A Short & Happy Guide to Criminal Law
Author:
Kennedy, Joseph E.
Edition:
3rd
Copyright Date:
2024
33 chapters
have results for criminal law
Chapter 2. An Overview of Criminal Law 23 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Criminal Law should be your favorite subject in your first year of law school. I will admit that I am biased on this point. I love criminal law. I teach criminal law, write about criminal law, and practiced criminal law before I began teaching. I have loved doing all three. Let me offer you three objective reasons though why criminal law should be your favorite 1L subject.
- Before we move into the substance of the criminal law itself, there are a couple of preliminary matters that we will cover in the next few chapters. These preliminary matters are often subjects of early chapters in criminal law textbooks because they provide necessary background. First, we need to learn a few things about criminal procedure. Second, we need to understand the sources of the criminal law that you will study in the course. Third, we need to explore the different philosophies of punishment that have shaped the development and interpretation of the criminal law.
- Criminal Law involves good and evil.
- Criminal Law enjoys a coherent structure.
- Once you have checked to see whether any justifications or excuses apply, you are done with your criminal law analysis. As promised, the whole of criminal law fits in one easy-to-remember sentence, but it will take the rest of this book and an entire semester of your time to really learn how to use that sentence.
- Open Chapter
Chapter 3. The Criminal Process 35 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Some students are understandably intrigued by criminal procedure and professional ethics, but the first year criminal law student needs to remember that what is being taught and tested in this course is the substantive criminal law. The matters covered in this chapter provide important background for learning the substantive criminal law, but background is not foreground. Learn what you need about these subjects in order to learn the criminal law in your first year. You can explore them in depth when you take these courses later in law school.
- This chapter provides only necessary background. You will not be tested in a first-year criminal law class on criminal procedure. Your first-year criminal law course covers the
- The power of the jury to nullify the law provides an important check on the power of the legislature to declare conduct criminal. If the legislature gets too far out of touch with “the conscience of the community,” then prosecutors will be unable to obtain convictions and the overall legitimacy of the criminal law will suffer as a result.
- One final bit of background needs to be discussed. All lawyers, including prosecutors and criminal defense lawyers, operate under rules of professional ethics. These rules guide and constrain how lawyers do their jobs. Like criminal procedure, professional ethics is the subject of an entire course of its own. Sometimes professors like to introduce the subject by integrating an ethical discussion into a discussion of a particular case or doctrine. Two recurring issues of professional ethics particular to criminal law are worth brief mention. One concerns prosecutors and the other concerns criminal defense lawyers.
- These tend to be the least common procedural postures in criminal law textbook cases because the law of evidence is itself quite complicated, and the subject of an entirely different course. Sometimes, however, the evidentiary issue is straightforward because it flows directly from a mistaken interpretation of the substantive criminal law. Relevance, for example, is a fundamental requirement for admissible evidence. If evidence is not relevant to an element of the criminal charge in the case, then it should not be admitted. If the judge gets the definition of the legal element of the charge wrong, this error will sometimes manifest itself in a decision to admit or not to admit a particular piece of evidence on relevance grounds.
- Open Chapter
Chapter 4. Statutory Interpretation and Sources of Law 41 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Before you jump into the doctrines that define crimes and defenses, you must understand a few things about the different sources of American criminal law. Most crimes and many defenses are defined by statute, but American criminal law was heavily influenced by the common law of crimes that developed originally in England. Building on this foundation, an American common law of crimes developed on its own. But, over time, more and more jurisdictions defined the criminal law through statutes passed by legislatures. Many of these statutes followed the common law. In the middle of the last century, a rival approach developed in the form of a Model Penal Code, developed by the American Law Institute. Explaining the roles that the common law, the Model Penal Code, and modern criminal statues play in American criminal law is one purpose of this chapter.
- Federal criminal law plays a minor role in a first year criminal law course. The vast majority of criminal law is state law, and the vast majority of criminal cases are brought in state courts. Federal criminal law is entirely statutory, and federal courts interpret these federal criminal statutes. Occasionally a textbook includes such a federal case, but the mere fact that the case is a federal one does not grant it any sort of authority over state court decisions on related issues. U.S. Supreme Court cases interpreting federal statues sometimes influence state courts confronting similar issues in interpreting state statutes, but state courts are not bound to follow the Supreme Court’s lead on criminal law matters that are not constitutional in nature.
- Again, don’t mistake background for foreground. Few cases in a criminal law textbook turn on questions of legislative history, and constitutional principles play a minor role in substantive criminal law (although they play a major role in criminal procedure). Still, one can’t fully understand what judges do when they interpret criminal statutes without understanding the limits within which they must work.
- The English common law provided the foundation for American criminal law, but it was a foundation that American judges and legislatures quickly began modifying. American judges issued their own common law decisions in criminal cases. More and more often, state legislatures began defining crimes and defenses by statute. By the end of the nineteenth century, most states had passed comprehensive criminal codes.
- U.S. Constitution and Federal Criminal Law:
- Open Chapter
Chapter 10. Homicide: An Overview 3 results
- Lots of people die in criminal law classes each year (hypothetically, that is) because homicide is the favorite topic of most criminal law professors. Many professors essentially teach the most important parts of the criminal law through the law of homicide. Because the taking of human life has long been considered the gravest crime, homicide law has played a key role in the evolution of criminal law. With so much at stake, courts wrestle with difficult questions in homicide cases, and often write detailed opinions explaining their reasoning. These opinions engage student attention because they deal with fundamental issues of criminal law in the context of compelling facts. For all of these reasons, criminal-law professors spend far more time in class—and on the exam—on homicide than on any other single crime.
