Law Commons^™

Blameworthiness, Intent And Cultural Dissonance, Nancy Kim

Nancy Kim

Criminal law assumes that the judge and jury share the same cultural and experiential framework as the defendant; accordingly, crimes are defined with this assumption as an underlying premise. In this article, I will explain how the determination of mens rea often fails to reflect culpability because the definition of crimes fail to account for the cultural dissonance that often exists between the judge/juror and the accused. In this Article, I propose an analysis and reconceptualization of intent that bridges gaps in perception and understanding attributable to cultural dissonance.

Catalogs, Gideon Parchomovsky, Alex Stein

All Faculty Scholarship

It is a virtual axiom in the world of law that legal norms come in two prototypes: rules and standards. The accepted lore suggests that rules should be formulated to regulate recurrent and frequent behaviors, whose contours can be defined with sufficient precision. Standards, by contrast, should be employed to address complex, variegated, behaviors that require the weighing of multiple variables. Rules rely on an ex ante perspective and are therefore considered the domain of the legislator; standards embody a preference for ex post, ad-hoc, analysis and are therefore considered the domain of courts. The rules/standards dichotomy has become a …

What Is An Accident?, Daniel B. Yeager

Daniel B. Yeager

Please consider for publication my attached 5000-word, 28-page, lightly annotated (39 footnotes) Essay, entitled “What Is an Accident?”

Here I attempt to decode the most frequently proferred excuse in and out of law. Surprisingly, as central as accidents are to questions of responsibility, their criteria have received almost no attention at all. From what I can tell, mine is the first sustained attempt to identify the grammar of accidents, an endeavor that follows up on similar efforts to do the same with the excuse of mistake in my book J.L. Austin and the Law: Exculpation and the Explication of Responsibility …

Constructing Autonomy: A Kantian Framework, Bailey H. Kuklin

Bailey H. Kuklin

No abstract provided.