A fundamental principle of constitutional and criminal law is that all people charged with committing an offense must be given an opportunity to defend themselves (see generally, LaFave & Israel, 1985). A number of specific rights emanate from this general principle, including the "right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury," the right to be confronted with the witnesses against h...

Criminal law can justly lay claim to being the native domain of law and economics. From Bentham to Becker, no area of law has been more brightly illuminated by the radiance of economic logic. Not coincidentally, in no other area of the law has the conflict between economics and ordinary moral sensibilities been perceived to be so sharp. When we are deciding how to apportion punishment, our inst...

On May 9, 2002, Canadian Health Minister Anne McLellan introduced Bill C-56, An Act Respecting Assisted Human Reproduction (the “AHR Act”), in the House of Commons. The Bill was then re-introduced in the House on October 9, 2002 as Bill C-13. This proposed legislation strives to deal with the moral and ethical concerns that surround research and science associated with reproductive technologies...

INTRODUCTION Under common law, criminal responsibility usually distinguishes between intentional act and accident, andmost serious criminal offenses consist of both a voluntary act and a guilty mind.1 This treatment presumes that no defendant should be held criminally responsible without a finding of fault. Despite this long-standing conceptual commitment to fairness, criminal law continues to ...

The criminal law is centrally concerned with culpability or mens rea— roughly, the mental (or quasi-mental) components of blame. But culpability has at least two dimensions. Narrow culpability involves the purpose, knowledge, recklessness, or negligence required by statute for each material element. What Joshua Dressler aptly calls broad culpability involves the other mental (or quasi-mental) c...

In particular circumstances, the civil and criminal laws of England required that a litigant or a prisoner convicted of a capital offence should be examined to determine whether she was pregnant. Such efforts to solve a medical problem for legal reasons illustrate, among other things, one of the interfaces between the two disciplines and their interdependence when confronted with a common probl...

We present qualitative research findings about how perceptions of criminal prosecutions for the transmission of HIV interact with the provision of high-quality HIV health and social care in England and Wales. Seven focus groups were undertaken with a total of 75 diverse professionals working in clinical and community-based services for people with HIV. Participants' understanding of the law in ...

Given the well-known difficulties in defining and detecting fatigue, it is a real challenge to incorporate it into either traffic or criminal law. Finnish traffic law forbids fatigued driving "only" on a general level concerning the driver's fitness to drive. We present several comments from Finnish traffic and local police officers regarding their own experiences of driving while fatigued. The...

The recent emergence of vibrant markets in 'new psychoactive substances' or 'legal highs' has posed significant new challenges for drug policy. These partly concern what to do about them but the speed and complexity of change has also raised difficulties for how policy responses should be developed. Existing drug policy systems appear too slow and cumbersome to keep up with the pace of change, ...