Individual Emergencies and the Rule of Criminal Law

Abstract:     
This is the penultimate version of a paper to be published as a chapter in F. Tanguay-Renaud and J. Stribopoulos (eds.) Rethinking Criminal Law Theory: New Canadian Perspectives in the Philosophy of Domestic, Transnational, and International Criminal Law (Hart Publishing, forthcoming 2011). It represents a significantly reworked version of a paper with the same title posted on SSRN three years ago.

The paper discusses various accommodations that ought to be made in the substantive criminal law to account for the challenges that individual emergencies may pose to the legitimacy of its rule. I address specific puzzles related to emergency-related reason/fact-relative justifications, evidence-relative justifications, and excuses. The paper also includes a discussion of the status of morality in the face of individual emergencies, as well as of the rule and authority of criminal law. I conclude by differentiating the challenges posed by individual and more generalised emergencies.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 48

Accepted Paper Series