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This research documents a systematic bias in memory for ethical attribute information: consumers have better memory for an ethical attribute when a product performs well on the attribute versus when a product performs poorly on the attribute. Because consumers want to avoid emotionally difficult ethical information (e.g., child labor) but believe they should remember it in order to do the right thing, the presence of negative ethical information in a choice or evaluation produces conflict between the want and should selves. Consumers resolve this conflict by letting the want self prevail and forgetting or misremembering the negative ethical information. A series of studies establishes the willfully ignorant memory effect, shows that it holds only for ethical attributes and not for other attributes, and provides process evidence that it is driven by consumers allowing the want self to prevail in order to avoid negative feelings associated with the conflict. We also ameliorate the effect by reducing the amount of pressure exerted by the should self. Lastly, we demonstrate that consumers judge forgetting negative ethical information as more morally acceptable than remembering but ignoring it, suggesting that willfully ignorant memory is a more morally acceptable form of coping with want/should conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidentiary issues regarding the requisite mens rea for human trafficking complicate how and when corporations with human trafficking in their supply chains can be brought to justice. Currently, corporations need to have actual knowledge of trafficking in their supply chain in order to establish liability for labor trafficking. This Note argues that the willful blindness doctrine could and should be used to satisfy mens rea in human trafficking. The willful blindness doctrine is commonly used as a substitute for actual knowledge to satisfy mens rea in drug trafficking cases despite clear statutory guidance that the mens rea element of the crime of drug trafficking is actual knowledge. In the context of human trafficking cases, the willful blindness doctrine would be applied to a corporation that turned a blind eye to human trafficking in its supply chain, replacing the element of actual knowledge of human trafficking. This Note addresses the history of human trafficking and the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA), the precedent of the willful blindness doctrine in drug trafficking prosecution, the mens rea standard in human trafficking cases, arguments for applying the willful blindness doctrine to human trafficking cases, and case studies that illustrate how to do so. The extension of the willful blindness doctrine to human trafficking cases will usher in an overdue era of corporate supply chain accountability under the TVPRA, a US law with an international reach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the implications of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit case United States v. Nora for proving willfulness in kickback cases. Topics discussed include the court's ruling, facts of the case, the problem with demonstrating willfulness after the case, key willfulness jurisprudence prior to 2010, and willfulness after the 2010 amendment.

In this paper, I identify a theoretical and political role for 'white ignorance', present three alternative accounts of white ignorance, and assess how well each fulfils this role. On the Willful Ignorance View, white ignorance refers to white individuals' willful ignorance about racial injustice. On the Cognitivist View, white ignorance refers to ignorance resulting from social practices that distribute faulty cognitive resources. On the Structuralist View, white ignorance refers to ignorance that (1) results as part of a social process that systematically gives rise to racial injustice, and (2) is an active player in the process. I argue that, because of its greater power and flexibility, the Structuralist View better explains the patterns of ignorance that we observe, better illuminates the connection to white racial domination, and is overall better suited to the project of ameliorating racial injustice. As such, the Structuralist View should be preferred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Too many of my Protestant clergy colleagues avoid preaching, teaching, leading, or engaging with anything immigration‐related because it is deemed "political" and too contentious by their congregants. Their collective silence creates contributes to a spiritual malaise for clergy and their congregations who willfully dodge, ignore, or deny the church's individual and collective response to this urgent social concern. Drawing from qualitative ethnographic interviews with clergy colleagues, this article provides an overview of their excuses and calls for the church to reclaim immigration as a theological term that has spiritual ramifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the willful blindness (WB) doctrine employed in criminal prosecutions in the U.S. It mentions the endorsement of the WB doctrine in a noncriminal context by the Supreme Court. Also noted are the different versions of WB and its problematic features. It emphasizes the need for courts to postpone the use of the doctrine until the jurors can understand a narrow and precise version of WB.

