ABSTRACT
In ‘Rethinking Non-fatal Offences Against the Person’, Jeremy Horder criticises the Law Commission’s 1993 proposals for reforming the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and instead proposes a series of offences designed to capture the moral essence of the defendant’s wrongdoing. In constructing a morally nominate account of wrongs against the person, Horder’s most serious offences are reserved for defendants who, inter alia, castrate, disable, disfigure, dismember, or render the victim deaf or blind. An early and influential account of fair labelling, the work remains important in that context. However, revisited through the lens of a body of scholarship published in the decades since Horder’s original work, the conceptual and normative foundations upon which his morally nominate account is based is revealed to be more socially and culturally contingent than it claims to be. This insight opens up space for a new legacy for Horder’s piece: as an illustration of the limits of legal moralism, if we are not careful to expose and interrogate our social and cultural starting points; as a reminder of the value of scholarship outside of legal theory and analytic philosophy to help us do just that; and as a starting point for a new discussion of what it might mean to commit an offence against the person.
