Taking as its starting point Miri Gur-Arye’s critical discussion of a legal duty to report crime, this paper sketches an idealising conception of a democratic republic whose citizens could be expected to recognise a civic responsibility to report crime, in order to assist the enterprise of a criminal law that is their common law. After explaining why they should recognise such a responsibility, what its scope should be, and how it should be exercised, and noting that that civic responsibility must include a responsibility to report one’s own crimes; it discusses whether that civic responsibility could ground at least a limited legal duty to report certain types of crime. It then turns to the question of whether a civic responsibility to assist the criminal law’s enterprise of bringing wrongdoers to account could include a responsibility to arrest suspected or known offenders if the police cannot or will not do so—a responsibility to make a citizen’s arrest, and the legal power to discharge that responsibility: how far should citizens feel entitled, or duty-bound, thus to ‘take the law into their own hands’?

本文以 Miri Gur-Arye 对举报犯罪的法律义务的批判性讨论为出发点，勾勒出一个理想化的民主共和国构想，该共和国的公民可以认识到举报犯罪的公民责任，以协助企业开展犯罪活动。刑法是他们的普通法。在解释了为什么他们应该承认这种责任、其范围应该是什么以及如何行使这一责任，并指出公民责任必须包括举报自己的罪行的责任之后；它讨论了公民责任是否可以构成至少报告某些类型犯罪的有限法律义务。然后转向问题：协助刑法将不法分子绳之以法的公民责任是否可以包括在警察不能或不愿这样做的情况下逮捕嫌疑人或已知罪犯的责任——逮捕公民的责任，以及履行该责任的法律权力：公民应该在多大程度上感到自己有权利或有义务，从而“将法律掌握在自己手中”？