- In the chapters that follow, I split homicide into four chapters. The chapter on common law murder covers three of the four types of homicide recognized as murder at common law: intent to kill murder, intent to grievously injure murder, and extremely reckless murder. The next chapter deals with premeditated and deliberate murder, a crime that many states have created to punish the worst type of intentional killings more severely. Felony murder, the fourth type of common law murder gets, its own chapter because of its complexity. The chapter on manslaughter covers both intentional
- the law of homicide, when you see murder crop up in both intentional and unintentional killings, or when you realize that unintentional killings can include murder as well as manslaughter. Just make sure you understand what each piece requires.
- Open Chapter
Chapter 5. Philosophies of Punishment 21 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Judges and lawyers have for many generations found it useful, often indispensable, to think philosophically about the criminal law in particular because criminal law has a number of purposes, and those purposes often conflict with one another. So making arguments about how the criminal law should be interpreted is easier if you can think clearly about how different interpretations serve or frustrate different purposes of punishment.
- So learn the basics of the philosophies of punishment at the beginning of your criminal law course! It will better equip you to understand and argue the criminal law doctrines that this course covers.
- This sort of choice-based retributivism—often described in terms of “culpability” or “moral blameworthiness” has greatly influenced the development of American criminal law. Culpability concerns mark the most consistent line between the civil and the criminal law. Historically, we criminalize those things that we deem worthy of moral condemnation, leaving the civil law to make life more orderly, efficient, and fair. The decision to punish intentional criminal acts more seriously than acts committed accidentally reflects a basic moral intuition that the person who kicks the dog is more culpable than the person who trips over the dog. As you will learn in coming chapters, we excuse or mitigate criminal liability in a number of different ways when the offender labored under some sort of condition that limited his ability to make the right choice. For example, we excuse criminal liability completely in cases of insanity; we often preclude criminal liability for many serious offenses if...
- How then, do lawyers use philosophy in the criminal law? Different philosophies of punishment help us to think systematically about our moral intuitions. They organize our thinking in a way that helps us identify the most important arguments for and against interpreting the criminal law in various ways. More specifically, they provide an almost indispensable vocabulary for certain types of arguments. It is impossible to read very far in a criminal law textbook without coming across the terms
- That being said, lawyers (and law students) should be careful to use philosophy and not be used by it. Law is not philosophy. Oliver Wendell Holmes famously once said that “the life of the law is experience.” Purely philosophical arguments rarely triumph over arguments grounded in a society’s experience. Moreover, criminal law, more than any other subject, is driven by moral intuitions about right and wrong. These moral intuitions are deeply rooted, often conflict with one another, and are sometimes not rational. So the philosopher’s quest to rationalize criminal punishment is doomed from the start. Our moral intuitions are too strong to be tamed and too messy to be neatly organized.
- Open Chapter
Chapter 15. Causation 18 results (showing 5 best matches)
- by the conduct defined by the crime. So result crimes require the application of legal principles that define causation. Causation in criminal law is usually pretty straightforward, so you will spend much less time talking about causation in criminal law than you will in a torts course. The reason for this is that tort liability is not as closely tied to fault as criminal liability. A tighter connection between the act and the result is required in criminal law because of the central role that moral condemnation plays in criminal punishment.
- What if the bullet wound kills the bank teller only because he has a rare clotting disorder that makes it unusually easy for him to bleed to death? The rule for the criminal law here is the same as in torts. In criminal law, as in torts, a wrongful actor “takes the victim as he finds him.”
- Torts has a catchy albeit gruesome metaphor that makes this idea easy to remember. The “eggshell plaintiff” is someone whose skull is as thin as an eggshell. Knocking down such a person might well kill them, so the surviving family members of the eggshell plaintiff could sue the tortfeasor, who wrongfully knocked the plaintiff down, for damages resulting from the death. Criminal law does not have plaintiffs—we have victims—so remember this as the eggshell victim rule in criminal law.
- Proximate causation is more complex because ultimately it reflects the criminal law’s judgment about who can be held responsible for harm. The central principle of proximate cause is foreseeability. We limit criminal liability to foreseeable harms. If you shoot me in the head because I happened to be parachuting down on top of your duck blind just as you are firing at a flock of ducks, then you are probably not going to be found to have proximately caused my death because we don’t ordinarily foresee people falling out of the sky on top of us.
- They say that variety is the spice of life. Well, variety is the source of the more difficult issues of proximate cause in the criminal law. Specifically, variety in how a required result occurs creates the need for principles that deal with (1) results that involve unintended
- Open Chapter
Chapter 7. The Guilty Mind 31 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Here we must begin not with a list, but with a story, because understanding how common law mental states evolved is important to understanding how they are applied. Faulkner once said, “The past is not dead; it is not even the past.” Nowhere is this truer in the criminal law than in the area of common law mental states. The moral intuitions that animated the common law’s early approach to mental states are powerful and persistent. They continue to influence the criminal law, even after the doctrinal definitions they gave birth to have been discarded. For this reason, many criminal law casebooks use some old common law cases to introduce common law mental states.
- Some principles do exist to guide courts in common law jurisdictions in determining when to presume that the legislature intended a defendant to be strictly liable with respect to a particular element. First, the common law was said to generally abhor strict liability. Few strict liability offenses existed at common law, with the exception of offenses such as statutory rape. Second, statutes that define crimes that are similar to old common law offenses are presumed to require at least general criminal intent with respect to all material elements. Third, even if a statute defines a non-common law criminal offense, a court will only presume that strict liability was intended if the court deems the crime a Public welfare offenses are generally regulatory offenses (e.g. violations of food safety laws). While no iron-clad definition exists, courts have over the years identified a number of factors that guide their decisions:
- Mental states are perhaps the most important part of the criminal law. Mental states are central to our notions of blameworthiness. Deliberately doing a bad thing is universally seen as worse than accidentally doing a bad thing. Mental states are also central to our notions of dangerousness and deterrence. When people are thinking about doing bad things, we want them to be deterred by the prospect of punishment. Someone who intentionally hurts people is the sort of dangerous person we often want to incapacitate through imprisonment. So the criminal law relies heavily on mental states to determine whether a crime took place, and to distinguish more serious crimes from less serious crimes.
