Criminalising Carelessness

Comparative and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Criminal Liability for Inadvertent Negligence

Can we punish people for crimes they didn’t even know they committed? Ultimately, the answer to this question lies at the core of criminal liability for inadvertent negligence. But legal systems respond very differently. Although most civil law jurisdictions seem to have no problem with criminal liability for inadvertent negligence, its criminali­sa­tion is controversial in common law jurisdictions. And even though most Anglo-American criminal law theorists firmly hold onto the principle of actus non facit reum, nisi mens sit rea, criminal liability for negligence, and even strict liability, is becoming inexorably widespread in statutory law. Surprisingly, despite the subject having been long discussed in Anglo-American and German criminal law scholarship, there has been scant exchange between them, and the two legal systems have benefited too little from each other’s insights. Cutting through the fields of philosophy, psychology, and criminal law theory, the project will address the theoretical, doctrinal, and practical issues of inadvertent negligence. A special emphasis will be placed on the question of what we are accusing the offender of: What is criminally wrong about being careless, and is this criminal charge tenable from a legal and even from a philosophical and psychological point of view? By bringing together scholars from different civil and common law jurisdictions, the project wants to stir a lively international and interdisciplinary debate on these questions and seeks to provide new answers to an old problem.