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The 'acquiescence' category of proprietary estoppel is a rare example of responsibility for pure omissions in private law. On liberal-individualistic theories of ownership, the policy considerations against liability for nondoing are exceptionally powerful in the context of rights over land. Nevertheless, I argue that in proprietary estoppel the law is justified in imposing a duty on the right-holder to alert a stranger when his actions are based on a mistake. Owners of property rights are under what Honoré termed a 'special duty' to contribute to the social good of efficient market for land by publicising their rights. This 'duty to speak' is however relatively weak and cannot completely suppress considerations against liability for omission. While liability in the acquiescence category can be justified in principle, the current law, in which owners who failed to correct the mistake of the relying party incur similar liability to owners who actively encouraged the other party to rely, is untenable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Ignorance of the law is no defence,' so we are told from an early stage in our legal studies. Or, to be more accurate, 'ignorance of the criminal law is no defence to a criminal charge.' That appears to be the rule in this country, apart from a couple of well-established exceptions and another possible one. I will argue that it is a preposterous doctrine, resting on insecure foundations within the criminal law and on questionable propositions about the political obligations of individuals and of the State. In developing these arguments, I will draw attention to the differing problems of ignorance of the criminal law in three broad areas - regulatory offences, serious crime, and offences of omission - with a view to suggesting that there is a great deal more that the State needs to do if the issue of ignorance of the criminal law is to be dealt with adequately and fairly. I begin by scrutinising the relevant rule of English criminal law and the justifications offered for it. I then go on to situate the 'ignorance-of-law' doctrine in the context of the principle of legality and the rule of law, those bastions of liberal criminal law theory. Part three then explores the three broad areas of the criminal law, and parts four and five carry the debate into the political obligations of individuals and of the State in these matters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We recently introduced an accurate and countermeasure (CM)-resistant P300-based deception detection test ( J.P. Rosenfeld et al., 2008 ). When subjects use CMs to all irrelevant items in the test, the probe P300 is increased rather than reduced, as in previous P300-based deception protocols, allowing detection of CM users. Evidence herein suggests this is partly due to an omit effect; the probe was the only uncountered item. Three groups were tested: a guilty omit probe group performed an explicit response to each irrelevant item but not to the probe, an innocent omit irrelevant group saw only irrelevant items and omitted a response to one item, and a guilty no omit group had a concealed information item as probe and performed an explicit response to each. We found a greater P300 amplitude to probes in the guilty omit probe condition as compared with the other two conditions, indicating a P300 enhancing effect of omitting a response to a single stimulus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three experiments investigated how moral judgments of harmful acts and omissions are affected by information about social roles. Subjects were given vignettes in which the relationship between an actor and victim was varied along the dimensions of solidarity (e.g. friends versus strangers) and hierarchy (e.g. superior versus equal; the terms are from Hamilton & Sanders, 1981). Subjects were asked to judge the morality of the actor in each case, both for a harmful omission (e.g. intentionally withholding the truth) and for an equivalent act (e.g. actively lying). Subjects judged the bahaviour worse in the act than the omission. Judgements were also affected by role relationships. The act-omission difference was also greater in the low-responsibility roles. Responses to the high-responsibility roles seem to reflect in a consequentialist perspective, focusing on outcomes rather than prohibitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author is discuses on the whether moral agents can be praiseworthy or blameworthy for omitting what is wrong. He presents some cases in which philosophers are considered praiseworthy for their omissions of wrong thing done by them. He further define clearly the concept of praise and blame and discusses on the saintly omissions.