Legal Interest Individual Reduction
Legal interest individual reduction is the episode’s way of handling the distinction between rights-infringement theory and legal-interest theory. 100.法律的悖论：谢天谢地，幸好我们还有罗翔 says criminal law can protect legal interests beyond narrow individual claims, but warns that collective interests become dangerous when they cannot be translated back into actual people harmed.
The source uses the postwar German move to reduce supra-individual legal interests back to individual interests as a safeguard. Environmental harm, for example, can count because damaged air, land, water, or health ultimately affects persons rather than only an abstract state or moral image.
Key Claims
- Rights-infringement theory keeps criminal law close to persons and their claims.
- Legal-interest theory can capture shared harms, but it needs an individual-rights anchor.
- Collective goods become risky criminal-law grounds when they cannot be connected to concrete human loss.
- The reduction test helps keep Criminal Law As Power Limitation from being swallowed by broad state purposes.
Connections
- Criminal Law As Power Limitation - why criminal law needs protected-interest discipline.
- Law-Morality Boundary - legal interests should not become a disguised morality-enforcement route.
- Liberalism-Paternalism Boundary - related self-regarding conduct and harm-boundary problem.
- Punishment Theory Tradeoff - punishment requires a legally and morally defensible protected interest.