Willful Ignorance, Culpability and the Criminal Law

1 Equal Culpability and the Scope of the Willful Ignorance Doctrine

Ignorance and Mistake of Criminal Law, Noncriminal Law, and Fact

After clarifying the distinction between mistakes of fact and mistakes of law, this article explores in detail an important distinction within the category of mistake of law, between mistake about the criminal law itself and mistake about noncriminal law norms that the criminal law makes relevant—for example, about the civil law of property (in a theft prosecution) or of divorce (in a bigamy pr...

Willful Ignorance in a World of Biased Misinformation

Suppose individuals face a claim of uncertain validity and can only obtain more information from sources known to sometimes report biased misinformation for or against the claim. In such an environment, it is optimal for Bayesian expected utility maximizers to select the source biased toward their current behavior even if they know that source more frequently reports misinformation than an oppo...

Does Willful Ignorance Deflect Punishment? – An Experimental Study

This paper studies whether people can avoid punishment by remaining willfully ignorant about possible negative consequences of their actions for others. We employ a laboratory experiment, using modified dictator games in which a dictator can remain willfully ignorant about the payoff consequences of his decision for a receiver. A third party can punish the dictator after observing the dictator’...

Weak-Minded Responsibility in Iranian Criminal Law and Egyptian Law

In Iran's criminal law, humans are not only divided into wise or insane they are also persons who, on the one hand, do not fall under Article 149 of the Islamic Penal Code in the definition of insane persons and on the other hand, they are not wise, the rational age of these people is lower than their child's physical age that Affected by mental disorder and mental retardation. Article 91 of th...