The Fearful Person Standard

• In Event: Fear, Crime Classification, and Disparity

Abstract

The US criminal legal system casts the reasonable person and their actions as fundamental to the project of assigning culpability. In theory, the reasonable person is the archetype the law needs, an objective standard for determining what duties an individual owes to others or how one ought to respond to a specific situation. In practice, the reasonable person standard has been called “the common law’s most enduring fiction” and is the subject of substantial debate. Sitting adjacent to the legal person standard is another legal concept, one that I argue should be an equally perplexing site of definition and debate: fear.

This paper reexamines a reasonable person standard in 4th amendment search and seizure and self-defense cases. Ultimately, I argue that the standard perhaps unknowingly currently used by courts isn’t a reasonable person standard and is instead a fearful person standard. I evaluate the consequences of codifying by fully considering fear not just in law, but also as a deeply sociological concept.

Author

• Kat Albrecht, Georgia State University