ABSTRACT
There are generally accepted to be two types of involuntary manslaughter: ‘unlawful act manslaughter’ and ‘gross negligence manslaughter’. Of unlawful act manslaughter, the Commission went on to say:
That part of it which is now described as ‘unlawful act manslaughter’ has been from time to time the object of complaint, not to say bewilderment, for over a century. The conceptual position has been made, if anything, worse by the efforts of courts in the last 30 years to keep the law within something like decent bounds. These efforts have had to be undertaken on an ad hoc basis, without the support of a proper framework of policy and analysis, and tainted by the doctrine of constructive liability which underpins this part of the law.
