Document Type

Article

Publication Title

California Law Review

Abstract

One of the innumerable debts I owe Sandy Kadish is in respect of his warm and consistent encouragement to invest some portion of my philosophical energies in the problems of the criminal law. When I replied that what I knew most about was the history of political philosophy, Sandy was undeterred. "Kant wrote about criminal law," he would say. "So did Hobbes and Locke. Those guys talked about capital punishment, individual responsibility and self-defense, just as much as they dealt with topics in political theory like the nature of law and the obligation to obey." He was right. There is plenty to discuss and plenty of inspiration to be drawn from the canon of traditional political philosophy, so far as criminal jurisprudence is concerned. So here is a response to my dear friend and mentor. In this Essay, I would like to consider the answers given by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Sanford Kadish to the following question, which continues to exercise us in modern criminal jurisprudence: If a person is to be exculpated-for example, in respect of the killing of another human being-because his act was justified, must it be justified from a point of view that transcends his own (socially justified, for example, or justified from a God's-eye point of view), or is there room for a concept of justification that is, in philosophical terminology, agent-relative?

First Page

711

DOI

https://doi.org/10.15779/Z38FB1Q

Volume

88

Publication Date

2000

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