lies an oddity: paternalist criminal law—and thepresumably rehabilitativepunishments that serve as responses to infringements of such laws—is meant to help the actor but in fact has the opposite effect on net. Incarceration is particularly problematic on this front as it harms the alleged criminal in ways that go beyond the harm they would have caused themselves. Incarceration also may undermine the actor’s ability to improve his decision-making abilities or his moral character. The effects of the punishment also drift to others—family and friends, as well as business associates, of the punished. Paternalists, inasmuch as they are motivated by beneficence or concern about moral character, must account for all of these costs as threats to well-being and the conditions for acting morally. Given the link between paternalism and incarceration, we propose that if we are to take seriously the problem of over-incarceration in the U.S., we must reconsider the use of paternalism in criminal law; we sketch several alternatives. We believe paternalists should support our resistance to incarceration and seriously consider these alternatives. (shrink)

In this article, I contribute to the debate between two philosophical traditions—the Kantian and the Aristotelian—on the requirements of criminal responsibility and the grounds for excuse by taking this debate to a new context: international criminal law. After laying out broadly Kantian and Aristotelian conceptions of criminal responsibility, I defend a quasi-Aristotelian conception, which affords a central role to moral development, and especially to the development of moral perception, for international criminal law. I show than an (...) implication of this view is that persons who are substantially and non-culpably limited in their capacity for ordinary moral perception warrant an excuse for engaging in unlawful conduct. I identify a particular set of conditions that trigger this excuse, and then I systematically examine it as applied to the controversial case of former-child-soldier-turned leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, Dominic Ongwen, who is currently at trial at the International Criminal Court. (shrink)

Various authors debate the question of whether neuroscience is relevant to criminal responsibility. However, a plethora of different techniques and technologies, each with their own abilities and drawbacks, lurks beneath the label “neuroscience”; and in criminal law responsibility is not a single, unitary and generic concept, but it is rather a syndrome of at least six different concepts. Consequently, there are at least six different responsibility questions that the criminal law asks—at least one for each responsibility concept—and, (...) I will suggest, a multitude of ways in which the techniques and technologies that comprise neuroscience might help us to address those diverse questions. In a way, on my account neuroscience is relevant to criminal responsibility in many ways, but I hesitate to state my position like this because doing so obscures two points which I would rather highlight: one, neither neuroscience nor criminal responsibility are as unified as that; and two, the criminal law asks many different responsibility questions and not just one generic question. (shrink)

India is a party to several international laws which speak of the duty to prosecute, investigate, and punish crimes. In light of India’s commitments to international law, the scope of its criminal laws appears to be failing on several counts. The following are a few general and specific recommendations for penal law reforms in India. These have been framed in light of several international developments, international laws, and relevant Indian laws and judgments. The recommendations concern the following themes: 1. (...) gaps in criminal law, 2. harmonization of standards 3. liabilities for derogations from fundamental duties (cultural heritage), and 4. a project for decolonization. (shrink)

Should we use the same standard of proof to adjudicate guilt for murder and petty theft? Why not tailor the standard of proof to the crime? These relatively neglected questions cut to the heart of central issues in the philosophy of law. This paper scrutinises whether we ought to use the same standard for all criminal cases, in contrast with a flexible approach that uses different standards for different crimes. I reject consequentialist arguments for a radically flexible standard of (...) proof, instead defending a modestly flexible approach on non-consequentialist grounds. The system I defend is one on which we should impose a higher standard of proof for crimes that attract more severe punishments. This proposal, although apparently revisionary, accords with a plausible theory concerning the epistemology of legal judgments and the role they play in society. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that, despite what many commentators have concluded, Plato’s division of three psychological “causes” of criminal behavior at Laws 863b1-e3 (anger, pleasure, and ignorance) is not intended to invoke the tripartite theory of the soul. I suggest that the focus of the division is on an alternative moral psychological picture, one which is better suited to the criminal penology of Book 9. However, I argue, this alternative picture is nonetheless consistent with tripartite theory.

