IS IGNORANCE OF THE LAW NO EXCUSE?!

When ignorance is no excuse: Different roles for intent across moral domains.

A key factor in legal and moral judgments is intent. Intent differentiates, for instance, murder from manslaughter. Is this true for all moral judgments? People deliver moral judgments of many kinds of actions, including harmful actions (e.g., assault) and purity violations (e.g., incest, consuming taboo substances). We show that intent is a key factor for moral judgments of harm, but less of a...

Misused honorary authorship is no excuse for quantifying the unquantifiable.

Kovacs argues that honorary authorship and regarding each co-author of multi-authored papers as if they were sole authors when the performance of researchers is being evaluated by their publications mean that we should require authors to identify what proportion of each publication should be attributed to each co-author. Even if such attributions could be made reliably, such a change should not...

HIV: low prevalence is no excuse for not testing.

There is no excuse for domestic abuse--reflections on violence.

I could comment for hours about victims I’ve seen over my 25 years in the Emergency Room (ER) who were battered by those they trusted, about swollen, pulpy, fractured faces; about broken limbs, multiple bruises, stab wounds and gunshot wounds that were meant to maim; about panic, fear, hopelessness and about the deaths of some of the victims. I could comment about the horrific effects on childr...

Ignorance and Mistake of Criminal Law, Noncriminal Law, and Fact

After clarifying the distinction between mistakes of fact and mistakes of law, this article explores in detail an important distinction within the category of mistake of law, between mistake about the criminal law itself and mistake about noncriminal law norms that the criminal law makes relevant—for example, about the civil law of property (in a theft prosecution) or of divorce (in a bigamy pr...