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)
“A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige through being mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)