The willful blindness doctrine at criminal law is well-established and generally fits with moral intuitions of guilt. It also stands in direct tension with the first principle of American criminal law: legality. This Article argues that courts could largely preserve the doctrine and entirely avoid the legality problem with a simple shift: willful blindness ought to be reconceptualized as a form of evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As U.S. asylum law becomes more restrictive, relief under the U.N. Convention Against Torture (CAT) has become the last hope for safety for many asylum seekers. But for those who face torture at the hands of non-State actors, CAT relief has proven extraordinarily hard to win. The CAT's torture definition encompasses privately-inflicted harm only when it occurs with the consent or acquiescence of a public official. Agency decisions initially took this to mean that officials must willfully accept or tacitly approve the private party's actions. Courts have rejected that approach as overly restrictive. But what they have adopted in its place--a "willful blindness" test under which CAT applicants must show that officials would turn a blind eye to the torture they face--is also problematic. Under this standard, even where government officials take only half-hearted or patently inadequate steps to combat acts of privately-inflicted torture such as domestic violence, honor killings, gang violence, or mob attacks on LGBTQI people, courts frequently conclude that acquiescence has not been shown. As long as officials are doing something, the decisions reason, they are not willfully blind. This Article argues that willful blindness should not be the test for acquiescence. The term "acquiescence" is defined in a Senate ratification understanding to require that a public official have awareness of the torturous activity and breach a legal responsibility to intervene to prevent it. This definition, which has been incorporated into U.S. law, makes clear that when officials are aware of torturous activity--and in most cases there is no doubt that a country's government is aware of widespread patterns of abuse-- what matters is whether they breach their legal responsibility to take preventive action. Drawing on previously overlooked aspects of the history of the CAT's drafting and U.S. ratification, this Article argues that officials acquiesce to torture if they fail to meet their legal responsibility under international law to take effective preventive measures. The State's responsibility to exercise "due diligence" to prevent, investigate, prosecute, and punish acts of torture by non-State actors is widely recognized under the CAT and other human rights treaties. The U.N. Committee Against Torture has found that when States fail to exercise due diligence, they enable private parties to commit acts of torture with impunity, and thereby acquiesce. That approach accords with how the U.S., during the treaty negotiations, originally defined "acquiescence" when it proposed adding the term to the CAT's torture definition. It also fits in comfortably with the text and purpose of the treaty and its U.S. ratification understandings. The Article concludes by considering what a due diligence standard for acquiescence would look like in practice and addresses potential objections to its appropriateness and administrability. It also offers a proposal to amend the CAT regulations to clarify the acquiescence standard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article introduces the main conceptual and normative questions about willful ignorance. The first section asks what willful ignorance is, while the second section asks why—and how much—it merits moral or legal condemnation. My approach is to critically examine the criminal law's view of willful ignorance. Doing so not only reveals the range of positions one might take about the phenomenon but also sheds light on foundational questions about the nature of culpability and the relation between law and morality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent paper in this journal, Gideon Yaffe provides an expected utility model of culpability in order to explain why willfully ignorant misconduct sometimes is just as culpable as knowing misconduct. Although promising, I argue here that challenges remain for Yaffe’s view. First, I argue that Yaffe’s proof of the equal culpability of willful ignorance and knowledge is not watertight in certain realistic cases. Next, I argue that Yaffe’s view of culpability is motive-sensitive in a way that sits uncomfortably with criminal law doctrine, and I show that his view has difficulty with unjustified actions that are nonetheless privileged. Perhaps these problems can be solved by modifying Yaffe’s account using the notion of legally recognized reasons. However, I argue that difficulties remain when it comes to implementing this solution into Yaffe’s mathematical model. Finally, I raise concerns about Yaffe’s account of willful ignorance in particular. While his view initially seems to have a major advantage over the additive picture of willful ignorance I’ve defended, this advantage does not stand up under scrutiny. In fact, Yaffe likely relies (albeit covertly) on an additive metaphysical picture of willful ignorance as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the “Willful Ignorance Principle,” a defendant is guilty of a crime requiring knowledge he lacks provided he is ignorant thanks to having earlier omitted inquiry. In this paper, I offer a novel justification of this principle