Doctrines of attribution are legal doctrines by which liability is extended to a

defendant In court proceedings, a defendant is a person or object who is the party either accused of committing a crime in criminal prosecution or against whom some type of civil relief is being sought in a civil case. Terminology varies from one jurisd ...

who did not actually commit the criminal act.''Rethinking Criminal Law''
2000,

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print book ...

, George P.Fletcher, Examples include

vicarious liability Vicarious liability is a form of a strict, secondary liability that arises under the common law doctrine of agency, '' respondeat superior'', the responsibility of the superior for the acts of their subordinate or, in a broader sense, the re ...

(when acts of another are imputed or "attributed" to a defendant),

attempt An attempt to commit a crime occurs if a criminal has an intent to commit a crime and takes a substantial step toward completing the crime, but for reasons not intended by the criminal, the final resulting crime does not occur.''Criminal Law - ...

to commit a crime (even though it was never completed), and

conspiracy A conspiracy, also known as a plot, is a secret plan or agreement between persons (called conspirers or conspirators) for an unlawful or harmful purpose, such as murder or treason, especially with political motivation, while keeping their agr ...

to commit a crime (when it is not completed or which is committed by another in the conspiracy).''Criminal Law - Cases and Materials''
7th ed. 2012,

Wolters Kluwer Law & Business Wolters Kluwer N.V. () is a Dutch information services company. The company is headquartered in Alphen aan den Rijn, Netherlands (Global) and Philadelphia, United States (corporate). Wolters Kluwer in its current form was founded in 1987 with a m ...

; John Kaplan,

Robert Weisberg Robert I. Weisberg is an American lawyer. He is an Edwin E. Huddleson, Jr. Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, and an expert on criminal law and criminal procedure, as well as a leading scholar in the law and literature movement. Weisberg ...

, Guyora Binder,

References

Criminal law legal terminology Legal doctrines and principles {{criminal-law-stub