- So you have to learn to do two things to figure out what the guilty mind requires for criminal liability. First, you have to figure out what mental states a crime requires for its various elements. Second, you have to analyze whether the defendant had the required mental states. And you must learn to do this in both a common law and a Model Penal Code jurisdiction.
- Old common law crimes are presumed to require at least general criminal intent.
- Open Chapter
Chapter 9. Intoxication 12 results (showing 5 best matches)
- This intuition that intoxication should not matter to criminal liability is honored (for the most part) in the criminal law. Intoxication is an issue that has a large role in crime but only a tiny role in the substantive criminal law. It plays a large role in crime because many people commit many crimes in some state of intoxication. Perhaps because intoxicating drugs and alcohol play such a big role in crime, society wants to deter people from becoming intoxicated enough to commit crimes, and considers them blameworthy for getting so intoxicated that they break the law.
- Since the criminal law generally treats intoxicated people as if they were sober, learning the doctrine of intoxication means learning a series of exceptions to this general rule.
- I always begin teaching the doctrine of intoxication in my criminal law class by offering someone in the front row a drink. I plop down a cup and a bottle of tequila in front of a student and ask, “Would you like to take a series of shots over the course of the class hour?” I quickly take the bottle back (more and more students have reached for the bottle over the years) and instead pose a hypothetical to the class. Assume that the student took me up on the offer, grew increasingly intoxicated and belligerent and, as a result, struck a student after bumping into her when class was over. Should the intoxicated student be punished more harshly, less harshly, or just the same as if completely sober? The vast majority of students vote that intoxication should not make any difference to the punishment.
- Let’s apply these rules to our tequila-drinking student in the front row of my criminal law classroom. Assume that she was really, really intoxicated and that she punched someone in the face, breaking their nose. She is completely out of luck with respect to the general intent offense of simple battery. Her intoxication could be a defense to the more serious charge of assault with intent to inflict serious injury, however. That specific intent crime requires that one act with the purpose to seriously injure someone. Her lawyer could argue that she was so intoxicated that she was unable to think clearly enough to form that sort of intent. If the jury had a reasonable doubt as to whether she intended to seriously injure, they should find her not guilty of that more serious charge.
- Voluntary intoxication may negate a mental state of purpose or knowledge but not a mental state of criminal recklessness or negligence.
- Open Chapter
Chapter 17. Miscellaneous Crimes Against the Person 7 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Assault and battery offenses are often neglected in criminal law courses. Most textbooks deal with them only in passing, yet assault and battery are covered on the Multi-state Bar Exam, and they are staples of any criminal law practice. For every one homicide there are many thousands of assaults and batteries in any given year. Also covered on bar exams, and playing only a supporting role in most criminal law textbooks, are the related crimes of false imprisonment and kidnapping.
- What first-year and third-year law students both need is a quick overview of the elements of these miscellaneous crimes against the person. Understanding the elements of each is all that is necessary to appreciate the background role they play in some cases in the first-year criminal law textbook, and coverage on the bar exam rarely goes beyond the fundamental points.
- As a general-intent crime, only criminal/gross negligence is required. Contact is required. Spitting on someone or setting forces in motion to cause contact are sufficient. The elements of criminal battery are as follows:
- Committed either intentionally or with at least criminal negligence
- Note that battery is a general-intent crime, which means that criminal and/or gross negligence is all that is required. So if I am swinging my fists around in a crowded space while watching a prize fight on TV and end up hitting you, then I could be guilty of battery, although gross negligence would require me to be taking really big swings in a really crowded space.
- Open Chapter
Chapter 21. Conspiracy 26 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The second reason we punish conspiracies is the “special danger of group activity.” The criminal law considers people who agree to commit crimes in groups to be more likely to see things through to the end, and more likely to be successful in their efforts. Teamwork makes lots of things easy, including crime. A group of people can encourage one another, pool their resources, and efficiently delegate the tasks involved. Groups can commit more elaborate crimes. They can also continue their criminal activities for longer, as new members add to (or replace) old ones. Historically the criminal law has had good reason to fear crime committed by groups: think of organized crime syndicates, terrorist organizations, and insurrectionary movements. The government relied heavily on conspiracy law in prosecuting the Ku Klux Klan, the Mafia, and Al Qaeda.
- Conspiracy is an important and complicated doctrine that contains many different rules. Criminal law professors often fit it in as best they can near the end of the semester. Some professors skip it altogether, finding it too difficult to quickly dip into something that has so many moving parts. Others spend a day or two trying to convey the main principles. Some give it more time because of its great importance to the practice of criminal law. This chapter will hit the fundamental concepts hard and touch on a few of the more important ancillary rules.
- But conspiracy law also involves special dangers to civil liberties. Criminal conspiracy law is defined so broadly that one noted judge aptly called it the “darling of the modern prosecutor’s nursery.” The same features that make conspiracy an effective weapon against the evil and the dangerous also makes it a handy club against the unpopular. Critics of conspiracy law fear that it promotes guilt by association and chills our First Amendment rights of free assembly by criminalizing meeting with people the government deems suspicious. Because conspiracy requires little or ...also confers great power onto informants who can allege a case for criminal conspiracy by making up a conversation about an agreement that never existed. Finally, broad conspiracy liability may actually waste government resources in the war against terrorism or organized crime by unleashing prosecutions against hapless groups of incompetent individuals who talk big but who could never bring themselves to...
