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 in the journal Jurisprudence.

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