In law, subjective standard and objective standards are legal standards for knowledge or beliefs of a plaintiff or defendant.
[Quimbe Legal Definitions, ''"Subjective standard of reasonableness"'', Definition - A standard that assesses the reasonableness of a defendant’s actions based on what the defendant perceived."]
/ref>[ State v. Leidholm, Supreme Court of North Dakota, 334 N.W.2d 811 (1983)]
An objective standard of reasonableness ascertains the knowledge of a person by viewing a situation from the standpoint of a hypothetical reasonable person
In law, a reasonable person, reasonable man, or the man on the Clapham omnibus, is a hypothetical person of legal fiction crafted by the courts and communicated through case law and jury instructions.
Strictly according to the fiction, it is ...
, without considering the particular physical and psychological characteristics of the defendant. A subjective standard of reasonableness asks whether the circumstances would produce an honest and reasonable belief in a person having the particular mental and physical characteristics of the defendant, such as their personal knowledge and personal history, when the same circumstances might not produce the same in a general reasonable person.People v. Serravo
''People v. Serravo'', Supreme Court of Colorado, 823 P2d 128 (1992), is a criminal case involving the meaning of "wrong" in the expression " incapable of distinguishing right from wrong", as it appears in the M'Naghten rule for the insanity defe ...
'' (1992) hinged on the distinction.[''Criminal Law - Cases and Materials'', 7th ed. 2012, ]Wolters Kluwer Law & Business
Wolters Kluwer N.V. () is a Dutch information services company. The company is headquartered in Alphen aan den Rijn, Netherlands (Global) and Philadelphia, United States (corporate). Wolters Kluwer in its current form was founded in 1987 with a m ...
; John Kaplan, Robert Weisberg
Robert I. Weisberg is an American lawyer. He is an Edwin E. Huddleson, Jr. Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, and an expert on criminal law and criminal procedure, as well as a leading scholar in the law and literature movement.
Weisberg wa ...
, Guyora Binder,
/ref> In ''People v. Serravo'', the court found that the standard of knowledge of moral wrongness in the M'Naghten rules, M'Naghten rule is the objective standard. The court wrote, "Moral wrong can be interpreted either by a purely personal and subjective standard or morality or by a societal and presumably more objective standard. We believe that the better reasoned interpretation of 'wrong in the term 'incapable of distinguishing right from wrong' refers to a wrongful act measured by societal standard of morality."
References
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Criminal law legal terminology