- The idea of a criminal agreement makes conspiracy doctrine a bit tricky. The guilty mind required is the intent to agree and the intent to achieve the object of the agreement. The guilty hand required at common law is the agreement itself. Most people think of an agreement as something that exists in people’s minds though. This makes conspiracy’s conduct requirement what I would call a “mentalish” one.
- Remember that while an agreement may be implied from very little, it still must be proved. Just because a judge allows a conspiracy charge to go to the jury does not mean that the jury will find the agreement to have been proved beyond a reasonable doubt. If a jury returns a verdict of guilty, however, it may be hard for a judge to set aside the verdict as a matter of law, because it is often very easy to imply an agreement from actions that work together towards a criminal objective.
- Open Chapter
Chapter 16. Rape 29 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Rape law also raises profoundly difficult issues of gender, autonomy, and the role of the criminal law in the most intimate areas of our lives. The law of rape was formed during an openly patriarchal time when women were subjugated by law in numerous ways. At common law, men were legally incapable of being guilty of the rape of their wives because the consent of the wife to intercourse with her husband was conclusively presumed as a matter of law. Since adultery and sex outside of marriage were each crimes in their own right, common law judges worried that a woman would “cry rape” to avoid criminal liability herself. This skepticism towards rape complainants continued into modern times, often in the form of procedural requirements such as corroboration of the woman’s claims, a prompt complaint, and admission of evidence of the rape complainant’s past sexual history to rebut the claim of non-consent. This skepticism persisted in the absence of evidence that false reports of rape were...
- So the division of labor between the elements of force and non-consent in ensuring that the blameworthy, but only the blameworthy, are convicted is key to the definition of rape. Unfortunately for the student of criminal law, jurisdictions vary widely in how they reformed rape law. Some rely on the force requirement, others on the non-consent element.
- of rape requires the law to essentially take a stand on how people should and should not speak to and touch one another when engaged in intimate sexual activity. Deciding how much or how little the criminal law should regulate sexual activity is difficult for our society and most others, given how significantly gender affects intuitions about proper behavior. But determining where and how to draw this line is the duty of the law.
- Some strongly believe that requiring such explicit communication during sexual activity robs sexual intimacy of a natural and spontaneous quality. These critics believe that an affirmative consent requirement imposes by fiat one particular way of relating to one another sexually. Some argue further that the criminal law is too blunt and too powerful an instrument with which to regulate our most private moments with such particularity.
- Finally, rape law is very complex. Most serious crimes place great importance on mental state requirements. Rape law historically did not. This confuses many students because what separates rape from perfectly lawful sexual activity is the absence of freely formed consent, a circumstance that obviously is mental in nature. To make matters even worse, rape law is incredibly varied. The rape law reform movement did not generate a consensus approach. While all jurisdictions have reformed their rape laws, they have done so in many different ways.
- Open Chapter
Chapter 6. The Guilty Hand 26 results (showing 5 best matches)
- As with many common law principles, the voluntary act requirement operates most often as a presumption of statutory interpretation. Judges presume that the legislature intended to require that the defendant must perform at least one criminal act, and then they will interpret criminal statutes accordingly. The difficult cases involve questions about which acts must be voluntary and when they must be committed.
- The most fundamental point to grasp in this area is that all crimes require some sort of voluntary act. (Except when they don’t—more about this below when we talk about omission liability.) You can’t think your way into criminal liability. A passage in the Catholic liturgy asks forgiveness for “thought, words, and deeds.” Thoughts without deeds do not create criminal liability, although the criminal law does consider speech as a “deed” under many circumstances.
- The guilty hand component of a crime is often the most straightforward aspect of the analysis. In the simplest terms, one must identify what actions the defendant must perform in order to be guilty of the crime. There are a few wrinkles that arise in atypical cases, however, and all criminal law courses spend a day or two at the very beginning of the course exploring them.
- The Olympic swimmer can be criminally prosecuted in many jurisdictions because he would be deemed to have voluntarily undertaken a rescue that he subsequently abandoned. Voluntary assumption of a legal duty creates a legal duty for the purposes of the criminal law because such undertakings may have caused the victim to rely upon the aid, or may have dissuaded others from helping.
- What sorts of legal duties create omission liability under the criminal law? Imagine that you are drowning at a public beach. A whole crowd of people are watching you die. People are even filming your death on their phones and uploading it to YouTube, where it is instantaneously going viral (your fifteen seconds of fame!) But nobody lifts a finger to help you, despite the abundance of life-saving equipment lying around. Who can be prosecuted for failing to come to your aid?
- Open Chapter
Preface 6 results (showing 5 best matches)
- , to be more precise. If you are a first-year law student, you might be feeling tired, stressed and a little bit overwhelmed right about now. That is why you wandered into an online or virtual bookstore looking for a study guide on criminal law. Before I say another word about what this guide will and won’t do for you, I do want to remind you that you dreamed of this moment. Well, not this exact moment of feeling tired, stressed and overwhelmed. You dreamed of attending law school, of passing the bar, and of becoming a lawyer. And becoming a lawyer is a great thing, so congratulations! You are on your way to achieving a great goal. But before you deliver thundering closing arguments to juries in nationally televised cases or brilliantly parry impossible questions from Supreme Court justices in a landmark constitutional case or close mega-billion dollar deals with Beyoncé or Donald Trump over lunch, you have to graduate law school. And in your first year of law school, you will take
- I include not just the rules, but the main ideas behind those rules. Law, as you will soon learn, is shaped by big ideas. Understanding the interplay between those big ideas and the small rules that govern any particular issue is difficult but absolutely essential to success as a law student and a lawyer. I do my best in the space that we have to give you a feel for the big ideas that animate each area of the criminal law.
