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The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) provides that children require 'special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection' (Preamble). In recent years various attempts have been made by Scottish lawmakers to safeguard and promote children's rights across a range of legal fields. However, the field of delict (termed "tort law" in many jurisdictions) has been excluded from the process of mainstreaming children's rights in domestic law. Most of the contemporary litigation in the field is about liability for negligence (i.e., unintentional wrongdoing). In negligence proceedings, children are typically victims seeking redress from adults through the judicial system following childhood injury. Using Scotland as a case study, this article examines legal reasoning in what are termed "childhood negligence proceedings". Drawing on the jurisprudence of the Committee on the Rights of the Child and wider literature, the article raises concerns about both the substance and established practices of the law. In particular, an absence of judicial engagement with children and research about childhood development is observed. Consideration is given as to what might be the nature of the obligations imposed upon states in this field of law by Articles 1 (age), 2 (non-discrimination), 3 (best interests), 6 (life, survival and development) and 12 (voice) of the CRC. Two overarching questions persist: first, can findings of negligence or contributory negligence against children ever be justified? And secondly, if so, what should be the model for imposing childhood liability? As Scotland fully incorporates the CRC in domestic law, the article concludes by framing a series of questions directed towards creating new knowledge and developing new understanding capable of transforming the child's position in delict/tort law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distinction between the criminal fault elements of recklessness and negligence is one of Anglo-American criminal law's key distinctions. It is a distinction with practical significance, as many serious crimes require at least recklessness and cannot be committed negligently. The distinction is standardly marked by awareness. Recklessness requires awareness that one's conduct carries a risk of harm. Negligence only requires that one ought to have been aware that one's conduct carried such a risk, even if one was in fact unaware of this. But should the recklessness/negligence distinction be marked by awareness of risk, or by something else? Does a defendant's awareness of risk really have the normative significance to mark such a distinction? In this paper, I answer these questions by discussing a challenge to this 'standard account' of the recklessness/negligence distinction raised by the work of Antony Duff, who defends an alternative, non-awareness-based model of the recklessness/negligence distinction. I will argue that, although Duff's alternative model fails, seeing how it goes wrong helps us see how awareness genuinely does have the right kind of normative significance to mark the distinction between recklessness and negligence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We seem to be responsible for our beliefs in a distinctively epistemic way. We often hold each other to account for the beliefs that we hold. We do this by criticising other believers as 'gullible' or 'biased', and by trying to persuade others to revise their beliefs. But responsibility for belief looks hard to understand because we seem to lack control over our beliefs. In this paper, I argue that we can make progress in our understanding of responsibility for belief by thinking about it in parallel with another kind of responsibility: legal responsibility for criminal negligence. Specifically, I argue that that a popular account of responsibility for belief, which grounds it in belief's reasons-responsiveness, faces a problem analogous to one faced by H.L.A. Hart's influential capacity-based account of culpability. This points towards a more promising account of responsibility of belief, though, if we draw on accounts of negligence that improve on Hart's. Broadly speaking, the account of negligence that improves on Hart's account grounds culpability in a (lack of) concern for others' interests, whereas my account of epistemic responsibility grounds responsibility for belief in a (lack of) concern for the truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The modified version of art. 121-3 of the French Criminal Code introduces a hierarchy of the nonintentional forms of guilt according to seriousness. From the perspective of the French legislator, this hierarchy would be the following: deliberate negligence (art. 121-3 para. 2), simple negligence - carelessness, imprudence - (art. 121-3 para. 3) and breaking a duty of care or protection (art. 121-3 para. 4). In the Italian Criminal Code only the conscious negligence is defined, whereas the simple negligence is not defined, but merely exemplified. Thus, article 43 para. 1 states that "There is an offence committed with negligence whenever the result, even though foreseen, is not desired by the agent and occurs because of carelessness, imprudence, lack of skill, or failure to observe laws, regulations, orders or instructions". