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74The Intrusion of MercyOhio State Journal of Criminal Law 4 361-87. 2007.On the basis of a communicative theory of criminal punishment, I show how mercy has a significant but limited role to play in the criminal law—in particular (although not only) in criminal sentencing. Mercy involves an intrusion into the realm of criminal law of values and concerns that are not themselves part of the perspective of criminal law: a merciful sentencer acts beyond the limits of her legal role, on the basis of moral considerations that conflict with the demands of penal justice. Som…Read more
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74Excuses, moral and legal: a comment on Marcia Baron’s ‘excuses, excuses’Criminal Law and Philosophy 1 (1): 49-55. 2007.Marcia Baron has offered an illuminating and fruitful discussion of extra-legal excuses. What is particularly useful, and particularly important, is her focus on our excusatory practices—on the ways and contexts in which we make, offer, accept, bestow and reject excuses: if we are to reach an adequate understanding of excuses, their implications and their grounds, we must attend to the roles that they can play in our human activities and relationships—and to the complexities and particularities …Read more
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65Trials and PunishmentsPhilosophical Quarterly 37 (149): 448. 1987.How can a system of criminal punishment be justified? In particular can it be justified if the moral demand that we respect each other as autonomous moral agents is taken seriously? Traditional attempts to justify punishment as a deterrent or as retribution fail, but Duff suggests that punishment can be understood as a communicative attempt to bring a wrong-doer to repent her crime. This account is supported by discussions of moral blame, of penance, of the nature of the law's demands, and of th…Read more
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65In this long-awaited book, Antony Duff offers a new perspective on the structures of criminal law and criminal liability. His starting point is a distinction between responsibility (understood as answerability) and liability, and a conception of responsibility as relational and practice-based. This focus on responsibility, as a matter of being answerable to those who have the standing to call one to account, throws new light on a range of questions in criminal law theory: on the question of crim…Read more
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62Punishment and the Duties of OffendersLaw and Philosophy 32 (1): 109-127. 2013.A critical discussion of Victor Tadros, The Ends of Harm.
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62Criminal Responsibility and the Emotions: If Fear and Anger Can Exculpate, Why Not Compassion?Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (2): 189-220. 2015.The article offers an Aristotelian analysis of emotion-based defences in criminal law: someone who commits an offence is entitled to an excuse if she was motivated by a justifiably aroused and strongly felt emotion that gave her good reason to commit the offence and that might have destabilised the practical rationality even of a ‘reasonable’ person. This analysis captures the logical structure of duress and provocation as excuses—and also shows why provocation is controversial as even a partial…Read more
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60Camus and Rebellion: From Solipsism to MoralityPhilosophical Investigations 5 (2): 116-134. 1982.
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58Action, the Act Requirement and Criminal LiabilityRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 55 69-103. 2004.The slogan that criminal liability requires an ‘act’, or a ‘voluntary act’, is still something of a commonplace in textbooks of criminal law. There are, it is usually added, certain exceptions to this requirement— cases in which liability is in fact, and perhaps even properly, imposed in the absence of such an act: but the ‘act requirement’ is taken to represent a normally minimal necessary condition of criminal liability. Even offences of strict liability, for which no mens rea is required, req…Read more
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55Crimes, Public Wrongs, and Civil OrderCriminal Law and Philosophy 13 (1): 27-48. 2019.The idea that crimes can usefully be understood as ‘public wrongs’, and that this can generate a plausible principle of criminalisation, has found some support in recent years; it has also been subjected to some sharp criticism. This paper aims to sketch the most plausible version of that idea, and to show how, once properly explained, it is not vulnerable to those criticisms. After a brief defence of the negative principle, that we may not criminalise conduct that does not constitute a public w…Read more
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53The Limits of Virtue JurisprudenceMetaphilosophy 34 (1-2): 214-224. 2003.In response to Lawrence Solum's advocacy of a ‘virtue–centred theory of judging’, I argue that there is indeed important work to be done in identifying and characterising those qualities of character that constitute judicial virtues – those qualities that a person needs if she is to judge well (though I criticise Solum's account of one of the five pairs of judicial vices and virtues that he identifies – avarice and temperance). However, Solum's more ambitious claims – that a judge's vice necessa…Read more
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52Blame, Moral Standing and the Legitimacy of the Criminal TrialRatio 23 (2): 123-140. 2010.I begin by discussing the ways in which a would‐be blamer's own prior conduct towards the person he seeks to blame can undermine his standing to blame her (to call her to account for her wrongdoing). This provides the basis for an examination of a particular kind of ‘bar to trial’ in the criminal law – of ways in which a state or a polity's right to put a defendant on trial can be undermined by the prior misconduct of the state or its officials. The examination of this often neglected legal phen…Read more
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52MercyIn John Deigh & David Dolinko (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of the Criminal Law, Oxford University Press. 2011.
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46Intention, Agency and Criminal Liability: Philosophy of Action and the Criminal LawPhilosophical Quarterly 41 (164): 378. 1991.
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46Trials and PunishmentsCambridge University Press. 1986.How can a system of criminal punishment be justified? In particular can it be justified if the moral demand that we respect each other as autonomous moral agents is taken seriously? Traditional attempts to justify punishment as a deterrent or as retribution fail, but Duff suggests that punishment can be understood as a communicative attempt to bring a wrong-doer to repent her crime. This account is supported by discussions of moral blame, of penance, of the nature of the law's demands, and of th…Read more
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45On the basis of a communicative theory of criminal punishment, I show how mercy has a significant but limited role to play in the criminal law—in particular (although not only) in criminal sentencing. Mercy involves an intrusion into the realm of criminal law of values and concerns that are not themselves part of the perspective of criminal law: a merciful sentencer acts beyond the limits of her legal role, on the basis of moral considerations that conflict with the demands of penal justice. Som…Read more
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42Good and evil and the criminal lawIn Christopher Cordner & Raimond Gaita (eds.), Philosophy, Ethics, and a Common Humanity: Essays in Honour of Raimond Gaita, Routledge. 2011.
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41Realism and Imagination in Ethics By Sabina Lovibond Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983,238 pp., £15.00 (review)Philosophy 59 (230): 541-. 1984.
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41Responsibility and ReciprocityEthical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (4): 775-787. 2018.Discussions of responsibility typically focus on the person who is held responsible: what are the conditions or criteria of responsibility; what can be done to or demanded of a person who is responsible? This paper shifts focus onto those who hold, rather than those who are held, responsible: what do we owe to those whom we hold responsible? After distinguishing responsibility as answerability from responsibility as liability, it attends mainly to the former, and points out the ways in which it …Read more
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41Responsibility and liability in criminal lawIn Matthew H. Kramer (ed.), The Legacy of H.L.A. Hart: Legal, Political, and Moral Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2008.
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40The virtues and vices of virtue jurisprudenceIn Timothy Chappell (ed.), Values and Virtues: Aristotelianism in Contemporary Ethics, Oxford University Press. 2006.
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39[Book review] equality, responsibility, and the law (review)Ethics 111 (3): 644-648. 1999.This book examines responsibility and luck as these issues arise in tort law, criminal law, and distributive justice. The central question is: whose bad luck is a particular piece of misfortune? Arthur Ripstein argues that there is a general set of principles to be found that clarifies responsibility in those cases where luck is most obviously an issue: accidents, mistakes, emergencies, and failed attempts at crime. In revealing how the problems that arise in tort and criminal law as well as dis…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Criminal Law |
Philosophy of Law, Miscellaneous |