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#Believewomen And The Presumption Of Innocence: Clarifying The Questions For Law And Life, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan

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The presumption of innocence and #BelieveWomen both embody compelling considerations, and we may wonder how to reconcile them. My project does not aim to reconcile the positions, but rather, it is prior to it. My goal in this paper is to better explicate the claims that underlie both #BelieveWomen and the presumption of innocence in law and life, as well as to identify instances in which cross-pollination, between our everyday evaluations and the legal system, is contaminating our thinking.

First, I begin with #BelieveWomen and sort through various ways to interpret this demand (though my survey is not exhaustive). I …

The Subversions And Perversions Of Shadow Vigilantism, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson

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This excerpt from the recently published Shadow Vigilantes book argues that, while vigilantism, even moral vigilantism, can be dangerous to a society, the real danger is not of hordes of citizens, frustrated by the system’s doctrines of disillusionment, rising up to take the law into their own hands. Frustration can spark a vigilante impulse, but such classic aggressive vigilantism is not the typical response. More common is the expression of disillusionment in less brazen ways by a more surreptitious undermining and distortion of the operation of the criminal justice system.

Shadow vigilantes, as they might be called, can affect the …

How Being Right Can Risk Wrongs, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson

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This is a chapter from the new book The Vigilante Echo. Previous chapters have made clear that some vigilantism can be morally justified where the government has failed in its promise under the social contract to protect and to do justice. But this chapter explains how even moral vigilante action can be problematic for the larger society. Vigilantes may try to do the right thing but are likely to lack the training and professional neutrality of police. They may be successful, but only on pushing the crime problem to an adjacent neighborhood. Because their open lawbreaking may seem admirable …

Shadow Vigilante Officials Manipulate And Distort To Force Justice From An Apparently Reluctant System, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson

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The real danger of the vigilante impulse is not of hordes of citizens, frustrated by the system’s doctrines of disillusionment, rising up to take the law into their own hands. Frustration can spark a vigilante impulse but such classic aggressive vigilantism is not the typical response. More common is the expression of disillusionment in less brazen ways, by a more surreptitious undermining and distortion of the operation of the criminal justice system.

Shadow vigilantes, as they might be called, can affect the operation of the system in a host of important ways. For example, when people act as classic vigilantes …

Criminal Law And Common Sense: An Essay On The Perils And Promise Of Neuroscience, Stephen J. Morse

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This article is based on the author’s Barrock Lecture in Criminal Law presented at the Marquette University Law School. The central thesis is that the folk psychology that underpins criminal responsibility is correct and that our commonsense understanding of agency and responsibility and the legitimacy of criminal justice generally are not imperiled by contemporary discoveries in the various sciences, including neuroscience and genetics. These sciences will not revolutionize criminal law, at least not anytime soon, and at most they may make modest contributions to legal doctrine, practice, and policy. Until there are conceptual or scientific breakthroughs, this is my story …

Neuroscience, Free Will, And Criminal Responsibility, Stephen J. Morse

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This chapter argues that the folk-psychological model of the person and responsibility is not challenged by determinism in general or by neurodeterminism in particular. Until science conclusively demonstrates that human beings cannot be guided by reasons and that mental states play no role in explaining behavior, the folk-psychological model of responsibility is justified. This chapter discusses the motivations to turn to science to solve the hard normative problems the law addresses, as well as the law's psychology and its concepts of the person and responsibility. Then it considers the general relation of neuroscience to law, which I characterize as the …

The Moral Vigilante And Her Cousins In The Shadows, Paul H. Robinson

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By definition, vigilantes cannot be legally justified – if they satisfied a justification defense, for example, they would not be law-breakers – but they may well be morally justified, if their aim is to provide the order and justice that the criminal justice system has failed to provide in a breach of the social contract. Yet, even moral vigilantism is detrimental to society and ought to be avoided, ideally not by prosecuting moral vigilantism but by avoiding the creation of situations that would call for it. Unfortunately, the U.S. criminal justice system has adopted a wide range of criminal law …

The Problem With Consenting To Insider Trading, Leo Katz

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Empirical Desert, Individual Prevention, And Limiting Retributivism: A Reply, Paul H. Robinson, Joshua Samuel Barton, Matthew J. Lister

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A number of articles and empirical studies over the past decade, most by Paul Robinson and co-authors, have suggested a relationship between the extent of the criminal law's reputation for being just in its distribution of criminal liability and punishment in the eyes of the community – its "moral credibility" – and its ability to gain that community's deference and compliance through a variety of mechanisms that enhance its crime-control effectiveness. This has led to proposals to have criminal liability and punishment rules reflect lay intuitions of justice – "empirical desert" – as a means of enhancing the system's moral …

Neuroscience And The Future Of Personhood And Responsibility, Stephen J. Morse

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This is a chapter in a book, Constitution 3.0: Freedom and Technological Change, edited by Jeffrey Rosen and Benjamin Wittes and published by Brookings. It considers whether likely advances in neuroscience will fundamentally alter our conceptions of human agency, of what it means to be a person, and of responsibility for action. I argue that neuroscience poses no such radical threat now and in the immediate future and it is unlikely ever to pose such a threat unless it or other sciences decisively resolve the mind-body problem. I suggest that until that happens, neuroscience might contribute to the reform of …

Plotting Premeditation's Demise, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan

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Theorists have consistently critiqued premeditation as being both over and under inclusive in capturing the worst killers. It is over inclusive because it covers a mercy killer, who emotionally deliberates about putting a loved one out of his misery. It is under inclusive because it does not include hot blooded, angry attacks that reveal deep indifference to the value of human life.

