Wydział Prawa i Administracji Uniwersytet Warszawski

Dziekan Wydziału Prawa i Administracji Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
prof. dr hab. Tomasz Giaro
zaprasza na seminarium im. Leona Petrażyckiego pod tytułem
Citizens and Their Criminal Law
który wygłosi prof. Antony Duff
z University of Stirling.

Dean of the Faculty of Law and Administration at the University of Warsaw
prof. dr hab. Tomasz Giaro
cordially invites to a Leon Petrażycki's Seminar titled
Citizens and Their Criminal Law
which will be given by prof. Antony Duff
from University of Stirling.

Wykład odbędzie się w sali 416 w Collegium Iuridicum I
28 października 2022 r. (piątek) o godz. 10:00.

Wykład zostanie wygłoszony w języku angielskim.

The lecture will take place in room 416 at the Collegium Iuridicum I
October 28th, 2022 (Friday) at 10:00.

The lecture will be conducted in English.

Zarys wykładu

Imagine a truly democratic republic—a polity of equal citizens. In such a polity the law, including the criminal law, is a common law: it is our law, as citizens. This paper discusses some of the implications of this (idealised) conception of criminal law.

If the criminal law is our law, we are collectively responsible for it. We are responsible for the laws that are enacted and enforced; we are responsible for the activities of the officials who apply the law—which includes a responsibility to ensure that they are accountable. But we will also have responsibilities or duties to assist actively in the criminal law’s enterprise: if it is our law, we must be its agents, not merely its subjects. These responsibilities will be of various kinds, depending in part on the particular civic roles that we might (either by choice or non-voluntarily) come to play in relation to the criminal law—such roles as, for instance, victim, witness, suspect, offender, convicted offender; for each of these roles is defined by a distinctive set of responsibilities (and rights) grounded in its contribution to the law’s aims.

In this paper we focus on just two kinds of (potential) responsibility: responsibilities to report crimes (including our own), and the responsibility, or power, to make a citizen’s arrest.

However we understand the aims of the criminal law (retribution, prevention, accountability, …), as active citizens we have a responsibility to report crimes. Note, however—

• This is not to say that we have a duty to report every (actual or suspected) crime: like the officials who administer the law, lay citizens must exercise discretion in deciding which crimes to report (and are accountable for their exercise of that discretion).
• The responsibility to report crimes includes a responsibility to report my own crimes: I owe it to my fellow citizens to answer to them for the public wrongs I commit.
• This is a civic responsibility; whether we should give it formal force, enforceability, as a legal duty is a further question.

But note that we have such responsibilities only in a just and decent polity: insofar as we live in polities that are unjust, our civic responsibilities will be quite different.

Do we also have a responsibility, should we also claim the power, to make a citizen’s arrest if the police are unavailable or unwilling to arrest a suspected offender? It might seem that this too is a responsibility that active citizens should have, and claim: that they should in this way be ready to act as ‘officials in civilian clothes’. However, various questions then arise—

• What is it to make an arrest?
• Under what conditions should lay citizens have the power to make an arrest; what kind of force should they be allowed to use?
• What kinds of risk does the power to make a citizen’s arrest impose, on whom?

A recent criminal case in England shows the importance of these questions, and the difficulty of finding plausible answers to them.