In law, subjective standard and objective standards are legal standards for knowledge or beliefs of a plaintiff or defendant.
[Quimbe Legal Definitions, ''"Subjective standard of reasonableness"'', Definition - A standard that assesses the reasonableness of a defendant’s actions based on what the defendant perceived."]
/ref>[ State v. Leidholm, Supreme Court of North Dakota, 334 N.W.2d 811 (1983)]
An objective standard of reasonableness ascertains the knowledge of a person by viewing a situation from the standpoint of a hypothetical reasonable person
In law, a reasonable person or reasonable man is a hypothetical person whose character and care conduct, under any ''common set of facts,'' is decided through reasoning of good practice or policy. It is a legal fiction crafted by the courts an ...
, without considering the particular physical and psychological characteristics of the defendant. A subjective standard of reasonableness asks whether the circumstances would produce an honest and reasonable belief in a person having the particular mental and physical characteristics of the defendant, such as their personal knowledge and personal history, when the same circumstances might not produce the same in a general reasonable person.People v. Serravo
''People v. Serravo'', Supreme Court of Colorado, 823 P2d 128 (1992), is a criminal case involving the meaning of "wrong" in the expression "incapable of distinguishing right from wrong", as it appears in the M'Naghten rule for the insanity defen ...
'' (1992) hinged on the distinction.[''Criminal Law - Cases and Materials'', 7th ed. 2012, ]Wolters Kluwer Law & Business
Wolters Kluwer N.V. is a Dutch information services company. The company serves legal, business, tax, accounting, finance, audit, risk, compliance, and healthcare markets.
Wolters Kluwer in its current form was founded in 1987 with a merger bet ...
; John Kaplan, Robert Weisberg
Robert I. Weisberg is an American lawyer. He is the Edwin E. Huddleson Jr. Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. Weisberg is an authority on criminal law and criminal procedure, as well as a scholar in the law and literature movement.
Educa ...
, Guyora Binder
Guyora Binder (born 7 November 1956) is a legal scholar and writer.
Binder has been faculty at University at Buffalo Law School and Boston University School of Law, and has been published in the Boston University Law Review.
In 2012, he wrote ' ...
,
/ref> In ''People v. Serravo'', the court found that the standard of knowledge of moral wrongness in the M'Naghten rules, M'Naghten rule is the objective standard. The court wrote, "Moral wrong can be interpreted either by a purely personal and subjective standard or morality or by a societal and presumably more objective standard. We believe that the better reasoned interpretation of 'wrong in the term 'incapable of distinguishing right from wrong' refers to a wrongful act measured by societal standard of morality."
References
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Criminal law legal terminology