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The persistence of strict criminal liability for child sexual abuse is attributable, at least in part, to the shortcomings of the existing alternatives, namely, the recklessness and criminal negligence standards. These two standards require juries to define the acceptable level of risk on a case-by-case basis. Juries are ill-equipped to make this calculation in sexual abuse cases, however, and their efforts to do so almost invariably are skewed by evidence of the victim's unchastity. This Article first explores the shortcomings of the recklessness and criminal negligence standards in this setting, and then attempts to develop a viable alternative. Under the proposed alternative, the legislature, not the jury, would define the acceptable risk of sexual imposition. It would calculate this invariant probability threshold in much the same way that juries calculate the acceptable risk in recklessness and criminal negligence cases-by assigning values to the gravity of the potential harm and to the social utility of the conduct. Under this scheme, the jury would be responsible only for deciding whether the risk of sexual imposition exceeded this invariant probability threshold in the defendant's case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People who knowingly engage in risky behavior but fail to think through why their actions are "risky" or "bad" or "dangerous," may not be subject to any criminal responsibility. Yet, by their choices to engage in dangerous actions, these people have shown themselves to be culpable, and thus deserving of punishment, as well as deferrable, since they know the dangerousness of their acts and therefore can decide whether to commit those acts. The law in its current state, presents the danger that opaquely reckless people are being treated as purely reckless and hence, our criminal justice system may be treating them as more culpable than they actually are. For theorists who believe that results do not matter for blameworthiness and punishability, responsibility rests upon the actor's choice. While many theorists advance this argument in the context of attempts and completed crimes, few focus on the result that this argument would have for reckless actors. That is, such a theory commits one to holding that the reckless driver who does not kill someone should be held as responsible as the reckless driver whose conduct results in death.

This article presents the text of a speech delivered by Honorable Frank E. Moss, a U.S. Senator from the state of Utah. Today the principles of freedom and fair play are being challenged and opposed around the world by totalitarian ideology that denies the existence of God and subjects the individual to arbitrary naked power of the state. The greatest threat to the Rule of Law in any of the nations of our free world is the danger that the people will become dissatisfied with the functioning of their system of, justice and do irreparable injury to it, without realizing that by so doing they are destroying the very foundation of the Rule of Law in their society. It is our professional responsibility to keep the pulse of life beating strongly in the law. We cannot do this by treating our fundamental freedoms as abstract theoretical concepts of a legal system. The people of the free world must learn to believe those freedoms to be what we believe them to be, the practical dynamic concepts for living, unalienable in every human being. In earlier days the status of law in other nations Obviously, our system is under attack and tremendous pressure from without.

The article analyses U.S. laws as applicable to cases of reckless driving. The statutes found in the several states are unsatisfactory. All statutes are, and should be, aimed at a similar course of conduct--driving in a manner which is recognizable by a reasonable man as highly dangerous. But not one of the statutes in force specifically states this. The Uniform Act speaks in terms of "willfulness and wantonness," resulting in difficulties in determining what course of action is meant. The result is to force reliance on the tangled common law meaning of these words. The same interpretive problem is found in states following the "due circumspection" concept. The net result is that traffic officers cannot look to the statute to determine what offenses are there included. What is needed is a clearer statute drafted along the following lines: reckless driving is that driving which the ordinary driver can easily perceive will, under the circumstances, result in substantial danger to person or property, provided, however, that the danger must be to person or property other than that of the accused.

The Minnesota County Attorneys' Association held its annual conference in Saint Paul, on December 29 and 30, 1959. The host was Ramsey County Attorney William Randall. The program themes were Criminal Negligence and Trends in the Criminal Law. Participating in the program were Lyman Brink, Si Weisman, Godfrey Nelson, Dr. Harold Wright, Senator Harold Schultz, Professor Maynard Persig and others. Officers for 1959 in charge were President Einer C. Iversen, Vice-President Attell P. Felix, and Secretary-treasurer George M. Scott.