Self, Others and the State Relations of Criminal Responsibility

"Criminal responsibility is having a brilliant career. With its dual dimensions - as both the basis on which individuals are called to account for criminal conduct, and the form or structure of the criminal law - criminal responsibility is now central to the criminal law. Responsibility has come to occupy this position in criminal law over the course of the twentieth century. At the turn of the twentieth century, lawyers, scholars and reformers were concerned with a range of matters, including the organisation of the criminal law and its mode of expression - as common law, legislation or code - but, by the turn of the twenty-first century, the myriad of concerns with the criminal law - including its organisation and its mode - were each refracted through the lens of criminal responsibility. In the intervening period, criminal responsibility became key to the self-definition of the criminal law, and the language of criminal responsibility became the language of the criminal law, spoken by scholars, judges, legislators, reformers and others. As a result, in the current era, criminal responsibility is not just one topic of study among many, but seems to hold the clue to understanding the criminal law as a whole. There is a general story told about this rise to prominence of criminal responsibility. In broad terms, and at some risk of caricature, this story runs along these lines: the centrality of criminal responsibility to criminal law in the current era represents the maturation of the law of crime, with criminal responsibility providing an internal guiding line allowing criminal law to be measured against itself. In Lindsay Farmer's words, criminal responsibility has become central to 'the law's reflexive account of itself', that is, to the criminal legal story about the criminal law.1 In this general story, the era of mature criminal law dates from the middle of the twentieth century, when, aided by the scholarship of leading legal theorists, such as HLA Hart at Oxford, and by major, hybrid academic-practice law reform projects, such as the Model Penal Code in the USA, criminal responsibility came to represent the normative heart of the law of crime"--