- The study guide you need is shorter and easier to remember. Any criminal law course will cover only a fraction of the countless rules included in the larger guides. Even if a professor includes some of those smaller rules in reading or class discussion, they almost never make them the central issues of their exam questions. Instead, professors do their utmost to teach students the fundamental rules and issues that govern each area of criminal law. I know it feels more comforting to hold a big, heavy study guide in your hand that takes a more encyclopedic approach, but that comforting feeling is an illusion. You need a study guide that focuses on the fundamentals, not a security blanket made of paper.
- Einstein once said that the important thing is to make things as simple as possible, but no simpler. Don’t think for a minute that I have dumbed things down. I teach at a great law school where really smart students demand to be challenged. I have also lectured for years for bar review courses that require me to explain even the most difficult concepts to ensure students don’t get caught short on the bar exam. I hit the fundamental concepts hard in the pages that follow. I don’t oversimplify these fundamental concepts. The criminal law is messy in parts, and while I explain the mess as clearly as possible, I have resisted the temptation that some authors fall into of making the law tidier than it is.
- Finally, I take the “guide” part of this book’s title seriously. The way the law is taught—how its classes are structured and its textbooks written—often mystifies students. Different professors and different textbook authors make different decisions about what areas to emphasize and about how to approach the material. As your guide, I will try to explain these choices as we go along.
- Open Chapter
Chapter 8. Mistakes and the Guilty Mind 39 results (showing 5 best matches)
- There are a couple of related rationales for this rule, but they all basically boil down to choosing utilitarian concerns over blameworthy concerns. The blameworthiness concern is relatively straightforward. Someone who does not realize that what they are doing is illegal is not as blameworthy as someone who knowingly breaks the law. The utilitarian concerns in favor of the rule are numerous. First, if ignorance of the law excused, then there would be an incentive to know as little about the law as possible because only the knowledgeable could be successfully convicted. Second, it would be arguably a lot more difficult to convict people of many types of crime. Presumably, juries would be easily convinced that defendants knew it was against the law to commit murder and theft and all of the various crimes that have always been crimes. But it would be much harder to convict people of the various regulatory crimes included in modern criminal codes, things that are not necessarily...
- Keep in mind that the official statement must be an interpretation of the law, not simply a promise not to enforce it. One who relies on the promise of a law enforcement officer or a prosecutor that they will not be prosecuted for violating the criminal law simply does so at their own peril in all but a very few cases.
- Both the Model Penal Code and many common law jurisdictions have created by statute—or sometimes by common law presumption—a limited defense of reasonable reliance on some official interpretation of the criminal statute in question. Such provisions usually recognize three types of legal authority upon which the defendant may reasonably rely.
- An official interpretation by an agency or official charged with enforcing the law
- An official interpretation by an agency or official charged with enforcing the law:
- Open Chapter
Chapter 24. Defensive Force 25 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Self-defense is the classic justification defense. People intuitively believe that the innocent have a right to protect themselves from violence. People also intuitively understand that there is an important difference between self-defense and retaliation, between attacking someone out of fear and attacking someone out of anger. One of the main purposes of the criminal law is to reduce violence by stopping people from taking the law into their own hands, but the law cannot be everywhere. A person should not have to choose between allowing himself to be hurt and breaking the law. So the criminal law justifies what it usually forbids—private violence—when a person is rightfully protecting himself or herself, or another innocent party.
- We will return to the idea that the criminal law can only privilege one person at a time to lawfully use force when we deal with the initial aggressor rules, and with the special rules that apply to the use of defensive force against law enforcement officers.
- These issues and a host of others make the doctrines justifying defensive force interesting and important. Lawyers who practice criminal law deal with self-defense issues all the time. Don’t be lulled by the intuitive nature of these doctrines. You need to think systematically through a range of issues—not just latch onto the first one that jumps out at you.
- The basic idea here is that only one person in a conflict can be lawfully using force at a time. If the security guard lawfully got to grab you, and you lawfully got to punch him, then society would end up with a lawful fist fight. This is not good, since a goal of the criminal law is to reduce violence, not to sanction or promote it.
- The reasonableness of one’s fear becomes an issue when force is used pre-emptively to some degree. Once an attack is ongoing, the reasonableness of one’s fear is beyond question. One need not wait until an attack begins, however, to have a fear that the criminal law recognizes as reasonable. In movies set in the Wild West, the “good guy” would wait until the “bad guy” reached for his gun before shooting. The criminal law does not always require you to wait that long because it does not assume that the good guys will always be faster than the bad. Deciding how long you must wait before your fear becomes reasonable, however, is difficult.
- Open Chapter
Chapter 26. Insanity and Related Defenses 25 results (showing 5 best matches)
- definition of insanity to determine when a person may be committed involuntarily to a mental institution (although people who are subject to involuntary commitment are not generally referred to as “insane” anymore). This definition is a somewhat empty one: it generally provides that a person may be involuntarily committed when they are a danger to themselves or others. Second, society needs a criminal definition of insanity to decide when a person should be
- Rarely does one criminal case have as big an effect on criminal law doctrine as the Hinckley case did. Hinckley was tried for the attempted murder of Ronald Reagan in federal court, and the federal courts at that time used the MPC’s substantial-capacity test. After Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity, an enormous backlash against the MPC test ensued. Congress changed the federal standard, and a number of states switched back to the M’Naghten test.
- A variety of procedural issues surround the insanity defense. While outside the scope of what is taught and tested in most first-year criminal law courses, these issues provide useful background. Substantial variation exists between jurisdictions, but a few general observations can be made.
