Research

My research mostly focuses on criminal law and philosophy. My papers cover (1) criminal doctrine, (2) criminal law theory, and (3) other areas of interest.

Criminal doctrine: I wrote my DPhil (PhD) thesis on the criminal law’s incapacity rules, such as insanity, diminished responsibility, and infancy. More recently I’ve written about various aspects of criminal law, including defences, complicity, and homicide.

Criminal law theory: I’ve written about proportionate punishment, and plan to return to some questions about principles by which to evaluate the criminal law (eg fair labelling).

Other: I’m interested in a lot of things besides criminal law, and have a few papers to write on law reform, tort law, and moral philosophy.

Publications

  1. ‘Windle Revisited’ [2018] Criminal Law Review 987 [paywalled article; final draft]

    2. The insanity defence is available at common law if the defendant ‘did not know he was doing what was wrong’ (part of the famous M’Naghten rules). English law interprets this very restrictively to mean ‘Did not know it was legally> wrong’. I argue that this interpretation was based on flawed reasoning.


  2. ‘Proportionality’s Lower Bound’ (2021) 15 Criminal Law and Philosophy 393-405 [open access]

    3. When is punishment proportionate? I claim that punishment isn’t disproportionately harsh if if it imposes costs on a person no greater than the costs which they intentionally caused to others. (The titular ‘lower bound’.) I show how this implies that punishments could be significantly harsher than current sentencing rules without being disproportionate. The reason for this is that crimes impose significantly higher costs (on society generally) than is often appreciated.


  3. ‘Homicide: Losing Control’ (2024) 83 Cambridge Law Journal 210-213 [open access]

    4. Harry Turner killed his wife Sally by stabbing her 68 times. At his murder trial, he tried to claim the partial defence of loss of control. This defence has three elements. The trial judge said that none were present. Turner was duly convicted of murder. But the Court of Appeal held that all three elements might be present, and ordered a retrial. In this case note I explain why the Court of Appeal was correct to do so, but only because the law of loss of control is a mess. (Turner was convicted upon his retrial.)


  4. ‘Inferring Culpability from Negligence’ (2025) Singapore Journal of Legal Studies (forthcoming)

    5. Criminal liability often turns on whether the defendant was negligent. You are negligent if you failed to do what the ‘reasonable person’ would have done. This standard is controversial because you might fail to do what the reasonable person would have done through no fault of your own. (Eg if you are unable to live up to that standard.) Andrew Simester has defended the negligence standard while arguing that it should be relativised to account for defendants with low intelligence. I argue that Simester doesn’t offer a compelling argument to relativise negligence to low intelligence but not other shortcomings.


  5. ‘Unnecessary Self-defence’ (under review)

    6. I argue that force used in self-defence can be lawful even if it is unnecessary.

Work in progress

  1. Paper on complicity 1
  2. Paper on complicity 2
  3. Paper on inchoate complicity
  4. Paper on law reform
  5. Paper on relativising reasonableness
  6. Paper on gross negligence manslaughter