This essay develops a liberal account of the mens rea requirement of criminal liability and identifies the fault level required by that account. By “a liberal account” is meant one that interprets the meaning of mens rea in a way that reconciles liability to coercion with the individual's inviolability. The article argues that the wrongdoer's choice to interfere or to risk interfering with another agent's capacity to act on his own ends is the level of fault required to make punishment implicitly self-imposed by the recipient and thus distinguishable from the wrongdoer's violence. Such a choice is one to which a denial of rights of agency may be logically imputed, a denial by which the wrongdoer implicitly authorizes his own coercibility. This version of subjectivism is, I argue, invulnerable against criticisms leveled against other versions. While staking out defensible subjectivist ground, the article criticizes the character, choice, and opportunity theories of mens rea proposed by Fletcher, Moore, and Hart, and elaborates the interpretations of exculpatory conditions flowing from the subjectivist thesis. Finally, it addresses arguments advanced by Ripstein, Duff, and Horder for eliminating the requirement of a conscious choice to do that which amounts to a denial of rights.

The international legal order is beginning to take human rights seriously, yet sound justifications for claims about human rights are conspicuously absent. Philosophers have begun to respond to this “justification deficit” by developing theories of human rights. Although a philosophical conception of human rights is needed, it would not be sufficient. The justification of human rights is a dynamic process in which a provisional philosophical conception of human rights both guides and is fleshed out by public processes of practical reasoning structured by legal institutions. Whether the “justification deficit” can be remedied depends not only upon the content of human rights norms as set out in the major conventions and the arguments philosophers can marshal to justify them but also upon the epistemic virtues of the institutions through which the norms are specified, contested, and revised over time.

Is pornography within the coverage of the First Amendment? A familiar argument claims that it is not. This argument reasons that (1) the free speech principle protects the communication of ideas, which appeal to the reason (the major premise); (2) pornography communicates no ideas and appeals to the passions rather than the reason (the minor premise); (3) therefore pornography is not protected by the free speech principle. This argument has been specified in different ways by different writers. The most prominent and careful of these are Frederick Schauer and John Finnis. Both founder on the attempt to distinguish pornography from art, which both would protect. If art, film, and literature should be protected, then this protection should extend to the pornographic subsets of these genres.