Reply to Critics of 'Criminally Ignorant: Why the Law Pretends We Know What We Don't' (OUP 2019)

Abstract

This is a reply to commentators at Book Symposium on Criminally Ignorant: Why the Law Pretends You Know What You Don’t held at Trinity College Dublin in Nov 2019 to appear together with the published comments from the symposium (currently under review).

I am immensely grateful to the commentators for their insightful challenges to the material in the book. Here I discuss five groups of central concerns, namely:

1) doctrinal and conceptual concerns about the willful ignorance doctrine (Child and Dsouza);

2) methodological concerns (Webster);

3) skepticism raised by numerous commentators (Donnelley-Lazarov, Dsouza, Webster and Wieland) about my view that criminal law should generally be motive-insensitive;

4) conceptual worries about the commensurability of my manifestation account and its competitor the causal account (Wieland);

5) concerns about my defense of the collective knowledge doctrine for corporate crimes (Krebs).

Keywords: willful ignorance, willful blindness, mens rea, culpability, knowledge, recklessness, motives, legality, corporate crime

JEL Classification: K14