I’m writing a response to an essay on “consent as a felt sense” and looking for a deeper explanation of mens rea and the reason why it ought form the basis for not just a legal system, but for the social norms of a community. I know there is some...
Any moderately well-informed person these days is aware of the shocking injustices that happen whenever criminal laws get written by people who don’t really understand what criminal law is, or how it works. (Brilliant summary here.) They tend to create crimes that are ill-defined, overbroad, and usually an overreaction to...
One of our bugbears here at The Criminal Lawyer is the excessive number of federal crimes — particularly those that are created by regulators rather than by elected legislators. We’re not alone in this concern, and over the past several months we’ve noticed what can only be called a growing...
One of our favorite topics here at the Criminal Lawyer has been the interaction of brain science and criminal law. So it’s with a pleased tip of the hat to Mark Bennett that we have the video linked above, an excellent summary of modern neuroscience as it applies to...
Over at Edge, in a short video, we get an intriguing look at criminal justice from the perspective of neurological science. Put all this together, as you can see here, and we discover little areas that are brighter than others. And this is all now easily done, as everyone knows,...
On Wednesday, President Barack Obama signed into law the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act. As usual, the Act included provisions that had nothing whatsoever to do with National Defense Authorization. And one of the tacked-on provisions was the much-debated Hate Crimes Prevention Act. We wrote about this back on May...
Amir Efrati has an interesting article in today’s Wall Street Journal, headlined “Cultural Background Gains Traction as a Legal Defense.” It’s a well-known fact that some things that are criminal in one society are perfectly acceptable in another. Some lawyers are starting to claim that it should be a defense...
In a sort-of unanimous opinion today, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction of a Mexican who’d tried to get a job by using counterfeit Social Security and Alien Registration cards along with a fake name and date of birth. He’d been convicted of aggravated identity theft, 18 U. S. C....
The other day, by a vote of 249 (59%) to 175 (41%), the U.S. House of Representatives voted to expand the scope of federal “hate crimes” to include crimes against gay people, transgender people, the mentally disabled and the physically disabled. With strong support from the White House and from...
Guilt or innocence, one might say, is all in the mind. After all, there are very few crimes that can be committed without the requisite mens rea, or mental state. If we’re going to punish someone, their acts cannot have been mere accident. We want to know that they had...
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