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the unwittingness of negligence, personal responsibility for negligent conduct is puzzling. After all, how is it that one is responsible for what one did not intend to do or was unaware that one was doing? How, therefore, is one's agency involved with one's negligence so as to ground one's responsibility for it? Negligence is an unwitting failure in agency to meet a standard requiring conduct that falls within one's competency. Accordingly, negligent conduct involves agency in that negligence is a manifestation of agency failure. Now, nobody's perfect. Human agency is innately fallible, and a measure of agency failure is, therefore, unavoidable. The more one's negligence manifests failure in one's agency as an individual, the more one is responsible for it. In contrast, the more one's negligence involves the shortcomings innate to all human agency the less responsible one becomes, because one's agency as an individual is less and less involved in one's failure. Determinative of the measure of individual and of human failings mixed into an instance of negligent phi -ing is the background quality of one's agency at meeting one's competency at phi -ing. That is, how able one is at delivering on what one is able to competently do. The more able, the less one's occasional instances of negligence involve manifestations of failures of one's agency as an individual—nobody's perfect—and are more manifestations of one's agency's innate human fallibility, making one less and less responsible for one's negligence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although in German and in Spanish legal systems there are no express provisions with regard to the criminal negligence (culpa), this has not hindered the legal doctrine and jurisprudence to thoroughly analyse this form of guilt. This made it possible to qualify as intentional offences some deeds which in our legal system are considered to be committed with conscious negligence (involving foresight). The difficulty to distinguish between indirect intention (dolus eventualis) and conscious negligence (luxuria) has nonetheless determined Spanish courts to ask the legislator to provide a clear definition of indirect intention, which could be an additional argument with respect to the weaknesses entailed by such a legal approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One proposed way of preserving the link between criminal negligence and blameworthiness is to define criminal negligence in moral terms. On this view, a person can be held criminally responsible for a negligent act if her negligence reflects a deficit of moral concern. Some theorists are convinced that this definition restores the link between negligence and blameworthiness, while others insist that criminal negligence remains suspect. This article contributes to the discussion by applying the work of ethicist Nomy Arpaly to criminal negligence. Although not interested in legal issues herself, Arpaly has a well-developed theory of moral agency that explains moral concern in terms of responsiveness to moral reasons. Introducing her work to the ongoing scholarly debate will be helpful for two reasons. First, while a definition of negligence in terms of moral concern is recognized as one proposed solution to the negligence–blameworthiness problem, authors promoting it have yet to give a systematic account of moral concern and its relation to blame. Borrowing Arpaly's account will help clarify the idea of moral concern so that both proponents and critics of a concern approach to negligence can have a better-defined debate. Second, her theory of blameworthiness is especially suited to defending the blameworthiness of negligent actions, because it does not have recourse to a special quality of choice or self-control that must be active to render conduct blameworthy. To make this second advantage clear, the article argues that reliance on choice or self-control problematizes blameworthiness for negligence. Those who wish to defend blameworthiness for negligent acts should base their work on an account of moral agency that does not rely on either choice or self-control to explain when an action is blameworthy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Objectives: This paper is a critical evaluation of the compensation system for personal injury tort in Nigeria. The present compensation system under the law of tort leaves many victims of personal injury uncompensated in Nigeria. This stems from many factors, including the fact that traditional tort theory of no liability without fault has continued to be the principal basis for liability. This is in spite of the heavy criticisms of the tort regime as an ineffective mode of compensation. Through an analytical assessment of selected core heads of claims in tort, the paper reveals the inadequacy in the foundations of tort law and its regulation of claims for personal injury in Nigeria. Implications: It finds that fault as the primary foundation of tort law in Nigeria creates a large volume of uncompensated plaintiffs, who, without an efficient alternative social security to fall upon, have to personally bear their losses. In the light of this, the paper uses examples from other jurisdictions to recommend that tort law in Nigeria is in need of more legislative intervention. Value: The paper recommends that the provision of a sustainable compensation system for personal injury is imperative for social justice in Nigeria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article compares laws related to the liability in negligence for third party criminal acts in the U.S. and Australia, as of May 2013. Topics discussed include High Court of Australia in the case 'Modbury Triangle Shopping Centre Pty. Ltd. v Anzil;' the U.S. court case 'MacPherson v. Buick Motor Company' and 'Donoghue v. Stevenson;' and Australian and American common law on liability for criminal acts of third parties.