- A person is not responsible for criminal conduct if at the time of such conduct, as a result of mental disease or defect, he lacks substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality [wrongfulness] of his conduct, or to conform his conduct to the requirements of law.
- Section 4.01 states that “A person is not responsible for criminal conduct if at the time of such conduct as a result of mental disease or defect he lacks substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality [wrongfulness] of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law.”
- Open Chapter
Chapter 25. Duress and Necessity 18 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Duress and necessity are two different doctrines that law students and judges sometimes confuse. They usually play a small part in the typical first-year criminal law course, if they are covered at all.
- Necessity is messier and vaguer than duress. It did not seem to exist at common law but has always been a part of American criminal law. In the absence of a statutory definition, a general common law definition applies. Some states have defined it by statute, although many of those definitions are vague. A once-clear line between duress and necessity has gotten fuzzy, and the Model Penal Code and a number of jurisdictions have expanded the defense.
- The Model Penal Code also deals with the common law’s clean hands/no-fault requirement in a more nuanced way. If one recklessly or negligently exposed one’s self to the threat, then one can be found guilty of a crime requiring a reckless or negligent mental state. As with self-defense, the MPC’s aim here is to calibrate one’s criminal liability to match the culpability of one’s mental state. So check the membership rules next time you join a criminal street gang!
- Duress is generally thought of as an excuse. Here is a classic example of duress. Your first-year criminal law professor becomes progressively more annoyed at the person sitting next to you in class, who smirks whenever the professor gets particularly serious about something, and—even worse—never laughs at any of the professor’s jokes. One day when this student is being particularly dismissive, the professor pulls out a gun, points it if you don’t slap the student. You slap the student. After the cheering from your classmates dies down (the student really did get on everyone’s nerves), someone calls the police. The professor and you are both arrested. You have a perfect defense though. Your criminal responsibility for the misdemeanor battery is
- Also known as the defense of coercion, duress existed at common law. Common law jurisdictions often apply it even in the absence of a statute. At common law, duress did not provide a defense to murder, but a number of jurisdictions have abandoned this limitation. Most jurisdictions limit duress to harms from human forces. Its (potential) elements are as follows:
- Open Chapter
Table of Contents 25 results (showing 5 best matches)
Chapter 14. Manslaughter 22 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Over time many common law jurisdictions have relaxed and expanded their definitions of provocation, and this is the big story that many criminal law textbooks tell. The Model Penal Code actually replaces provocation with an even more forgiving doctrine called Extreme Mental or Emotional Disturbance, but that will be discussed a bit later.
- Voluntary manslaughter should be one of the most interesting parts of your criminal law course because it raises fundamental issues at the heart of the criminal law. Think of voluntary manslaughter as “discounted murder.” You intended to kill someone, which ordinarily is murder, but the crime gets “discounted” down to voluntary manslaughter, and you receive a lighter sentence. Put this way, you can see the grounds for controversy. Why should we give discounts to any murderer? To make things even more interesting, voluntary manslaughter is not some newfangled product of modern sensitivities. It is an old common law doctrine.
- Involuntary manslaughter is the baseline offense for very wrongful but unintentional killings. As discussed above, it is the extraordinary unintentional killing that constitutes extremely reckless murder. Not all unintentional killings even constitute manslaughter, however. Virtually all jurisdictions require at least criminal or gross negligence. Some jurisdictions require recklessness as opposed to criminal negligence. Recklessness involves a higher level of culpability because it requires that the actor consciously disregard the substantial and unjustifiable risk of death, whereas criminal negligence requires only that one fail to recognize such a risk.
- Very wrongful but unintentional killings. Almost all jurisdictions require at least criminal or gross negligence, some require recklessness, and scholars disagree about which are majority and which are minority. For both recklessness and criminal negligence, the actor was really careless in some aspect. Crimes of omission are common involuntary manslaughter scenarios.
- Voluntary manslaughter is a great opportunity to explore some of the deeper philosophical issues in a criminal law course. One of the biggest questions is whether we “discount” murder to voluntary manslaughter because we think the conduct is partially
- Open Chapter
Chapter 19. Inchoate Crimes: An Overview 6 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Something inchoate is something not fully done or realized. So far, we have concerned ourselves with complete crimes, but criminal law has always created liability for inchoate—incomplete—crimes as well. The three inchoate crimes that first-year criminal law courses typically touch upon are solicitation, conspiracy, and attempt. Attempt is the most important, but professors fit in solicitation and conspiracy as they can. Logically though, it is easier to start with solicitation and conspiracy, then end with attempt.
- Something inchoate is something not fully done or realized. Criminal law has always created liability for inchoate crimes. The following are three inchoate crimes:
- Attempt raises these issues most clearly. To be guilty of an attempt, you must have done something towards the commission of the crime. But how much should be enough? People begin all sorts of things intending to see them through, but then change their minds or just give up. Where should the criminal law fix that “point of no return,” at which you have now committed the crime of attempt regardless of whether you see it through or not? At what point do you become blameworthy or dangerous enough to condemn or deter?
- What you will see as you work through the law of inchoate offenses is that the law makes a tradeoff. To be guilty of an inchoate offense, you must have a very guilty mind since you have a much less guilty hand than you would have for a completed crime. Inchoate offenses are what the common law terms “specific-intent” offenses and sometimes require a greater mental state than the completed offense itself.
- opportunity to prevent crime by cutting off potentially dangerous conduct and to punish people who are already sufficiently blameworthy. On the other hand, if we require too little to establish guilt then we may punish people who would have never done anything further and who are not sufficiently blameworthy to merit criminal punishment.
