In
criminal law
Criminal law is the body of law that relates to crime. It prescribes conduct perceived as threatening, harmful, or otherwise endangering to the property, health, safety, and moral welfare of people inclusive of one's self. Most criminal law ...
, a regulatory offence or quasi-criminal offence is a class of crime in which the standard for proving
culpability
In criminal law, culpability, or being culpable, is a measure of the degree to which an agent, such as a person, can be held morally or legally responsible for action and inaction. It has been noted that the word, culpability, "ordinarily ha ...
has been lowered so a (
Law Latin
Law Latin, sometimes written L.L. or L. Lat., and sometimes derisively called Dog Latin, is a form of Latin used in legal contexts. While some of the vocabulary does come from Latin, many of the words and much of the vocabulary stem from English. ...
for "guilty mind") element is not required. Such offences are used to deter potential offenders from dangerous behaviour rather than to impose
punishment
Punishment, commonly, is the imposition of an undesirable or unpleasant outcome upon a group or individual, meted out by an authority—in contexts ranging from child discipline to criminal law—as a response and deterrent to a particular ac ...
for moral wrongdoing.
Absolute liability offences
An absolute liability offence is a type of
criminal offence that does not require any
fault elements (''
mens rea'') to be proved in order to establish guilt. The prosecution only needs to show that the accused performed the
prohibited act (''actus reus''). As such, absolute liability offences do not allow for a defense of
mistake of fact
A mistake of fact may sometimes mean that, while a person has committed the physical element of an offence, because they were labouring under a mistake of fact, they never formed the mental element. This is unlike a mistake of law, which is not ...
.
Due to the ease in which the offence can be proven, only select offences are of this type. In most legal systems,
absolute liability
Absolute liability is a standard of legal liability found in tort and criminal law of various legal jurisdictions.
To be convicted of an ordinary crime, in certain jurisdictions, a person must not only have committed a criminal action but also ha ...
offences must be clearly labeled as such in the
criminal code
A criminal code (or penal code) is a document that compiles all, or a significant amount of a particular jurisdiction's criminal law. Typically a criminal code will contain offences that are recognised in the jurisdiction, penalties that might ...
or criminal
legislation
Legislation is the process or result of enrolling, enacting, or promulgating laws by a legislature, parliament, or analogous governing body. Before an item of legislation becomes law it may be known as a bill, and may be broadly referred to ...
.
Public welfare offences
A public welfare offence is a crime for which "a reasonable person should know
hat the proscribed activityis subject to stringent public regulation and may seriously threaten the community's health or safety".
See also
*
Infraction
*''
Malum prohibitum
''Malum prohibitum'' (plural ''mala prohibita'', literal translation: "wrong s or because
S, or s, is the nineteenth Letter (alphabet), letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the English alphabet, modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is English alphab ...
prohibited") is a List of Latin phrases, Latin phrase used in law to refer to conduct that constitutes an unlawful act only by virtue of statute, as opp ...
''
*
Quasi-criminal Quasi-criminal means a lawsuit or equity proceeding that has some, but not all, of the qualities of a criminal prosecution. It may appear in either a common law or a civil law jurisdiction. It refers to "a court's right to punish for actions or o ...
*
Status offense
A status offense is an action that is prohibited only to a certain class of people, and most often applied only to offenses committed by minors.
In the United States, the term status offense also refers to an offense such as a traffic violati ...
References
Criminal law
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