Criminally Ignorant: Why the Law Pretends We Know What We Don’t is about the legal fiction that we know what we don’t. If you bury your head in the sand rather than learn you’re committing a crime, you can be punished as if you knew. How can that be justified? This book offers a framework to explain why it’s not as puzzling as it seems. When remaining ignorant of the facts is sufficiently culpable, the interests and values protected by the criminal law are served by punishing you as though you knew those facts. This idea—imputing mental states based on equal culpability—is what this book seeks to justify (at least within limits). The resulting theory shows that some legal fictions—like the willful ignorance doctrine—require reform. At the same time, it shows why we also need more legal fictions of this kind. Moreover, they should be extended to impose further accountability on corporations. Still, equal culpability imputation can be taken too far. We need to determine its limits to avoid injustice. Thus, the book seeks to place equal culpability imputation on a solid normative foundation, while demarcating its proper boundaries. The resulting theory of when and why the criminal law can pretend we know what we don’t has far-reaching implications for legal practice and reveals the pressing need for reform.