BOOK REVIEW* Responsibility in Law and Morality by PETER CANE

The concept of responsibility underlies many legal rules and remedies. For the most part, criminal liability is incurred only in respect of acts for which the accused is considered responsible; and civil liability is incurred only in respect of loss or damage for which the defendant is considered responsible. However, it seems often to be suggested that questions of responsibility are matters for morality rather than law; that criminal and civil liability is determined by application of legal rules rather than by moral ideas of responsibility; and that the role played in relation to the law by ideas of responsibility lies in their contribution to the moral appraisal of the rules of law. In this book, Peter Cane, Professor of Law at the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University and recently a member of the Panel of Eminent Persons charged with reviewing the law of negligence for the Commonwealth Government, examines the legal role of ideas of responsibility, particularly as they operate in what he calls Anglian legal systems, that is, systems the conceptual structure of which is derived from that of English law. In doing so, he challenges suggestions such as those noted above, claiming that Taw and morality interact symbiotically’, and that ‘careful study of legal concepts of responsibility can add significantly to our understanding of responsibility more generally’.* 1 Although Cane says that his book is about law and not a work of philosophy, I suspect its main readership may be among philosophically-inclined lawyers interested in advancing their understanding of how the concept of responsibility is used in the law, through an appreciation of the two-way relationship between this use and moral ideas of responsibility; and among philosophers interested in advancing their understanding of general notions of responsibility, through an appreciation of how the concept is used in the law. However, the book may also prove of use to practising lawyers in addressing actual legal problems concerning responsibility, just as Hart and Honore’s Causation in the Law has been useful in addressing legal problems concerning causation. It is true that, unlike causation, responsibility as such is rarely invoked by legal rules, so that analysis of the concept is not as directly relevant to problems