Most people are completely oblivious to the danger that their medical data undergoes as soon as it goes out into the burgeoning world of big data. Medical data is financially valuable, and your sensitive data may be shared or sold by doctors, hospitals, clinical laboratories, and pharmacies—without your knowledge or consent. Medical data can also be found in your browsing history, the smartphone applications you use, data from wearables, your shopping list, and more. At best, data about your health might (...) end up in the hands of researchers on whose good will we depend to avoid abuses of power.2 Most likely, it will end up with data brokers who might sell it to a future employer, or an insurance company, or the government. At worst, your medical data may end up in the hands of criminals eager to commit extortion or identity theft. In addition to data harms related to exposure and discrimination, the collection of sensitive data by powerful corporations risks the creation of data monopolies that can dominate and condition access to health care. -/- This chapter aims to explore the challenge that big data brings to medical privacy. Section I offers a brief overview of the role of privacy in medical settings. I define privacy as having one’s personal information and one’s personal sensorial space (what I call autotopos) unaccessed. Section II discusses how the challenge of big data differs from other risks to medical privacy. Section III is about what can be done to minimise those risks. I argue that the most effective way of protecting people from suffering unfair medical consequences is by having a public universal healthcare system in which coverage is not influenced by personal data (e.g., genetic predisposition, exercise habits, eating habits, etc.). (shrink)

I argue for two propositions. First, contrary to the common wisdom, we may justly punish individuals who are not morally responsible for their crimes. Psychopaths – individuals who lack the capacity to feel sympathy – help to prove this point. Scholars are increasingly arguing that psychopaths are not morally responsible for their behavior because they suffer from a neurological disorder that makes it impossible for them to understand, and therefore be motivated by, moral reasons. These same scholars then infer from (...) this conclusion that they must also lack criminal responsibility and therefore that our continuing to punish psychopaths for their crimes is unjust. My response is that this inference is entirely fallacious. -/- Criminal responsibility turns out to be quite distinct from moral responsibility. The two kinds of responsibility require very different conditions to be satisfied. In particular, criminal responsibility, unlike moral responsibility, does not require an agent be able to grasp and follow moral reasons; it requires only that the individual be able to grasp and follow criminal laws. Once this point is recognized, it becomes much easier to accept my thesis: while the subset of psychopaths who commit crimes are not morally responsible for their criminal behavior because they cannot understand moral reasons, they are still criminally responsible because they can understand what the consequences will be if they get caught. For this reason, even though I concede that psychopaths are not morally responsible for the crimes that they commit, our practice of punishing them for these crimes is still just. -/- Second, I argue that psychopathy is a mental illness and should be recognized as such. One reason that it should be recognized as a mental illness is simply because it is; it satisfies the main criteria for inclusion in the DSM-IV, the “bible” of mental disorders. The other reason is more practical than conceptual. It starts with two facts: the U.S. Supreme Court has decided that the preventive detention of any individual who is not a criminal suspect is not constitutional unless the individual is not only dangerous but also mentally ill; and psychopathy is not currently considered to be a mental illness. So, as things now stand, we cannot preventively commit dangerous psychopaths – that is, psychopaths who have clearly indicated that they will be committing serious crimes. Instead, we must wait for them to commit the crimes before we can lock them up. Unfortunately, this incarceration always comes too late for the victims. It would therefore be better if we could lock them up before they actually inflict any harm. Once again, then, I propose that the legal and psychological communities classify psychopathy as a mental illness. (shrink)

Increasing evidence from psychology and neuroscience suggests that emotion plays an important and sometimes critical role in moral judgment and moral behavior. At the same time, there is increasing psychological and neuroscientific evidence that brain regions critical in emotional and moral capacity are impaired in psychopaths. We ask how the criminal law should accommodate these two streams of research, in light of a new normative and legal account of the criminal responsibility of psychopaths.

