Individual Emergencies and the Rule of Criminal Law

This is the draft of a paper initially presented in the Oxford Jurisprudence Discussion Group. The paper assesses the relationship between individual emergencies and criminal law in light of the ideal of the rule of law and Joseph Raz's thesis about the normal justification of authority. After sketching out the main theoretical positions on how criminal law ought to provide for its own potential failure in the face of private emergencies, I …