SAGE Journal Articles

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Article 1: Green, Richard T. (September 2002). Common Law, Equity, and American Public Administration. The American Review of Public Administration, 32(3): 263-294.

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This article evaluates the claims of those who advocate the use of common law as a corrective to the statutory and rule-based excesses of the American administrative state. Their claims are assessed in light of common-law history and in terms of current administrative law. Although many claims are exaggerated or simply wrong, there are some aspects of common law that deserve attention in public administration. These are explained from the perspective of common-law evolution. Common law developed in a very pragmatic and experimental fashion and therefore displays some qualities public administrators will find useful, especially in the adjudicative realm of agency decisions, but more broadly as well. A model with five features of common-law practice is presented for public administrators to use in improving an agency’s decision making under law.

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Article 2: Duff, R.A. (August 2010). A criminal law for citizens. Theoretical Criminology, 14(3): 293-309.

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Rather than appealing to penal parsimony as a constraint on the otherwise insatiable demands of the criminal justice system, we should develop a positive account of the proper aims of criminal law which shows parsimony, or moderation, to be integral to those aims. We can do this by developing a republican conception of criminal law as a law that citizens impose on themselves: such a law will be modest in its scope, and will provide a criminal process of trial and punishment that addresses those subjected to it with the respect due to them as citizens.

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Article 3: Dyson, Matthew (June 2015). The Future of Joint-up Thinking: Living in a Post-accessory Liability World. The Journal of Criminal Law, 79(3): 181-197.

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The law of secondary liability continues to trouble defendants, victims, politicians, practitioners, judges, academics and laypeople. In a recent report, the House of Commons Justice Select Committee called even more forcefully for the Government to consult on reforming the law of ‘joint enterprise’. The committee called, in particular, for a stronger fault requirement: at the moment a secondary party can be liable for the full offence merely because he foresaw a chance that the principal might commit a crime. This article discusses the report, analyses the substantive law in issue and considers appropriate reforms. The report is also a chance to reassess what secondary liability looks like today, a process that reveals that we now live in a post-accessory liability world where ‘joint enterprise’ rules. This shift in language and corresponding shift in fault elements has caused significant uncertainty in understanding the law as well as practical injustice, making it easier to convict for more serious crimes than should be the case. The paper draws on an analysis of the joint enterprise cases decided in 2014 to show how attitudes to evidential and sentencing issues are shaping the substantive law.