Revisiting the Hart/Wootton Debate on Responsibility

Abstract

Barbara Wootton — Baroness Wootton of Abinger — was, in the words of a recent biography, ‘a public intellectual who applied her searching intellect to many of the important questions which faced Britain from the 1930s to 1980s’. Critical to understanding her views was that ‘she did so from the perspective of a social scientist.… She had no time for social or economic theory…. Instead she wished to use the techniques of empirical social science research to identify evidence-based solutions to policy problems.^’1 Her views on the criminal law, and in particular on criminal responsibility, did not stem in the main from theoretical, conceptual or philosophical commitments so much as from her commitment to social science and the evidence that (she believed) it produced.