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In chapter 6 of Attempts, Gideon Yaffe defends the thesis that it is 'possible to attempt crimes of negligence' (, p. 173). I am persuaded that he is right about this, provided that 'attempt crimes of negligence' is read as (potentially misleading) shorthand for 'attempt to bring it about that we commit crimes of negligence.' But I find certain parts of his defense unpersuasive. My discussion of those parts of his argument motivates the following thesis: Not only can one attempt to bring it about that one commits a crime of negligence, but the attempt can be successful as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Doug Husak suggests that sometimes an actor should be deemed reckless, and not merely negligent, with respect to the risks that she knowingly created but has forgotten at the moment of action. The validity of this conclusion, he points out, depends crucially on what it means to be aware of a risk. Husak's 'neutral prompt' and 'counterfactual actual belief' criteria are problematic, however. More persuasive is his suggestion that we understand belief, in this moral and criminal law context, as a concept whose meaning is determined by its function as a culpability standard. Husak concludes that inadvertent actors are often less culpable than knowing-but-later-forgetful actors; this is plausible, but there are also numerous counterexamples. Holly Smith focuses on negligence cases in which an agent's failure to notice a risk stems, not from a prior culpable choice, but from an objectionable attitude or set of attitudes. She is right to emphasize that genuine moral culpability does not depend on conscious choice. However, Smith also asserts that decisions that flow from an actor's objectionable attitudes are only rarely culpable, because they often do not arise from a reasonably full configuration of the actor's motives. This last requirement is, I fear, an unrealistic and unnecessarily demanding criterion of culpability. Even when many of the actor's evaluative attitudes are 'inactive' in Smith's sense, the actor might deserve blame for not bringing them to bear on his decision. Michael Moore and Heidi Hurd thoroughly explore, and find deficient, H.L.A. Hart's 'unexercised capacity' theory of negligence. They are correct that that theory requires a further judgment: an actor's inadvertence is culpable only if he had the capacity to have adverted 'if X' where X is the source of the actor's moral desert. They overstate, however, in suggesting that the capacity issue falls out of the picture once we identify that underlying desert basis. The authors also worry that if desert is grounded on an underlying vice, we lack a reliable way of ranking the different vices that might explain the actor's inadvertence; this is not a fatal objection, however, because negligence determinations are quite feasible even in the absence of clear rankings. Moore and Hurd conclude by identifying eight distinct categories in which criminal liability for negligence is justifiable. Negligence is indeed a surprisingly complex and pluralist concept. The three articles in this symposium brightly illuminate some of the most fundamental conceptual and normative issues in the debate over whether it is just to blame and punish the negligently inadvertent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Negligence is a problematic basis for being morally blamed and punished for having caused some harm, because in such cases there is no choice to cause or allow-or risk causing or allowing-such harm to occur. The standard theories as to why inadvertent risk creation can be blameworthy despite the lack of culpable choice are that in such cases there is blame for: (1) an unexercised capacity to have adverted to the risk; (2) a defect in character explaining why one did not advert to the risk; (3) culpably acquiring or failing to rid oneself of these defects of character at some earlier time; (4) flawed use of those practical reasoning capacities that make one the person one is; or (5) chosen violation of per se rules about known precautions. Although each of these five theories can justify blame in some cases of negligence, none can justify blame in all cases intuitively thought to be cases of negligence, nor can any of these five theories show why inadvertent creation of an unreasonable risk, pure and simple, can be blameworthy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Revista de Derecho Penal y Criminologia is the property of Editorial UNED and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In 1988 in Hill v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, the House of Lords denied a duty of care was owed by police to a victim of a serial murderer. The case was interpreted as immunity from negligence actions for police when involved in the suppression and investigation of crime'. Recent cases in Australia and the United Kingdom have confirmed that while blanket immunity from negligence actions for police involved in investigatory functions does not exist, plaintiffs alleging negligence will face considerable difficulties establishing a duty of care was owed. The recent cases provide an opportunity to re-examine the appropriate tests to apply in determining the existence and scope of police duty of care and to reassess the policy grounds underlying the decisions. In doing so the article argues that Australian courts should avoid the UK approach of applying a broad exclusionary rule particular to police, as sufficient safeguards already exist in the Australian High Court's duty of care formulation for public authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Research Report presents an initial attempt to apply the theory of counterfactual thinking to study the cognitive processes that underlie judgments of negligence. Subjects reviewed a summary of an appellate case involving a work accident and listed all the ways in which the accident could have been undone (mutated). Participant's evaluations of the defendant's behavior were influenced by the number of mutations of the plaintiff's conduct. Exploratory path analysis suggested that counterfactual thinking may have its greatest impact not as a direct influence on verdicts and damages, but rather as an indirect influence impacting verdicts through lower level judgments about the normality of the defendant's behavior and the standard of care. The results also suggest that contrary to the law, subjects base their negligence verdicts on assessments of normal care along with due care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the criminal liability of negligence in midwifery under the law in Great Britain. A court ruled in Regina (R) versus Misra and Srivastava that gross negligence by a health professional constitute as manslaughter if the action exposed the patient to the risk of death and caused it. The House of Lords held that gross negligence is an act of indifference to an obvious risk of injury to the patient and failure to avert the risk. A brief overview of the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 is presented.

This article considers the crime of gross negligence manslaughter and explains how the criminal offence is based on the civil form of negligence, but where the negligence is very serious and involves a risk of death. It also considers the offence of corporate manslaughter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]