The question of when a person is culpable for taking an unjustified risk of harm has long been controversial in Anglo-American criminal law doctrine and theory. This survey of the approaches adopted in England and Wales, Canada, Australia, the United States, New Zealand and Scotland argues that they are converging, to differing extents, around a 'Standard Account' of culpable unjustified risk-taking. This Standard Account distinguishes between awareness-based culpability (recklessness) and inadvertence-based culpability (negligence) for unjustified risk-taking. With reference to criminal law theory and philosophical literature, the author argues that, when explained appropriately, the Standard Account is defensible and practical. Defending the Standard Account involves analysing in depth a number of controversial matters, including the meaning of advertence/awareness, the role of attitudes such as indifference in culpable risk-taking, and the question of whether negligence should be used in the criminal law.

Recklessness involves unreasonable/unjustified risk-taking. The argument here is that recklessness in the criminal law is best understood as nevertheless containing an element of reasonableness. To be reckless, on this view, the defendant must reasonably believe that she is exposing others to a risk of harm. If the defendant's belief about the risk being imposed by her conduct is unreasonable, she should not (normally) be considered reckless. This point is most important in relation to offences of endangerment where recklessness sets the outer limits of criminal liability.

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In Jogee and Ruddock, the Supreme Court/Privy Council decided that the law on secondary liability took a “wrong turn” in 1984 in the Privy Council's decision in Chan Wing-Siu. Chan Wing-Siu's contemplation/foresight-based fault element for secondary liability was alleged by the Supreme Court/Privy Council to have bucked a legal trend towards requiring that the secondary party intended to encourage or assist every one of the principal's offences. This article presents an alternative history of secondary liability that explains a wider selection of cases from 1553–1984 than were considered in Jogee and Ruddock. On this alternative account, Chan Wing-Siu was simply a more explicit and intellectually honest decision than its predecessors. If this alternative view of history is accepted, the Supreme Court/Privy Council's claim to be merely “correcting” (rather than substantively reforming) the law of secondary liability should be rejected. Doing so would make more critical a question that was side-stepped in Jogee and Ruddock, namely whether this reform should have been undertaken by the judiciary, rather than the legislature.

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