The widespread phenomenon of enacting HIV-specific laws to criminally punish transmission of, exposure to, or non-disclosure of HIV, is counter-active to good public health conceptions and repugnant to elementary human rights principles. The authors provide ten reasons why criminal laws and criminal prosecutions are bad strategy in the epidemic.

The Report on " The Criminal Law and Sexual Offenders prepared by the Joint Committee on Psychiatry and the Law appointed by the British Medical Association and the Magistrates Association, focuses attention upon a part, and perhaps not the most important, of the larger problem of the medical treatment of crime. It will be generally accepted that unless the matter is viewed in perspective, and ...

A fundamental principle of constitutional and criminal law is that all people charged with committing an offense must be given an opportunity to defend themselves (see generally, LaFave & Israel, 1985). A number of specific rights emanate from this general principle, including the "right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury," the right to be confronted with the witnesses against h...

Criminal law can justly lay claim to being the native domain of law and economics. From Bentham to Becker, no area of law has been more brightly illuminated by the radiance of economic logic. Not coincidentally, in no other area of the law has the conflict between economics and ordinary moral sensibilities been perceived to be so sharp. When we are deciding how to apportion punishment, our inst...

On May 9, 2002, Canadian Health Minister Anne McLellan introduced Bill C-56, An Act Respecting Assisted Human Reproduction (the “AHR Act”), in the House of Commons. The Bill was then re-introduced in the House on October 9, 2002 as Bill C-13. This proposed legislation strives to deal with the moral and ethical concerns that surround research and science associated with reproductive technologies...

INTRODUCTION Under common law, criminal responsibility usually distinguishes between intentional act and accident, andmost serious criminal offenses consist of both a voluntary act and a guilty mind.1 This treatment presumes that no defendant should be held criminally responsible without a finding of fault. Despite this long-standing conceptual commitment to fairness, criminal law continues to ...

The criminal law is centrally concerned with culpability or mens rea— roughly, the mental (or quasi-mental) components of blame. But culpability has at least two dimensions. Narrow culpability involves the purpose, knowledge, recklessness, or negligence required by statute for each material element. What Joshua Dressler aptly calls broad culpability involves the other mental (or quasi-mental) c...

In particular circumstances, the civil and criminal laws of England required that a litigant or a prisoner convicted of a capital offence should be examined to determine whether she was pregnant. Such efforts to solve a medical problem for legal reasons illustrate, among other things, one of the interfaces between the two disciplines and their interdependence when confronted with a common probl...