The Unmet Challenge of Criminal Theory

The last several decades have witnessed an outpouring of serious articles bringing to bear the methods of analytic philosophy to the issues of substantive criminal law. J. L. Austin, a philosopher and not a lawyer, may have been the first to demonstrate the potential of probing legal concepts such as mistake and accident, justification and excuse, for their philosophical potential. H.L.A. Hart carried forward the literature with several path breaking essays on criminal law. It is only in the last few years, however, that we have encountered an explosion of interest in the basic questions of criminal law. As the essays in this volume, as well as other works in progress, demonstrate, we now have a critical mass of scholars interested in the philosophical dimensions of punishment, self-defense, justification, excuse, omissions, and causation