Does One Mens Rea Fit All: Thoughts on Alexander's Unified Conception of Criminal Culpability

Like Sandy Kadish, the man whom we have come together to honor at Boalt Hall,' Larry Alexander is an immensely thoughtful and productive scholar. Alexander's new Essay2 is, as usual, provocative. His thesis is that the current tripartite subjective fault system, in which the law distinguishes between the mental states of purpose, knowledge, and recklessness, is unwise and unnecessary. According to Alexander, purpose and knowledge are reducible to recklessness, because all three culpable mental states share the same basic moral vice of insufficient concern for the interests of others3 or, for short, callousness or indifference.4 Since Alexander would also abandon negligence as a form of criminal culpability, he apparently favors