through application of the theory that knowledge matters to culpability because of how the knowing action manifests the agent’s failure to grant sufficient weight to other people’s interests. I show that, under a simple formal model that supports this theory, omitting inquiry manifests precisely the same degree of disregard of others’ interests as manifested in knowingly acting criminally. Several surprising implications of this view are described, including that when the agent’s method of inquiry has a non-zero false positive rate, his omission of inquiry does not make the same contribution to his culpability as knowledge, while it does, by contrast, when the false negative rate is non-zero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of the willful blindness doctrine in the Spanish legal system implies a structural change in the subjective imputation system, given that according to this doctrine, it is posible to punish as intentional act a conduct which may be described as ignoring elements of crime that could and should have been known by the perpetrator. This new approach entails the equalization of effective knowledge of the elements of a crime with the duty to know them, therefore understanding the ascertainment of intent in criminal law as an act of attribution, and leading to a complete normativization of the concept of intent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Avoiding information about adverse welfare consequences of self-interested decisions, or willful ignorance, is an important source of socially harmful behavior. To understand this issue, we analyze a Bayesian signaling model of an agent who cares about self-image and has the opportunity to learn the social benefits of a personally costly action. We show that willful ignorance can serve as an excuse for selfish behavior by obfuscating the signal about the decision-maker's preferences, and help maintain the idea that the agent would have acted virtuously under full information. We derive several behavioral predictions that are inconsistent with either outcome-based preferences or social-image concern and conduct experiments to test them. Our findings, as well as a number of previous experimental results, offer support for these predictions and thus, the broader theory of self-signaling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Article investigates the limits of the willful ignorance doctrine as employed in federal criminal law. This foundational rule allows willfully ignorant defendants to be treated as knowing wrongdoers. The willful ignorance doctrine is of increasing importance at the moment in light of the mens rea reform bills currently working their way through Congress. This legislation seeks to establish some form of knowledge as the default mens rea in federal law. Thus, if some version of this law is passed, the willful ignorance doctrine will provide a partial work-around. Motivated by the central role of the willful ignorance doctrine in federal prosecutions for a range of crimes--from drug offenses to white-collar crime--this Article analyzes a tension between the way federal courts justify the doctrine and the way they apply it. In particular, the Article argues that courts are committed to expanding the doctrine beyond the limits within which it is currently applied. The law allows willful ignorance to substitute for knowledge on the theory that these two mental states are equally culpable. This Article argues that, as a result, the law is also committed to allowing some forms of egregious non-willful ignorance--most importantly, reckless ignorance--to substitute for knowledge when the conditions of equal culpability are met. Moving beyond the traditional willful ignorance doctrine is especially important in order to combat the incentives that lawyers, accountants, and other white-collar professionals have to remain in ignorance of fraud committed by their clients. While the existing willful ignorance doctrine is responsive to conscious efforts to remain in ignorance of fraud in one's midst, the criminal law does not have sufficient doctrinal tools to counteract the incentives to recklessly allow one's ignorance to be preserved. This is the gap that the Iterated Reckless Ignorance Principle defended here is meant to fill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Courts commonly allow willful ignorance to satisfy the knowledge element of a crime. The traditional rationale for this doctrine is that willfully ignorant misconduct is just as culpable as knowing misconduct. But it is not obvious that this “equal culpability thesis” holds across the board. Is it true in all cases of willful ignorance or only some? This is the question I investigate here. Specifically, I argue against several common versions of the equal culpability thesis before defending my own restricted version. First, I argue that the broadest version of the thesis, adopted by many courts, is overinclusive. Then I argue against several restricted versions of the thesis offered by legal theorists including Doug Husak, David Luban, and Deborah Hellman. My own account, by contrast, is premised on a duty of reasonable investigation. If my account is on the right track, the widely employed willful ignorance doctrine stands in need of reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research shows that consumers who willfully ignore ethical product attributes denigrate other, more ethical consumers who seek out and use this information in making purchase decisions. Across three studies, willfully ignorant consumers negatively judge