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Psychology

University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

Immaturity

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Against The Received Wisdom: Why The Criminal Justice System Should Give Kids A Break, Stephen J. Morse Jul 2019

Against The Received Wisdom: Why The Criminal Justice System Should Give Kids A Break, Stephen J. Morse

All Faculty Scholarship

Professor Gideon Yaffe’s recent, intricately argued book, The Age of Culpability: Children and the Nature of Criminal Responsibility, argues against the nearly uniform position in both law and scholarship that the criminal justice system should give juveniles a break not because on average they have different capacities relevant to responsibility than adults, but because juveniles have little say about the criminal law, primarily because they do not have a vote. For Professor Yaffe, age has political rather than behavioral significance. The book has many excellent general analyses about responsibility, but all are in aid of the central thesis about …


A System Of Excuses: How Criminal Law’S Excuse Defenses Do, And Don’T, Work Together To Exculpate Blameless (And Only Blameless) Offenders, Paul H. Robinson Jan 2009

A System Of Excuses: How Criminal Law’S Excuse Defenses Do, And Don’T, Work Together To Exculpate Blameless (And Only Blameless) Offenders, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

Criminal law excuses are analyzed as a group of analogous doctrines working together to exculpate blameless offenders. The analysis reveals that current law doctrine, although it often is not explicit about the parallel and integrated operation of its excuse defenses, does much to perform this exculpatory function. However, the systematic perspective of excuses also reveals some serious shortcomings of current doctrines.