The criminal law's person is a multifaceted exploration of how substantive criminal law takes humans – or makes them out – to be. As explained in the editors’ efficient and perspicacious introduction essay, the criminal law's person might be set by how people actually are, what they ought to be, or some purpose-driven fictional construct (p.8). The book's final essay, ‘Implicit bias, self-defence and the reasonable person’, by Jules Holroyd and Federico Picinali, unpacks ‘reasonable person’ belief-based exculpatory tests in defensive force law in England and Wales and the United States and evaluates them for their facilitation of morally problematic cognitive bias, which, the authors conclude, ‘cannot be avoided in the presence of racist social structures’ (p.167). The authors push past the ‘reasonable person’ as the empirically ordinary person (p.179) to the possessor of reasonably-based and non-culpably held beliefs. But there remains, I think, further scope for consideration of the ‘reasonable person’ as an optional heuristic for getting at the actual standard of reasonableness. At least one of the jurisdictions under consideration does not even use the phrase ‘reasonable person’ in statute, but uses ‘reasonable’.1 The standard of ‘reasonable’ itself is never wrong, only its application can be wrong, and the authors’ points about implicit biases could be redeployed in regard to its application.
Holroyd and Picinali invoke a conduct rules and decision rules framing distinction for their evaluation. This dual evaluation is perhaps one reflection of what Claes Lernestedt (in his contribution, ‘Standard-setting versus tracking “profound” blameworthiness: what should be the role of the rules for ascription of responsibility’) identifies as criminal law's tension between forward-looking ambitions and its limiting constraints (p.56). Lernestedt calls for criminal law to seek ‘“profound” blameworthiness in the concrete person’ (p.73). This concrete person is the actual person, not the construct, and to appreciate them in criminal law we need more input from disciplines such as psychiatry and psychology (p.73). Broadly speaking, similar concern arises in the essays by Michael Thorburn (‘In search of the criminal law's person’), Alan Norrie (‘Victims who victimise: guilt in political theory and moral psychology’) and Craig Reeves (‘Responsibility beyond blame: unfree agency and the moral psychology of criminal law's persons’). These essays each develop critical reaction to the criminal law orthodoxy that assumes the would-be (non-insane) criminal defendant as a rational autonomous agent. They question the very possibility of the criminal law's authority. Thorburn is quite demanding about the level of political understanding needed on the part of the defendant for legitimate criminal liability imposition. It is difficult to go along with Norrie's styling of the recipient of structural social injustice as a ‘victim’ in the same