Introduction

Criminal lawyers work towards a system of rules that is intended to be formal, technical, consistent in principle, and to do justice to individuals. This discourse is always under threat because it is built on concepts that enforce exclusions: the competing politics of non-élite groups, the social context of criminal activity, and the political perceptions of the élite group itself. The principles of responsibility upon which the criminal law is based are given their particular shape by what is excluded from the subjective assessment of fault, and by the political interventions of the social élite charged with their development. That which is excluded, the subterranean forces of the political and the ideological, continually irrupts within the law, unsettling its formal appearance of consistency and disturbing its conceptual categories. In this and the following chapter, I explore the working out of this contradictory process in relation to the primary elements of actus reus: acts, omissions and causes. In all three areas, I will argue that the fundamental issue is the construction of the abstract individual in legal doctrine. I will note that that construction operates differently as between acts and omissions, and acts and causes for reasons that concern the functional operation of the different concepts within the social and legal context.