Angelo Ryu

Under the Criminal Attempts Act 1981 s1(1), D is guilty for an attempt only if she does an act 'more than merely preparatory' to a criminal offence. It has proved surprisingly difficult for the courts to give a plausible and coherent gloss on that statutory language. This paper aims to remedy this. It (i) shows that the present tests can't accomodate all the leading cases, and often renders the verdicts unintelligible, before (ii) proposing an alternative. D's act is more than merely preparatory to an offence when it is wrong for the same kind of reasons that the substantive offence would be wrong. 'Wrong for the Right Reasons' can fit the cases and is normatively attractive.

This paper lays out a principle of consistency and shows how it justifies lenient sentences for juvenile offenders. The principle holds that, if the state disadvantages someone by applying the rationale of a legal rule, it has a reason of fairness to act on that same rationale when doing so would advantage them. As applied to juvenile leniency, the law systematically assumes that juveniles are diminished in their normative capacities. These rules, putting the penal context to one side, operate to disadvantage those juveniles for whom the assumption is false. This places the state under a duty, owed to these juveniles as a matter of fairness, to act on the same assumption when it would work to their advantage. Such juveniles are therefore owed lenient sentences.

Take two positions, both of which we take to be popular ways of thinking about law. First, some norm N is part of the law only if, and in virtue of, N being ultimately recognized or validated by the rule of recognition. Call this Hartian Orthodoxy. Second, statements about legal rights are best understood as claims about the existence of moral rights according to law. Call this legal perspectivalism. Here we show that the two are incompatible. Our argument is that, to account for certain arguments that mix legal and factual claims, perspectivalism must close the legal perspective according to some inference rule. As it happens, however, the only defensible candidates render perspectivalism incompatible with Hartian Orthodoxy.

Here I distinguish two things jurisprudence might take itself to explain. A theory of law can be either concept-first or practice-first. Concept-first theories investigate the concept we implicitly deploy to label some things as law and not others. Practice-first theories investigate directly, and uncover interesting features of, a particular social practice. That practice could be, for instance, the practice of lawyers and officials which prevails in the United States. I identify Hershovitz's Law Is a Moral Practice with a practice-first approach. Then I elaborate on the distinction and show that a practice-first approach is more defensible than many assume. Finally, I argue a practice-first approach rules out predictive theories of law.

Perspectivalism is a popular way to understand legal obligations. That there is a legal obligation, on this view, is equivalent to there being a moral obligation from the legal perspective. But Adam Perry argues that perspectivalism cannot account for arguments going from legal premisses to a factual conclusion. Take, for instance, the premisses (i) only those over 18 have a legal right to vote and (ii) Sarah has a legal right to vote. Seemingly we should be able to arrive at the valid conclusion that Sarah is over 18. Perry says perspectivalism cannot explain the validity of this conclusion. We show that it can. So his objection – that perspectivalism cannot make sense of an important feature of legal argumentation – fails. Along the way, our discussion reveals an important lesson: those who endorse perspectivalism must take care to ensure that all parts of a legal argument, both premisses and conclusions, are true according to the legal perspective.