Another Friday entry written on the phone. Sorry for the spelling and grammar mistakes. (Hopefully I will not make this a habit. I dearly miss sleep)
Today I had just Criminal Law, with a lecture in the morning and then a tutorial in the afternoon.
In today’s lecture we continued with our look into Homicide, particularly in the sense of manslaughter. The actus reas is the same in murder, so what we explored is the difference in mens rea.
From a consequentialist view (totally not discussed this in class, nor in the same way) there is no difference between the two. However the Law takes more of a deontological view, in that the intentions do natter. However looking through the case law with Woollins and statutes regarding loss of control, this is not always the case. From Woollins, there was too large of scope to determine if the case was murder and in the areas regarding strict liability there seems to be a disregard for the mens rea in order to stop love (or in the words of the professor: luuuv) crimes being justified (such as infidelity causing loss of control). So the law seems to differ here and places normative values (nod to public law (total in joke) ) into the legal system, which I would argue should be left to the jury. Not the judge or parliamentarians to decide.
The tutorial is pretty much a continuation of the lecture, but we were given some feedback on the coursework we handed in. Apparently we were quite impressive, but I’ll wait and see when I get back my paper.
Also, almost done with my public law essay. So at least there’s that. However this weekend is all about the North London Derby!
HP KOTECHA 