Bouvier Law Dictionary Knowledge (Know or Knowing or Knowingly)

Knowledge (Know or Knowing or Knowingly)

The Wolters Kluwer Bouvier Law Dictionary Desk Edition

The Wolters Kluwer Bouvier Law Dictionary Desk Edition - ETTOC > The Entries, A-Z > K

Author
Stephen Michael Sheppard

Knowledge (Know or Knowing or Knowingly)

An awareness of anything. In general, knowledge is the conscious possession of information or understanding, usually
acquired by observation, experience, study, invention, or description by others. In legal contexts, knowledge usually
amounts to a person's exposure to some item of information that is specific to an action or enterprise and which alters
one's duties. Knowledge may alter one's duty of care toward others, as in the knowledge of a defective good or defect in
property, which might give rise to a duty of disclosure or warning, or one's knowledge of another's intentions or actions,
which might give rise to promissory estoppel. In this sense, to act knowingly is an element of the mens reas required for
the commission of certain crimes; one cannot be punished for certain offenses unless one had information essential to the
crime.

The law will often imply a duty to acquire knowledge, such as a duty to investigate or the duty to be informed required of
a police officer or a private fiduciary, or a liability that attaches to some conduct whether one acquires it knowingly or
otherwise, such as the liability of a property owner who acquires property with hazardous chemical wastes.

Knowledge in the law usually increases one's duties, creating an incentive for a person to evade knowledge, or to allege
ignorance, despite having actual knowledge or having a duty to acquire knowledge that was avoided. Thus knowledge as a
matter of law has an objective quality, in that a person will be considered by law to have knowledge in circumstances that
give rise to a reasonable expectation that a person in those circumstances would have acquired such knowledge. This
consideration occurs usually through constructive knowledge or presumed knowledge. Thus, knowledge by a corporation
includes knowledge held by all of the members and employees of the corporation, as well as knowledge in its records.

Knowledge might but need not be a matter of perfect awareness by an individual, and knowledge may amount to
inferences from something of which a person is aware. Perhaps most essentially in law, knowledge does not require a
perfect expression, either of the sources or reasons of the knowledge or a description of what is known. Many conclusions
are required in the law, such as a knowledge or belief in a person's trustworthiness or guilt, that cannot be reduced further
than a conclusion but are considered knowledge nonetheless.

Derivation: Bouvier, 1853, KNOWLEDGE. Information as to a fact.

2. Many acts are perfectly innocent when the party performing them is not aware of certain circumstances attending them;
for example, a man may pass a counterfeit note and be guiltless, if he did not know it was so; he may receive stolen goods
if he were not aware of the fact that they were stolen. In these and the like cases it is the guilty knowledge which makes
the crime. See, as to the manner of proving guilty knowledge, Archb. Cr. Pl. 110, 111. Vide Animal; Dog; Evidence
Ignorance; Scienter.
 Bouvier Law Dictionary Knowledge (Know or Knowing or Knowingly)

Bouvier, 1853, KNOWINGLY, pleadings. The word "knowingly," or "well knowing," will supply the place of a positive
averment in an indictment or declaration, that the defendant knew the facts subsequently stated; if notice or knowledge be
unnecessarily stated. the allegation may be rejected as surplusage. Vide Com. Dig. Indictment, G 6; 2 Stra. 904 2 East.
452; 1 Chit. Pl. *367; Vide Scienter.

See Steve Sheppard, The Metamorphoses of Reasonable Doubt: How Changes in the Burden of Proof Have Weakened the
Presumption of Innocence, 78 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1165 (2003).

Usage: Heraclitus said long ago, "Much knowledge does not teach wisdom." James Bryce, 1 Modern Democracies 74
(1921).

Brown argues that insufficient evidence exists to support her conviction because she did not knowingly or intentionally
strike Grandmother, instead, she was only knowingly and intentionally attempting to retrieve her child and leave the
home. Brown v. Indiana, 879 N.E.2d 25 (Ind. Ct. App. 2008) (Vaidik, J.).

It is possible to read the Court's opinion in Roth v. United States and Alberts v. California, 354 U.S. 476, in a variety of
ways. In saying this, I imply no criticism of the Court, which in those cases was faced with the task of trying to define
what may be indefinable. I have reached the conclusion, which I think is confirmed at least by negative implication in the
Court's decisions since Roth and Alberts, that under the First and Fourteenth Amendments criminal laws in this area are
constitutionally limited to hard-core pornography. I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I
understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so.
But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that. Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184, 197
(1964) (Stewart, J., concurring).

The Wolters Kluwer Bouvier Law Dictionary Desk Edition

Copyright 2012 CCH Incorporated, All Rights Reserved

End of Document

Page 2 of 2