Duties to Report, and Duties to Testify

I note below one argument against duties to promptly report crimes that you’ve witnessed. (I speak here about such duties imposed on the public at large, rather than on particular professionals.) More broadly, I generally don’t support such duties.

I should note, though, that such duties are not conceptually far different from duties to testify about such crimes when subpoenaed to testify. To be sure, they kick in considerably more often; but as a matter of libertarian principles, the gulf between them is not particularly large, I think. (I do think that a general presumption in favor of liberty should allow such impositions only when they’re especially necessary, and that a duty to testify probably is necessary, but a duty to report is not. But that’s a mixed pragmatic-libertarian argument, and not a purely libertarian one.)

So I’d like to ask the more solidly libertarian among our readers: What do you think about duties to report, duties to testify, and the relationship between the two of them? Is the duty to testify, when properly subpoenaed, whether on behalf of a criminal defendant, the prosecution, or a civil party, an acceptable constraint on liberty? Is the duty to report? If the answer is different for the two, why is it different?

I’m not asking what is constitutionally permissible; the duty to testify certainly is — subject to the privilege against self-incrimination, when the testimony would risk incriminating you — and I think the duty to report would be, too. (One can argue that the duty to report is a constitutionally impermissible speech compulsion, but for complicated reasons I don’t think this argument ought to prevail.) I’m asking how we should think about whether these are permissible interferences with one’s liberty.

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