Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article explores the formulation of the criminal defence of necessity in the context of murder cases. The discussion will provide a medium through which to critique necessity's theoretical foundations which are classified either as one of justification or excuse. It is this highly problematic distinction which will be exposed as not only having been overlooked in case law but is futile where necessity is considered as providing a murder defence. Such a theoretical dichotomy does not reflect the competing rights and values present in the case law, and nor does it align with the decision-making process taken by judges in cases where they resolve such moral conflicts. What is present is a contextual form of necessity that frames and recognises the circumstances the actors are placed in. The analysis argues for a recategorisation of necessity into a narrow fact-driven category beyond the abstract duality of justification or excuse. To support the view of a situation-led approach, necessity is exposed as omitting a critical doctrinal element; that of the imminence of harm within a broader recognition that the situation presents an emergency. Adopting a comparative perspective, the article analyses why the emphasis placed on the imminence of harm found in Canadian jurisprudence ought to be reflected in English law. The rationale for this is to fully reflect the agony of the circumstances that underpin the scope of necessity in murder situations and to ensure that actors in such tragic situations have their rights secured as far as possible, before allowing the defence to apply. One of the final implications of the article is a reconsideration of the relationship between necessity and duress of circumstances arguing that a reappraisal of their convergence is required. The article's argument leaves the juridical precept that duress is not available as a defence to murder on an insecure foundation and in need of judicial re-evaluation.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".