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Series

Columbia Law School

2009

SSRN

Law and Philosophy

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Law

Responsibility And The Negligence Standard, Joseph Raz Jan 2009

Responsibility And The Negligence Standard, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

The paper has dual aim: to analyse the structure of negligence, and to use it to offer an explanation of responsibility (for actions, omissions, consequences) in terms of the relations which must exist between the action (omission, etc.) and the agents powers of rational agency if the agent is responsible for the action. The discussion involves reflections on the relations between the law and the morality of negligence, the difference between negligence and strict liability, the role of excuses and the grounds of duties to pay damages.


Agency And Luck, Joseph Raz Jan 2009

Agency And Luck, Joseph Raz

Faculty Scholarship

Advancing an account of responsibility which is based on the functioning of our rational capacities, the paper revisits some central aspects of the moral luck puzzle. It proposes a new variant of Williams’ agent-regret, but concludes that its scope does not coincide with cases of moral luck. It then distinguishes different ways in which the factors beyond our control feature in our engagement with the world which show how the guidance principle (we are responsible for actions guided by our rational powers) recognises a narrower range of situations of moral luck than is often supposed, allowing to distinguish between responsibility …


Post-Modern Meditations On Punishment: On The Limits Of Reason And The Virtues Of Randomization, Bernard E. Harcourt, Alon Harel, Ken Levy, Michael M. O'Hear, Alice Ristroph Jan 2009

Post-Modern Meditations On Punishment: On The Limits Of Reason And The Virtues Of Randomization, Bernard E. Harcourt, Alon Harel, Ken Levy, Michael M. O'Hear, Alice Ristroph

Faculty Scholarship

In this Criminal Law Conversation (Robinson, Ferzan & Garvey, eds., Oxford 2009), the authors debate whether there is a role for randomization in the penal sphere - in the criminal law, in policing, and in punishment theory. In his Tanner lectures back in 1987, Jon Elster had argued that there was no role for chance in the criminal law: “I do not think there are any arguments for incorporating lotteries in present-day criminal law,” Elster declared. Bernard Harcourt takes a very different position and embraces chance in the penal sphere, arguing that randomization is often the only way to avoid …