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Full-Text Articles in Criminal Law
Ignorance Of Law Is An Excuse - But Only For The Virtuous, Dan M. Kahan
Ignorance Of Law Is An Excuse - But Only For The Virtuous, Dan M. Kahan
Michigan Law Review
It's axiomatic that "ignorance of the law is no excuse." My aim in this essay is to examine what the "mistake of law doctrine" reveals about the relationship between criminal law and morality in general and about the law's understanding of moral responsibility in particular. The conventional understanding of the mistake of law doctrine rests on two premises, which are encapsulated in the Holmesian epigrams with which I've started this essay. The first is liberal positivism. As a descriptive claim, liberal positivism holds that the content of the law can be identified without reference to morality: one needn't be a …
Response: Between Economics And Sociology: The New Path Of Deterrence, Dan M. Kahan
Response: Between Economics And Sociology: The New Path Of Deterrence, Dan M. Kahan
Michigan Law Review
The explosive collision of economics and sociology has long illuminated the landscape of deterrence theory. It is a debate as hopeless as it is spectacular. Economics is practical but thin. Starting from the simple premise that individuals rationally maximize their utility, economics generates a robust schedule of prescriptions - from the appropriate size of criminal penalties,1 to the optimal form of criminal punishments, to the most efficient mix of private and public investments in deterrence. Yet it is the very economy of economics that ultimately subverts it: its account of human motivations is too simplistic to be believable, and it …
Romer V. Evans And The Permissibility Of Morality Legislation, S. I. Strong
Romer V. Evans And The Permissibility Of Morality Legislation, S. I. Strong
Faculty Publications
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, two of England's most respected jurists engaged in an on-going debate that would take the legal world by storm. The debate concerned whether and to what extent morality should be reflected in the law and was instigated by the publication of the Wolfenden Report, a study presented to Parliament as it considered whether to repeal certain antisodomy laws in Great Britain. On the one hand was Lord Patrick Devlin, a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary later elevated to the House of Lords, Britain's highest court. Devlin opposed the conclusions contained in the Wolfenden …