ethical others they have never met across various disparate personality traits (e.g., fashionable, boring). The denigration arises from the self-threat inherent in negative social comparison with others who acted ethically instead of choosing not to do so. In addition, this denigration has detrimental downstream consequences, undermining the denigrator's commitment to ethical values, as evidenced by reduced anger toward firms who violate the ethical principle in question and reduced intention to behave ethically in the future. There are two moderators of the effect: Denigration becomes less strong if willfully ignorant consumers have a second opportunity to act ethically after initially ignoring the ethical product information and also significantly weakens if initially ignoring the ethical attribute is seen as justifiable. These results have implications for understanding ethical consumption behavior, perceptions of ethical consumerism in general, and marketing of ethical products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In America, we like to say that we live in a democracy. Yet, it is difficult to believe that the majority would allow current practices to continue if citizens knew how the food animals they eat are treated – both during their short lives and during slaughter. The problem is that the citizens don’t know, and it is not a case of willful blindness. Take a moment to recall what you know about our meat industry. Can’t think of much? That is the goal of the meat industry: out of sight, out of mind. In several states, so called ‘Ag-Gag’ laws are designed to keep the truth from the public. In those states, it is a felony to obtain a job with the intent of being a whistle blower. The meat industry knows that if it were to be exposed, the public would demand better treatment of animals, a demand that would decrease profits for the meat industry. This paper will explain these ‘Ag-Gag’ laws in detail, explore their effect on our society, shed light on the practices that the meat industry tries – very successfully – to hide from voters and consumers, and examine the scary results that can occur when an industry is allowed to regulate itself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Contractual duress, unconstitutional conditions, and blackmail have long been puzzling. The puzzle is why these doctrines sometimes condemn threatening lawful action to induce agreements but sometimes do not. This Article provides a general solution to this puzzle. Such threats are (and should be) deemed unlawfully coercive only when they are contrived, meaning that the threatened action would not have occurred if no threat could have been made. I show that such contrived threats can be credible because making the threat strongly influences whether the threatened action occurs. When such threats are uncontrived warnings, meaning that the threatened action would have occurred even if no threat could have been made, they are not coercive and can only benefit the agreeing parties. However, sometimes (as with blackmail) agreements produced by uncontrived warnings are also unlawful on the ground that they harm third parties. The contrived-threat test explains why the Medicaid-defunding threat in the Affordable Care Act was unconstitutional. It also explains why the recent King v Burwell conclusion--that the Affordable Care Act does not withhold tax credits from states that do not create insurance exchanges--would have been constitutionally required even if it had not been required by the statutory text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Willful ignorance is an important concept in criminal law and jurisprudence, though it has not received much discussion in philosophy. When it is mentioned, however, it is regularly assumed to be a kind of self-deception. In this article I will argue that self-deception and willful ignorance are distinct psychological kinds. First, some examples of willful ignorance are presented and discussed, and an analysis of the phenomenon is developed. Then it is shown that current theories of self-deception give no support to the idea that willful ignorance is a kind of self-deception. Afterwards an independent argument is adduced for excluding willful ignorance from this category. The crucial differences between the two phenomena are explored, as are the reasons why they are so easily conflated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we look at two interpretive puzzles associated with the thought of Avicenna that are still of intrinsic philosophical interest today. The first concerns to what extent, if at all, Avicenna's deity can be said to act freely. The second concerns to what extent, if at all, humans within Avicenna's philosophical system can be said to act freely. It is our contention that only through a careful analysis of Avicenna's theory of action can one begin to assess his position concerning the status of the will and so provide a satisfactory response to these two interpretative issues. We hope to show that Avicenna can account for divine freedom and that, at least in the case of prophets and sages, humans too are capable of free action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the U.S. courts' traditional rationale for the willful ignorance doctrine. Topics discussed include decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in "Global Tech Appliances, Inc. v. SEB S.A" regarding the traditional rationale for this doctrine; equally culpability of deliberate ignorance and positive knowledge; and scope of the equal culpability thesis.

