Bibliographic record
Abstract
FOR at least a century and a quarter one of the most settled and invariable maxims of the criminal law, founded upon a decision of 15 judges in the Court for Crown Cases Reserved (Prince (1875) 2 C.C.R. 154; see, also, Robins (1844) 1 C. & K. 456), has been that the prosecution did not have to prove fault on the defendant’s part in respect of the element of age in statutory offences created for the protection of the young. Many statutes have been drafted (or amended), and thousands upon thousands of defendants have been convicted, on this basis. But no longer. For the Appellate Committee has decreed, without giving any reasons for doing so-there is just a bare assertion (B. v. D.P.P. [2000] A.C. 428, reversing a unanimous decision of a strong Divisional Court: [1998] 4 All E.R. 265)-that “an age-related ingredient of a statutory offence stands on no different footing from any other ingredient”, and that proof of fault (in the shape of the absence of a belief-reasonable or unreasonable-that the child is above the proscribed age) is required unless excluded by Parliament either expressly or by “necessary implication, … [that is, by] an implication which is compellingly clear” (Lord Nicholls). “Such an implication”, we are told, “may be found in the language used, the nature of the offence, the mischief sought to be prevented, and any other circumstances which may assist in determining what intention is to be attributed to Parliament when creating the offence” (ibid.). This is, of course, none other than the all too depressingly familiar litany of vague, overlapping criteria which from time out of mind has signally failed to compel from the judges predictable answers to the question whether, when Parliament has been silent on the point, a person must, if she is to be convicted of a given offence, be presumed to have been at fault in respect of all, or some, of its external elements. The reference to a silent legislature’s intention is to a fiction-a mere rhetorical device. There is, as everyone knows, only one sure and compelling guide: the express provision of a no-fault defence logically precludes a requirement to prove fault in regard to the matter to which it refers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.097 | 0.062 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".