Philosophy of Criminal Law

Francis Wharton was an American legal writer and educationalist and the foremost American authority on international law. He authored the doctrine in criminal law (Wharton’s Rule of Concert of Action) that to form a conspiracy takes one more person than is necessary to commit the crime (i.e. it takes two people to gamble. Therefore, two people gambling cannot be guilty of conspiracy to gamble, though three can).

The following pages form the first part of the eighth edition of my work on Criminal Law, now in press. My object, in this partial and preliminary publication, is to call attention to certain points on which Criminal Law touches other branches of philosophy. These points are : —

1. Retribution as a local as well as ethical sequence
2. Immorality as distinguished from indictability
3. Religion and secular law occupying distinct sovereignty
4. Mental disturbance as affecting responsibility
5. Qualified responsibility
6. How far responsibility is conditioned by knowledge
7. Limits of necessity
8. Origin of the State, so far as concerns the reservation of natural rights
9. Limitation of the penal authority of the State to the rights which cannot be vindicated by private act
10. Purpose unconditioned by time
11. Complexity of purpose
12. Crime as illogical
13. Effectiveness of omissions
14. Inalienability of primary rights
15. Causation as the disturbance of an equilibrium
16. Causation imputable only to moral agents
17. ls not necessarily physical – Excerpts from the author’s Preface