The article discusses various reasons why the U.S. Congress reportedly needs to revise the nation's Foreign Corrupt Practices Act's (FCPA's) mens rea guidelines in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in the patent infringement case Global-Tech Appliances Inc. v. SEB which deals with a willful blindness standard legal standard. Foreign bribery allegations involving the Wal-Mart Stores Inc. retail firm are mentioned, along with corporate corruption claims and American criminal law.

The article discusses various legal aspects of money laundering in America, focusing on criminal law elements such as willful blindness, legal defenses such as double jeopardy and constitutional vagueness, and the U.S. Money Laundering Control Act of 1986. Law enforcement sting operations and criminal intent are mentioned, along with criminal penalties in America and the U.S. Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). Unlawful activity-related proceeds are also examined.

The article discusses various legal aspects of corporate criminal liability in America, focusing on the U.S. Department of Justice's enforcement policies, prosecutorial discretion in America, and issues related to conspiracy and a willful blindness doctrine. The U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and a collective knowledge doctrine are mentioned, along with corporate mergers in America and non-prosecution agreements. Disgorgement and deferred prosecution agreements are also examined.

In this article, the author focuses on the problems of willful blindness being continuously encountered in the criminal law of Canada. Topics discussed include relationship of willful blindness with recklessness in Canadian criminal laws, judicial opinions of the Supreme Court of Canada on the concept of willful blindness and judicial review on the negligence that took place in the Canadian laws.

Damages can be assessed by the court, by law or by the willful agreement of parties. This study analyzes the notion of damages, the conditions for awarding damages, as well as their assessment by the court and their legal assessment. The purpose of assessment of damages incurred by the creditor is that of reinstating the creditor to the situation in which it would have been found, if the debtor had voluntarily performed the obligations assumed by concluding the contract. Judicial assessment of damages is made by judgment and involves the judge's examination of all the conditions for undertaking contractual liability, particularly with regard to the prejudice caused to the creditor by the debtor's non-performance of obligations. Legal assessment of damages occurs in the cases regulated by Articles 1535 and 1536 of the new Civil Code and falls within the scope of obligations that have as object the service of granting a sum of money, to which the legislator also adds the case of obligations to do, which can be assessed in money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the legal aspects of money laundering in America as of September 2013, focusing on various issues such as the willful blindness doctrine, a double jeopardy legal defense, and the U.S. Congress' passage of the nation's Money Laundering Control Act of 1986. Other topics include sting operations, interstate commerce, and a constitutional vagueness defense to money laundering allegations. The U.S. Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) is also examined.

The article discusses corporate criminal liability in America as of September 2013, focusing on various topics such as the U.S. Congress' passage of the nation's Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the disgorgement legal doctrine, and the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines. Other topics include America's willful blindness doctrine, legal remedies in the U.S., and the economic aspects of sanctions against corporations. Breaches of fiduciary duties and the legal aspects of mergers and dissolutions are examined.

The article discusses the decision of the U. S Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in case Bard Peripheral Vascular Inc. v. W.L. Gore & Associates Inc. that changed the willful patent infringement landscape. Topics discussed include the concept of patents, patent infringement, and various types of patent damages, practical implications of the Bard case on litigants as well as the court system, and another Federal Circuit case Underwater Devices Inc. v. Morrison-Knudsen Co. Inc.

The article focuses on the substitution of willful blindness to the actual knowledge under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Topics discussed include copyright infringement, online service providers (OSP) and liabilities. It also discusses statutory balances, role of judiciary and safe harbors.

The article discusses the existence of copyright law which is for public benefit and compensation and reward law for the creators. Topics discussed include tensions created by copyright law in law policy, the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which highlights the tensions created and the application of equitable willful blindness law for removing safety provided by the DMCA.

The article focuses on the induced patent infringement and the Willful blindness law. Topics discussed include secondary patent infringement, willful blindness doctrine which is accepted by all Circuit Court of Appeals, and failure to discover the existence of a competitor's patent. It mentions the U.S. Supreme Court case Global-Tech Appliances v. SEB SA which concluded that the induced acts will cause patent infringement.

The article discusses U.S. copyright laws, the willful blindness legal doctrine, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit's ruling in the 2012 case Viacom International Inc. v. YouTube Inc. which deals with alleged copyright infringement and a safe harbor provision for service providers which is located in Section 512(c) of the nation's 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. A copyright holder's exclusive rights are also addressed in this case.

