Towards a Legal History of American Criminal Theory: Culture and Doctrine from Blackstone to the Model Penal Code

Authors

Gerald F. Leonard, Boston Univeristy School of LawFollow

Author granted license

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2003

ISSN

1093-3514

Publisher

Buffalo Criminal Law Center

Language

en-US

Abstract

Long before the birth of American law, English criminal jurisprudence had firmly established the general proposition that crime required not just a guilty act but a guilty mind. Coke’s maxim to that effect, actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea, is still frequently deployed by courts and scholars alike. So is the phrase coined by Blackstone to describe that guilty mind: the “vicious will” that must be present for an act to become a crime. In another great maxim, however, Holmes said that “general propositions do not decide concrete cases.” It is not too shocking, then, that these general propositions of Coke and Blackstone have been pushed aside whenever judges have felt the need. While courts have often insisted on proof of a guilty mind, they have also freely applied strict liability and entrenched that doctrine in many areas of the criminal law.

Comments

Boston University School of Law Working Paper Series, Public Law & Legal Theory Working Paper No. 02-19

Recommended Citation

Gerald F. Leonard, Towards a Legal History of American Criminal Theory: Culture and Doctrine from Blackstone to the Model Penal Code , 6 Buffalo Criminal Law Review 691 (2003).
Available at: https://doi.org/10.1525/nclr.2003.6.2.691