Criticism
Advocates of the MPC stress that the law must be clearly defined to prevent arbitrary enforcement, or a chilling effect on a population that does not know what actions are punishable. This is known as the legality principle. However, critics say that the assumption that there are no possible legal systems between the extremes of "forbidden" and "allowed" is the central weakness of the MPC. British law, for example, assumes that a jury can decide what is "reasonable" both in the context of British law and social expectations as well as the specific accusation they are being asked to judge. Behavior may thus be deemed unlawful by a jury in cases where the MPC would require legislative change to produce a conviction.
Read more about this topic: Model Penal Code
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.”
—Richard Holt Hutton (1826–1897)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)