Since the early 1970s, the Fourteenth Amendment's emancipatory potential has dramatically eroded, with rapid plunges followed by ever-lower plateaus. In 2007, we entered another cycle of precipitous devolution. Today, this latest drop seems to be accelerating along two supposedly distinct tracks: intent doctrine and colorblindness. Ostensibly, the search for discriminatory intent provides a means of ferreting out unconstitutional racial discrimination. In contrast, colorblindness subjects raceconscious laws to strict scrutiny whether their impetus is benign or invidious, rendering intent irrelevant. On and off the Supreme Court, supporters and critics spar over whether these doctrines fulfill the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection. Nevertheless, both sides accept the seemingly fundamental division in racial jurisprudence between intent and colorblindness. This Article challenges the notion of a divided equal protection. First, it shows that before the advent of colorblindness, intent doctrine formed the undivided--and reasonably efficacious--heart of equal protection. Intent doctrine once worked tolerably well for detecting the mistreatment of non-Whites, and also in distinguishing benign from invidious discrimination--the two tasks at which current equal protection grievously fails. Second, it demonstrates that colorblindness developed in response to intent doctrine, and in turn led to a disastrous reworking of that approach. Intent and colorblindness are not separate, but inextricably intertwined. Rather than seeing equal protection today as bifurcated, we should understand it as again unified, though under what might best be termed "intentional blindness." Combining the names of the two doctrines, this portmanteau captures the marrow of the Court's racial jurisprudence--which seems intentionally blind to the persistence of racial discrimination against non-Whites. It is this resistance that connects the current assaults on antidiscrimination statutes to the impending demise of affirmative action. It also links both of these to a larger history of reversals in equality law spanning four decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the rule of law in the U.S. in 2012. Topics include the impact of willful blindness to the diminished importance of the rule of law, the impact of modernism on the U.S. rule of law, and how polarity impacts judicial adherence to precedent. Information is provided on criticisms of legal positivism, the post-positivist rule of law, and rule-constrained decision making of judges. The author discusses the rule of law's 'crisis of modernity' and provides an overview of modernism in legal theory.

The article focuses on the limits of contributory trademark infringement against Internet service providers (ISPs). Topics include direct trademark infringement through the manufacturing of counterfeit goods, the direct control and monitoring rule, and willful blindness. Information is provided on reasonable anticipation and intellectual property crimes.

The article discusses the crime of money laundering in the U.S. as of March 2012, focusing on an overview of Section 1956 of the nation's Money Laundering Control Act of 1986, as well as an analysis of several criminal defenses such as constitutional vagueness, impermissibility, and double jeopardy. The criminal element of willful blindness, which is part of the crime of money laundering, is also addressed.

The article discusses corporate criminal liability in the U.S. as of March 2012, focusing on an analysis of the criminal elements of conspiracy and willful blindness, as well as an examination of potential remedies such as probation for criminal liability linked to corporations. It states that a court might order the disgorgement of illegal corporate profits in cases involving money laundering and obscenity.

The article presents information on the high-stake multidistrict litigation based on man-made environmental disasters in the U.S. with reference to the oil rig explosion of the Deepwater Horizon. The issues related to compensation and sanction, application of willful misconduct and gross negligence and the degrees of negligence are discussed. The need of tracing the problematic developments and criteria-guided analytical framework for determining the faults is also discussed.

From fairly inconspicuous beginnings, the willful-blindness doctrine has proliferated throughout federal courts. Federal prosecutors currently request willful-blindness jury instructions even when the evidence does not warrant their use, and trial judges frequently grant these requests over defense objections that inappropriate willful-blindness instructions confuse jurors and relieve prosecutors of their burden of proof with respect to the defendant's mental state. One of the primary reasons federal courts misuse willful-blindness instructions is that the circuits are split over the appropriate guidelines for the appellate review of willful-blindness instructions. To curb misuse of willful-blindness instructions, appellate courts should use the abuse-of-discretion standard to review a trial court's decision to give a willful-blindness instruction, use the de novo standard to review the accuracy of the wording of a willful-blindness instruction, and delineate instances where the inappropriate use of willful-blindness instructions is not harmless error, especially in contexts such as white-collar criminal prosecutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the criminal tax cases and the claims of ignorance of relevant legal duties or misunderstanding. The complexities in the tax code of the U.S., interpretation of willful blindness by the U.S. courts and the standard for conviction are discussed. The non-tax fraud case law, strict interpretation of conscious avoidance in tax statutes and the duty implicitly imposed on taxpayers are also discussed with reference to the trial of Cheek v. United States.

The article offers the author's insights on the fault elements of indirect patent infringement in an objective point of view. The author discussed the foundational concepts of such a fault including components of a legal claim, the mental culpability in the context of tort, and alternative fault approaches. He presents a description of the fault components in willful and indirect infringements, and explicates how their historical context formed the view of such components as involving an investigation on the accused party's mental condition. He claims that the conventional view of fault is wrong, and states that mental state ideas in tort can be transferred into patent law. He suggests an alternative means of viewing fault in patent infringement that is identical to objective recklessness.