Argument about changes in the law of rape are logically dependent upon a prior definitional account. For any legal definition of an act, one can sensibly ask if that definition is right. To know whether the law is sound, one must first understand of what it is that the definition is a definition. For many parts of the criminal law, and the law of rape is one, the definitions on which the law moves are concepts perfectly accessible outside and (...) apart from the law. I have two aims for this article. The first is to argue for a particular conception of rape as the best understanding of the constellation of acts we conceptualize as rape. The second, less direct, is to show that traditional methods of conceptual analysis can contribute to legal and social scholarship and reform. (shrink)

There are a number of important links and similarities between public health and safety. In this extended essay, Gregg D. Caruso defends and expands his public health-quarantine model, which is a non-retributive alternative for addressing criminal behavior that draws on the public health framework and prioritizes prevention and social justice. In developing his account, he explores the relationship between public health and safety, focusing on how social inequalities and systemic injustices affect health outcomes and crime rates, how poverty affects (...) brain development, how offenders often have pre-existing medical conditions (especially mental health issues), how involvement in the criminal justice system itself can lead to or worsen health and cognitive problems, how treatment and rehabilitation methods can best be employed to reduce recidivism and reintegrate offenders back into society, and how a public health approach could be successfully applied within the criminal justice system. Caruso's approach draws on research from the health sciences, social sciences, public policy, law, psychiatry, medical ethics, neuroscience, and philosophy, and he delivers a set of ethically defensible and practically workable proposals for implementing the public health-quarantine model. The essay begins by discussing recent empirical findings in psychology, neuroscience, and the social sciences that provide us with an increased understanding of the social and neurological determinants of health and criminal behavior. It then turns to Caruso's public health-quarantine model and argues that the model provides the most justified, humane, and effective approach for addressing criminal behavior. Caruso concludes by proposing a capability approach to social justice grounded in six key features of human well-being. He argues that we cannot successfully address concerns over public health and safety without simultaneously addressing issues of social justice—including the social determinants of health (SDH) and the social determinants of criminal behavior (SDCB)—and he recommends eight general policy proposals consistent with his model. (shrink)

The Call for Papers for this conference suggests the topic, “international codes of business conduct.” This paper is intended to present a shift from a discussion of codes, or constraints to be placed upon business, to an entirely different topic: to responsibility, which yields duty, and the reciprocal concept, right. Beyond the framework of external regulation and codes of conduct, voluntary or otherwise, lies another possible accounting system: one of real corporate responsibility, which arises out of the evident capability (...) of businesses to engage in rationally self-regulated activity. If such responsibility can be shown to be comprehensible, then it could bind the activities of corporations ethically, and in rationally compelling legitimate law, just as your activities and mine are bound. Perhaps we can bind the officers of corporations as responsible persons, but I would like to introduce an undiminished conception of responsibility that will back legitimate law for the corporations themselves, as artificial persons. That is the purpose of Part 1 of this paper. In Part 2 I will turn to the case of multinational corporations in particular. I will draw conclusions regarding their general duties and rights, and will dip explicitly into ethical formulations, as well as the ground of legitimate law. I will also indicate a particular rational requirement, or duty, for politically and environmentally sustainable business practices of multinationals. In Part 3 I will discuss jurisdiction for instituting legal sanctions in multinational cases. I will argue that the national laws and civil suits that may be pursued within a court in one nation can actually stand as legitimate checks against abuses carried out by the arms of multinational corporations that reside in other nations. (shrink)