- Open Chapter
Chapter 18. Property Crimes 22 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Property crimes are seldom taught in first year criminal law courses but are often tested on the bar exam, and are a staple of criminal law practice. People like to mess with other people’s stuff, but there are more ways of messing with other people’s stuff than you might think. The result is several types of crime against property, and the trick—on both the exam and in real life—is to distinguish one from the others.
- Note that forgery includes altering as well as making a document. So you don’t need to steal someone’s checkbook and write out a check from scratch in order to be guilty. Just wait for them to write you a check and add a couple of zeroes to the amount! Both count equally as forgeries under the criminal law.
- Burglary, as we have discussed earlier, is basically the combination of trespassing with a felonious or larcenous intent. Arson is a particularly serious and dangerous form of property destruction; it is the criminal act of deliberately setting fire to property.
- This intent must exist concurrently with the breaking and entering. Breaking into a house just to get out of the cold is a criminal trespass, not a burglary, even if you subsequently decide to steal something while inside. On the other hand, you become
- Burglary was a relatively narrowly defined offense at common law that has since been expanded by statute in a number of different ways. We will begin with the narrow common law definition, whose elements are:
- Open Chapter
Acknowledgments 1 result
- Thanks are owed to Bonnie Karlen of West Publishing for her patience and enthusiasm in helping me see this project through to its completion; Tyla Olson and Andrew Swanson of UNC Law School and Michele Bassett, Bridget Davis, Daniel Buteyn, Moriah Hamstad, and Laura Holle of West Academic Publishing for their thoroughness in editing the manuscript; Maria Savasta-Kennedy and Maxine Eichner for reviewing portions of the manuscript; and countless UNC Law students, and colleagues who helped me find my voice in teaching criminal law. This edition would not have been possible without the skilled assistance of Heather Alyn Newton and Daniel Stainkamp. I also acknowledge a debt to the numerous criminal law scholars whose work I have learned from over the years. Among them are four giants who deserve mention by name: Joshua Dressler, Wayne LaFave, Arnold Loewy, and Paul Robinson. Without their longer, more painstakingly detailed surveys, this short and happy guide to the field would not have...
- Open Chapter
Chapter 1. Thinking Like a Lawyer and Learning Like a Law Student 57 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The typical law school exam, especially in the first year, is a series of essay questions that require a student to analyze a fairly complicated fact pattern. (Some professors use short answer or multiple-choice questions, but this is more common in the second and third year.) The fact pattern will sometimes be followed by sections of a statute that the student is to use in analyzing the problem. Then very general questions will follow. Some professors will simply ask the student to discuss or analyze all legal issues arising under the law studied in the course. A typical question in a criminal law course might be to analyze all criminal liability—although sometimes the question will be limited to certain potential defendants or certain types of crimes.
- The key to thinking systematically is that when you come to a fork in the road that you take both paths—you think through all the choices and possible outcomes of going in either direction. More specifically, when analyzing a criminal law fact pattern you don’t stop after identifying the first crime or the first defense or the first theory of liability. You think through them all.
- The decisions you read in your textbook will largely be appellate decisions, not decisions written by the judge who presided over the initial trial. An appeal must raise a particular issue or set of issues. A lawyer can’t simply appeal on the ground that “the judge made a mistake” or “the verdict is unfair” or “the law is wrong.” The lawyer must identify a particular mistake that was made and articulate the particular issue raised by the mistake. The nature of the mistake raised is called the . Common procedural postures in criminal cases will be discussed in the next chapter. For example, one common procedural posture in criminal cases is that the judge makes a mistake in instructing the jury on the law they are to apply to the facts of the case. The particular issue raised by the mistake varies greatly. A failure to state in a jury instruction in a first degree murder case that premeditation and deliberation require cool reason undisturbed by hot blood, for example, might raise an...
- The procedural posture of the case was that of a special verdict, which is too unusual to merit discussion. But the issue raised was simple. Was the killing of one innocent man to save the lives of three others justified under the criminal law doctrine of necessity as the lesser of two evils, or were Dudley and Stephens simply guilty
- Let’s use a case commonly used in criminal law textbooks to illustrate this process. The case of
- Open Chapter
Chapter 23. Complicity and Liability for Crimes of Others 28 results (showing 5 best matches)
- While the case law is a bit of a muddle, two trends are evident. First, courts tend to find providers of legal goods and services to be purposeful with respect to resulting crimes—and thereby to be complicit—when the provider can be said to have some sort of . Perhaps criminals constitute a disproportionate share of his business, or he charges criminals inflated prices, or he literally gets paid out of the proceeds from the crime. Second, some courts require only knowledge with respect to serious crimes that involve danger to life.
- Enterprise liability, on the other hand, refers to the criminal liability of corporations and other such legal entities. The corporation itself is found guilty despite there being “no body to kick and no soul to damn.” Ordinarily such liability exists only when the board of directors or high-ranking officers engage in criminal conduct.
- One of the reasons law professors love felony murder exam questions is because they require knowledge of many different doctrines. Felony murder fact patterns involving multiple defendants require you to apply both felony murder and complicity doctrines. Could your Mom be guilty of felony murder for making your lunch the day of the robbery if one of your fellow robbers kills someone during the robbery? If she intended to assist in the robbing of the bank when she packed the lunch, the answer is yes in most jurisdictions that have a classic felony murder rule. You only come up with this answer if you see how these various doctrines connect with one another, and that is one of the principle challenges of a criminal law exam.
