我要吃瓜

Citation

Duff RA & Marshall SE (2024) Reporting Crimes and Arresting Criminals: Citizens’ Rights and Responsibilities Under Their Criminal Law. Criminal Law and Philosophy, 18, pp. 557-577. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-023-09701-8

Abstract
Taking as its starting point Miri Gur-Arye's critical discussion of a legal duty to report crime, this paper sketches an idealising conception of a democratic republic whose citizens could be expected to recognise a civic responsibility to report crime, in order to assist the enterprise of a criminal law that is their common law. After explaining why they should recognise such a responsibility, what its scope should be, and how it should be exercised, and noting that that civic responsibility must include a responsibility to report one's own crimes; it discusses whether that civic responsibility could ground at least a limited legal duty to report certain types of crime. It then turns to the question of whether a civic responsibility to assist the criminal law's enterprise of bringing wrongdoers to account could include a responsibility to arrest suspected or known offenders if the police cannot or will not do so-a responsibility to make a citizen's arrest, and the legal power to discharge that responsibility: how far should citizens feel entitled, or duty-bound, thus to 'take the law into their own hands'?

Keywords
Miri Gur-Arye; Duty to report crime; Democratic republic; Civic responsibility; Citizen's arrest; Vigilantism

Journal
Criminal Law and Philosophy: Volume 18