Criminal offences and regulatory breaches in using social networking evidence in personal injury litigation Pages 2-7 Current Criminal Law ISSN 1758-8405 Volume 2 Issue 3 March 2010 Author SALLY RAMAGE WIPO 900614 UK TM 2401827 USA TM 3,440.910 Orchid ID 0000-0002-8854-4293 Sally Ramage, BA (Hons), MBA, LLM, MPhil, MCIJ, MCMI, DA., ASLS, BAWP. Publisher & Managing Editor, Criminal Lawyer series [1980-2022](ISSN 2049-8047); Current Criminal Law series [2008-2022] (ISSN 1758-8405) and Criminal Law News series [2008-2022] (ISSN (...) 1758-8421). Sweet & Maxwell (Thomson Reuters) (Licensed Annotator of UK Statutes) in Current Law Statutes Annotated, (2006, 2009, 2010 editions) (sole and separate S&M contracts) for 7 UK Criminal Justice Statutes: UK Safeguarding Vulnerable Persons Act 2006; UK International Development Act 2006; UK Fraud Act 2006; UK Policing and Crime Act 2009, UK Local Democracy Act 2009; UK Bribery Act 2010; and UK Crime and Security Act 2010. Trade Mark SALLY RAMAGE ® 2401827 (2005-2025) in the UK, WIPO Trade Mark SALLY RAMAGE® 900164; USA-(Trade Mark 3,440,910) (2008-2028). WARNING: The doing of an unauthorized act in relation to a copyright work may result in both a civil claim for damages and criminal prosecution. Essentially, Social Network information may not always be admissible in a court of law but may be the door to lead to other, non-contentious evidence. In fact, even illegally obtained evidence may sometimes be admissible evidence, though this is not absolute. Most of the information available on social networking sites will be ‘personal data’. The data controller is the network operator, without whose consent, collecting such information could be an offence, unless it was necessary for the purpose of preventing or detecting crime. (shrink)

With 163 authoritative entries providing definitive explanations and critiques of the fundamental principles and practices of corporate governance, this timely Encyclopedia is a comprehensive overview of the economic, political, social, legal and environmental impacts of corporations across the globe. Bringing together almost 100 leading experts, the Encyclopedia addresses the meaning and purpose of corporate governance and how this term has evolved over time. Philosophical perspectives on corporate governance, as well as its origins and history are laid out, (...) alongside critical theories and methodologies on governance. The Encyclopedia then examines different aspects of governance related to governance regimes, neoliberalism, finance, accounting and corporate reporting, law and regulation, strategy and forms of governance. Board processes and performance, leadership in the boardroom, board directors and board diversity are explained. Focus is drawn to emerging societal problems and crises related to corporate governance and how these have been addressed by different institutions, such as digital era governance, corporate social responsibility and corporate sustainability and regeneration of the natural world. The Elgar Encyclopedia of Corporate Governance is an essential reference source for academics, researchers and students of business and management, economics and finance and environmental studies. Professionals and policymakers working in the sectors of corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, management and sustainability and strategic management will also find this to be an indispensable reference work. Key Features: 163 distinct entries structured by theme Combines empirical findings with real-world examples Adopts a comparative global analysis from leading academics Accessible explanations of fundamental concepts and principles. (shrink)

We are living through an era of increased robotisation. Some authors have already begun to explore the impact of this robotisation on legal rules and practice. In doing so, many highlight potential liability gaps that might arise through robot misbehaviour. Although these gaps are interesting and socially significant, they do not exhaust the possible gaps that might be created by increased robotisation. In this article, I make the case for one of those alternative gaps: the retribution gap. This gap arises (...) from a mismatch between the human desire for retribution and the absence of appropriate subjects of retributive blame. I argue for the potential existence of this gap in an era of increased robotisation; suggest that it is much harder to plug this gap than it is to plug those thus far explored in the literature; and then highlight three important social implications of this gap. (shrink)

Our understanding of folk and scientific psychology often informs the law’s conclusions regarding questions about the voluntariness of a defendant’s action. The field of psychology plays a direct role in the law’s conclusions about a defendant’s guilt, innocence, and term of incarceration. However, physical sciences such as neuroscience increasingly deny the intuitions behind psychology. This paper examines contemporary biases against the autonomy of psychology and responds with considerations that cast doubt upon the legitimacy of those biases. The upshot is that (...) if reasonable doubt is established regarding whether psychology’s role in the law should be displaced, then there is room for future work to be done with respect to the truth of psychology’s conclusions about criminal responsibility. (shrink)