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Full-Text Articles in Law
Demystifying Mindreading For The Law, Teneille R. Brown
Demystifying Mindreading For The Law, Teneille R. Brown
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
To lawyers, mindreading conjures up flamboyant images of crystal balls or charlatans. However, it is a deeply serious endeavor for the law. The primary role of fact-finders in civil, criminal, and administrative trials in the United States is to serve as highly-regulated mind readers—to listen to the testimony and decide whether the witnesses are credible and telling the truth. Because it can be so easily biased, we must directly acknowledge how jurors and judges (in addition to voters and employers) automatically and imperfectly read minds. We must remove the “mystique of mindreading,” and see how ordinary assessments of mental states …
Stated Culpability Requirements, Scott England
Stated Culpability Requirements, Scott England
Faculty Scholarship
This Article comprehensively reviews the law of stated culpability requirements in Model Penal Code (MPC) jurisdictions. Part I provides an overview of section 2.02(4), explaining how the provision works and its role in the MPC’s culpability scheme. Part II then identifies section 2.02(4)’s main weaknesses, drawing on both the provision itself and the Code’s commentary. Next, Part III reviews the law in the twenty-five states with culpability provisions influenced by the MPC, identifying specific problems that section 2.02(4) has created in the case law. Finally, Part IV recommends new stated-culpability rules that improve section 2.02(4) and more rigorously enforce the …
Conspiracy, Complicity, And The Scope Of Contemplated Crime, Kimberly Ferzan
Conspiracy, Complicity, And The Scope Of Contemplated Crime, Kimberly Ferzan
All Faculty Scholarship
One of the leading casebooks for the first-year Criminal Law course begins the mens rea discussion with Regina v. Cunningham.1 Cunningham, in need of money, decided to rip the gas meter off the residential gas pipe in his soon-to-be basement to steal the shillings inside. That Cunningham was guilty of theft was uncontroversial. The problem was that Cunningham did not turn off the gas, and it seeped into the adjacent home, partially asphyxiating the neighbor, Sarah Wade. Although the case is technically about the interpretation of the word “maliciously” in the Offences against the Person Act, the lesson students are …
Internal And External Challenges To Culpability, Stephen J. Morse
Internal And External Challenges To Culpability, Stephen J. Morse
All Faculty Scholarship
This article was presented at “Guilty Minds: A Virtual Conference on Mens Rea and Criminal Justice Reform” at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. It is forthcoming in Arizona State Law Journal Volume 53, Issue 2.
The thesis of this article is simple: As long as we maintain the current folk psychological conception of ourselves as intentional and potentially rational creatures, as people and not simply as machines, mental states will inevitably remain central to ascriptions of culpability and responsibility more generally. It is also desirable. Nonetheless, we are in a condition of unprecedented internal challenges to …