APA Newsletters

Spring 2001
Volume 00, Number 2

Newsletter on Philosophy and Law

Recent Law Review Articles of Interest
Abstracts

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Symposium: "The Morality of Criminal Law: A Symposium in Honor of Professor Sanford Kadish,"

88 California Law Review 685 (2000).

In its May 2000 issue, the California Law Review published a symposium in honor of Berkeley law professor, and former dean, Sanford H. Kadish. The symposium, entitled "The Morality of Criminal Law," contains eight principal papers, each of which addresses a different philosophical problem of the criminal law. Each paper is followed by a response.

In "The Nature and Function of Criminal Theory," George Fletcher argues that criminal law theory is, to its detriment, disconnected both from actual legal practice, and from political philosophy. Steven Schulhofer writes in reply that practice ought never to trump theory anyway, and that political philosophy is not the helpful guide to criminal law that Fletcher takes it to be. Jeremy Waldron, in "Self-Defense: Agent-Neutral and Agent-Relative Accounts," explores the idea of a Hobbesian account of justification, one that would help us characterize cases in which each of two threatened individuals is entitled to use force in self-defense against the other. Christopher Kutz replies by considering the nature of agent-relative justifications from a political perspective. In "Basic Values and the Victim's State of Mind," Meir Dan-Cohen argues that the criminal law does not focus as much on the state of mind of victims as utilitarian reflection on criminal harm would suggest, and that the criminal law can be better understood as protection for human dignity. Kent Greenawalt replies by showing that the victim's state of mind figures more significantly in the structure of liability than Dan-Cohen thinks.

In "Why the Successful Assassin is More Wicked than the Unsuccessful One," Leo Katz argues that the familiar philosophical accounts of moral luck do not adequately explain the importance of results in our moral intuitions and in the criminal law. Instead, he offers an account of his own, that uses as its point of departure cases in which agents attempt to reverse the harmful effects of their bad acts by committing some further bad act. Paul Robinson replies by disputing several of the important intuitions on which Katz relies. Michael Moore, in "The Metaphysics of Causal Intervention," offers a detailed investigation into the nature of superseding causes. Stephen Morse replies by disputing the relevance of results in criminal law. In "The Inefficiency of Mens Rea," Claire Finkelstein argues that economic accounts of crime are fundamentally flawed, because the central concept of criminal liability-mens rea-cannot be captured in economic terms. Jules Coleman replies by showing that Finkelstein´s analysis extends to central concepts in tort law as well.

In "Insufficient Concern: A Unified Conception of Criminal Culpability" Larry Alexander argues that recklessness is the only mental state that makes sense as a requirement for criminal liability. Joshua Dressler replies that the other mental states, namely intent and knowledge, cannot be easily abandoned. Samuel Scheffler, in "Justice and Desert in Liberal Theory," explores the asymmetry of positive and negative desert in John Rawls' A Theory of Justice, and proposes a holistic theory of desert to account for the asymmetry. Doug Husak takes issue with this account by arguing that the supposedly unique holistic character of positive desert applies to negative desert as well.

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APA Newsletters

Spring 2001 Volume 00, Number 2

Spring 2001
Volume 00, Number 2