This symposium contribution argues that the problem is that premeditation can only partially capture the most culpable choices. Culpability is complex. Culpability assessments include the analysis of risks imposed; the reasons why they were imposed; the defendant’s thoughts …

The Unsolved Mysteries Of Causation And Responsibility, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan

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This article is part of a symposium on Michael Moore's Causation and Responsibility. In Causation and Responsibility, Moore adopts a scalar approach to factual causation, with counterfactual dependency serving as an independent desert basis. Moore’s theory of causation does not include proximate causation. The problem with Moore's argument is that the problems with which proximate causation dealt - how and when to limit cause in fact - remain unresolved. In this paper, I focus on two sets of problems. The first set is the “fit” or categorization problems within the criminal law. I focus on three matches: (1) the fit …

Mercy, Crime Control, And Moral Credibility, Paul H. Robinson

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If, in the criminal justice context, "mercy" is defined as forgoing punishment that is deserved, then much of what passes for mercy is not. Giving only minor punishment to a first-time youthful offender, for example, might be seen as an exercise of mercy but in fact may be simply the application of standard blameworthiness principles, under which the offender's lack of maturity may dramatically reduce his blameworthiness for even a serious offense. Desert is a nuanced and rich concept that takes account of a wide variety of factors. The more a writer misperceives desert as wooden and objective, the more …

Liability Insurance At The Tort-Crime Boundary, Tom Baker

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This essay explores how liability insurance mediates the boundary between torts and crime. Liability insurance sometimes separates these two legal fields, for example through the application of standard insurance contract provisions that exclude insurance coverage for some crimes that are also torts. Perhaps less obviously, liability insurance also can draw parts of the tort and criminal fields together. For example, professional liability insurance civilizes the criminal law experience for some crimes that are also torts by providing defendants with an insurance-paid criminal defense that provides more than ordinary means to contest the state’s accusations. The crime-tort separation in liability insurance …

Self-Defense And The State, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan

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This article is a contribution to a symposium honoring Sandy Kadish. This article seeks to explore whether and to what extent our understanding of self-defense depends upon a citizen's relationship with the state. Part II begins by setting forth Professor Kadish's claim that self-defense is "a right to resist aggression" that is held by a citizen against the state. After contending that such an account is insufficient to justify self-defense, the remainder of the article seeks to explore the relationship between the state and self-defense. Part III argues that self-defense is a pre-political moral right, as opposed to a political …

Beyond Intention, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan

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The conventional view is that a result is intended if it is motivationally significant - i.e., if it is why the person acted. However, inseparable effects cases place pressure on this conventional view for we intuitively reject the claim that, for instance, one can intend to decapitate without intending to kill. These cases therefore threaten an important border in both law and morality - the distinction between what we intend and what we foresee. In resolving the problem of inseparable effects, this article challenges the conventional view that intentions are co-extensive with motivational significance. Drawing on philosophy of mind literature, …

Fair Notice And Fair Adjudication: Two Kinds Of Legality, Paul H. Robinson

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We distinguish our form of government and our legal system from others by our commitment to the rule of law. In the criminal law, in particular, this commitment is aggressively enforced through a series of doctrines that taken together demand a prior legislative enactment of a prohibition expressed with precision and clarity, traditionally bannered as the legality principle. But it is argued in this article that the traditional legality principle analysis conflates two distinct issues: one relating to the ex ante need for fair notice, the other to the ex post concern for fair adjudication. There are in fact two …

Before And After: Temporal Anomalies In Legal Doctrine, Leo Katz

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Legal doctrine exhibits some striking temporal anomalies, previously not much adverted to. Wrongdoing looked at before it has occurred, and after is has occurred, is apt to look very different. I take up the two key components of wrongdoing seriatim, the harm-portion and the misconduct-portion: the "damage" part and the "liability" part. We tend to look at harm in a harm-agnifying way before it has occurred, and in a harm-inimizing way afterwards. We thus tend to think about negligence and the harm it wreaks in seemingly inconsistent ways. I examine and reject some possible explanations of this. Misconduct too looks …

Justice, Liability, And Blame: Community Views And The Criminal Law, Paul H. Robinson, John M. Darley

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This book reports empirical studies on 18 different areas of substantive criminal law in which the study results showing ordinary people’s judgments of justice are compared to the governing legal doctrine to highlight points of agreement and disagreement. The book also identifies trends and patterns in agreement and disagreement and discusses the implications for the formulation of criminal law. The chapters include:

Chapter 1. Community Views and the Criminal Law (Introduction; An Overview; Why Community Views Should Matter; Research Methods)

Chapter 2. Doctrines of Criminalization: What Conduct Should Be Criminal? (Objective Requirements of Attempt (Study 1); Creating a Criminal Risk …

The Role Of Harm And Evil In Criminal Law: A Study In Legislative Deception?, Paul H. Robinson

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What is the role of the occurrence of harm or evil in criminal law? What should it be? Answers to these questions commonly use the distinction between what is called an objective and a subjective view of criminality. To oversimplify, the objective view maintains that the occurrence of the harm or evil defined by the offense is highly relevant. The subjectivist view maintains that such harm or evil is irrelevant; only the actor's culpable state of mind regarding the occurrence of the harm or evil is important. The labels tend to overstate a rather subtle distinction. The objectivist or harmful …

Causing The Conditions Of One's Own Defense: A Study In The Limits Of Theory In Criminal Law Doctrine, Paul H. Robinson

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One widely-stated goal of criminal law theory is to create the set of rules that best implements our collective sense of justice. To reach this goal, the theorist continuously adjusts his theory so that it generates rules that better reflect our fundamental notions of justice. These rules, moreover, must function as workable doctrine, which in the context of criminal law means precise statutory provisions. It is this process of theoretical refinement and translation that is the topic of this article. Can good theory generate results that approximate our collective sense of justice? Can the theoretical refinements be translated into workable …