Mark Dsouza
Associate Professor in Law at UCL. My research focuses on the philosophy and doctrine of criminal law. I co-edit the Criminal Justice Theory Blog https://criminaljusticetheoryblog.wordpress.com/, and co-organise the Assize Seminars in Criminal Law https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-and-subject-groups/assize-seminars-cutting-edge-criminal-law.
My monograph, 'Rationale-Based Defences in Criminal Law' (based on my doctoral research) was published by Hart Publishing in May 2017. (It has been reviewed in the Modern Law Review, and Criminal Law & Philosophy). In it, I suggest a new account of the various types of rationale-based defences in the criminal law, and offer suggestions as to how they should be understood, interpreted, and applied.
I have also published on the theoretical foundations of consent in the criminal law (Law & Philosophy, 2014; SSRN, 2013), the supposed duty of retreat before using force in self defence (OJLS, 2015), and the conception of culpability that underlies the criminal law (King’s Law Journal, 2015), the theory of accessorial liability (UCL JLJ, 2019), and the theory of corporate criminal liability (Cambridge LJ 2020). My latest paper proposes an alternative to the act/omission distinction in criminal law and won the Best Paper prize at the 2020 SLS Conference. It is forthcoming in the March 2021 issue of the journal, Legal Studies.
I read for my LLM (First Class) and PhD at the University of Cambridge. I accepted my first full-time lectureship at the University of Liverpool, and moved to UCL in 2016.
My monograph, 'Rationale-Based Defences in Criminal Law' (based on my doctoral research) was published by Hart Publishing in May 2017. (It has been reviewed in the Modern Law Review, and Criminal Law & Philosophy). In it, I suggest a new account of the various types of rationale-based defences in the criminal law, and offer suggestions as to how they should be understood, interpreted, and applied.
I have also published on the theoretical foundations of consent in the criminal law (Law & Philosophy, 2014; SSRN, 2013), the supposed duty of retreat before using force in self defence (OJLS, 2015), and the conception of culpability that underlies the criminal law (King’s Law Journal, 2015), the theory of accessorial liability (UCL JLJ, 2019), and the theory of corporate criminal liability (Cambridge LJ 2020). My latest paper proposes an alternative to the act/omission distinction in criminal law and won the Best Paper prize at the 2020 SLS Conference. It is forthcoming in the March 2021 issue of the journal, Legal Studies.
I read for my LLM (First Class) and PhD at the University of Cambridge. I accepted my first full-time lectureship at the University of Liverpool, and moved to UCL in 2016.
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Papers by Mark Dsouza
This chapter argues that at least in relation to the substantive law of core criminal offences – the kind that form the foundations of substantive criminal law teaching at universities – these challenges are sometimes overstated. It aims to consider whether the criminal law has the resources to help us identify cases in which the artificial intelligence technology (AIT) seemingly criminal activity should be attributed to a human defendant. The chapter addresses offences with three different types of actus reus stipulations separately, since they raise different issues in the attribution analysis. These are: specific conduct offences, specific consequence offences and state of affairs offences. The set of concerns most frequently voiced are to do with instances in which the AIT is faced with a difficult choice about which criminalised outcome to bring about. There are several different inchoate offences, but once again, they are all composed of actus reus and mens rea elements that have previously been analysed.
I argue that this ‘Remark-able Conduct Requirement’ (RCR) analysis helps us narrow the field of conduct-tokens that are normatively appropriate candidates for criminalisation, and when adapted for use in interpreting existing offences it
(a) generates familiar and plausible liability outcomes;
(b) simplifies the application of the law;
(c) offers a principled argument to limit the scope of offences drafted in overly broad terms, by excluding innocuous doings from potential criminal liability; and
(d) suggests ways to make progress on philosophical puzzles about how we should conduct ourselves.
Email me at my ucl.ac.uk address if you would like a copy of the accepted paper.
In this paper, I consider whether these shortcomings can be remedied by reformulating the identification doctrine to treat all corporate officers and employees as embodying the corporation when acting within their real or ostensible corporate authority.
attempt to correct this imbalance by developing a philosophically enriched exegesis (and where appropriate, critique) of the English law on criminal accessorial liability, by reference to the structures of responsibility underpinning English criminal law. I take
the relatively settled state of the English criminal law of principal liability to suggest that it is a good guide to these underlying structures. Therefore, using these rules (as adjusted for the differences in context between liability as a principal and liability as an
accessory) as a template, I evaluate the English law of criminal accessorial liability.
(a) the philosophical source (if any) of the duty to retreat;
(b) the interests that may privately be defended; and
(c) the point of time at which private force becomes available to a defender.
I address these disputes by suggesting that rules requiring retreat or submission must be limitations on private force that flow from the state's monopoly of legitimate force within its jurisdiction. I argue that these limitations on private force operate at two stages. The first stage limitations restrict 'in-principle' access to private force to cases in which the threat cannot be avoided non-forcefully, and the second stage limitations ensure that the force privately deployed does not exceed the force that the state could itself have legitimately deployed. Next, I examine whether certain interests often taken to be privately defensible ought to be treated as such. Finally, I describe the model of retreat and submission that follows from the ideas canvassed.
If you'd like a copy of this paper, please email me and I will be happy to share a proof.
Books by Mark Dsouza
The monograph breaks new ground by defending a model of rationale-based defences that turns solely on the quality of the defendant's reasoning. This model is shown to generate appealing liability outcomes, advance convincing solutions to questions that have puzzled criminal lawyers for years, and offer suggestions for doctrinal reform that are both normatively sound, and practical. By proposing new ways way to think about defences, this book makes an original contribution to criminal law theory that will be of benefit to academics, practitioners, and persons interested in law reform.
Legal Blog Posts by Mark Dsouza
Book Reviews by Mark Dsouza