- Also, don’t forget about possible Pinkerton liability under conspiracy law if crimes are committed in furtherance of a conspiratorial agreement. (See above in the chapter on conspiracy.) Often a conspirator will be an accomplice, but this is not necessarily the case. Someone who agreed to a crime but who did not assist in any way and who did not offer any direct encouragement to any of those who committed it might nonetheless be liable for the crime in a jurisdiction that recognized Pinkerton liability. The harsh nature of expanding criminal liability so widely is, of course, one of the reasons why so many jurisdictions reject this sort of conspiracy-based complicity. Still, you usually get points
- getting the mental state of the offender right. Since mental states are often inferred from circumstances, a real danger exists that some hapless individual who was helping the wrong people at the wrong time will suffer criminal liability that he does not deserve. Moreover, in failing to meaningfully distinguish between great and small acts of assistance, and between mere encouragement as opposed to real action, complicity arguably fails to distinguish the half-hearted offender from the committed criminal, the merely bad from the truly evil. The man who points the gun is arguably a worse and more dangerous person than the person who writes the bank robbery note, but each share equally in liability for bank robbery under the complicity doctrine.
- Open Chapter
Chapter 13. Felony Murder 16 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Felony murder fact patterns are favorite exam topics for many criminal law professors because they test a student’s ability to apply a complex set of interlocking rules and doctrines. But even the most complex fact pattern can be broken up into the following simple steps:
- limit the resulting murder liability. There are lots of limits on felony murder liability (although none would spare the butterfingered bank robber or his hapless driver from first degree murder liability in most jurisdictions). What makes this area particularly tricky for first-year law students is that some of these limitations will be written in a statute, and other limitations will be inferred by a judge who interprets the law against the background of the common law. Here is a quick preview of these limitations and exceptions:
- One important point needs to be made about these limitations: they are creatures of the common law that have been incorporated into modern homicide schemes by judges or legislatures. These limitations often operate as presumptions by judges who assume that the legislature intended to incorporate the common law’s limits on felony murder into the jurisdiction’s statutory scheme. But they are not constitutional principles. This means that where the legislature clearly intends to ignore one of these limits, a judge will abandon a contrary common law presumption and apply the statue as the legislature wrote it. This idea will become clearer after we discuss the first two limitations on felony murder liability.
- Felony murder is a very important area of practice because it is widely used by prosecutors, and it is a common subject of law school exams because it requires students to work through a complex set of interlocking rules and definitions. Think of it is as a “sweeping homicide crime” with lots of exceptions and limits.
- Why do we allow such strict liability for murder when the common law is generally so hostile to strict liability? The short answer is that we really don’t like felons. The longer answer consists of the following three policy arguments in favor of felony murder liability:
- Open Chapter
- Remember though that premeditation and deliberation does not require good planning or good thinking. Unlike the crafty TV killers that capture everyone’s imagination, many of the killers who inhabit the pages of criminal law textbooks are pathetic figures who kill for stupid reasons and in stupid ways. Killing thoughtfully but stupidly can still be first degree murder.
- A “hit man” who kills for money is perhaps the clearest example of such a killer. Many textbooks, however, contain at least one example of a mercy killing where a grief-stricken spouse or child reluctantly takes the life of a loved one in order to spare them needless suffering. Such examples make the point that the people who think before killing are not always eviler than those who do not. The criminal law punishes more harshly killers who reason their way into killing, but it does not attempt to distinguish between good and bad reasons.
- Open Chapter
Chapter 22. Attempt 29 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Assume that my homicidal law student decides to sneak into my house and shoot me to death while I sleep. She bursts into my bedroom in the dead of night, and shoots into my bed at the form beneath the blankets. Unbeknownst to her I have become quite paranoid after years of thinking up homicidal hypotheticals for my criminal law class, and I have taken to sleeping in my bedroom closet while leaving a mannequin under my blankets to fool would-be assassins.
- As is the case with the other inchoate offenses, attempt law requires a highly culpable mental state to compensate for the fact that less conduct is required of the offender. The common law generally defined a criminal attempt as an intentional act that crossed the line from preparation to perpetration of a crime with the intent that the crime be committed. The Model Penal Code (MPC) modified this definition by including within the definition of attempt the purposeful commission of a “substantial step” toward commission of a crime that was taken with the mental state required for the offense attempted. The MPC approach generally expands attempt liability by allowing a conviction on the basis of less and earlier conduct than is possible under the common law approach. While many jurisdictions still follow the common law approach, the MPC’s approach has become very influential. Many states—even ones that generally follow the common law—have adopted the MPC’s definition of attempt.
- Thomas Wolfe said that you can’t go back home. Can you go effectively go back in time and “undo” your criminal liability for an attempt you have already committed? What if you have already crossed the line separating preparation from perpetration, but have a change of heart? Imagine that the law school assassin described above gets as far as pointing her rifle at me before deciding not to go through with it. If she goes home and confesses all to her roommate, can she still be convicted of attempted murder?
- , the government develops a “pre-crime program” that uses psychics to stop murders before they are committed. Once the psychics give the word, a SWAT team swoops in and arrests the would-be killers for the crimes they were about to commit. While no such psychics exist in real life (if they did, they’d probably be in Vegas) the doctrine of attempt is our pre-crime program. Through attempt law, we try to identify those who are going to commit a crime and subject them to arrest and prosecution for criminal liability before the crime is completed.
- A “substantial step in a course of conduct planned to culminate in commission of the crime” is sufficient if it is “strongly corroborative of the actor’s criminal purpose.”
- Open Chapter
Chapter 20. Solicitation 11 results (showing 5 best matches)
- “It’s a free country,” people say. Why then can we criminalize speech? Well, your first-amendment right to free speech stops short of asking other people to commit crimes. First-amendment concerns are raised, however, with respect to what constitutes a solicitation. One key issue is whether this speech is directed at a definable group. A general call to violate a particular law contained in a widely distributed leaflet or a blog post might not be considered a solicitation. A targeted mailing or a post in a restricted chat room would more likely be seen as a criminal solicitation.
- The Model Penal Code does offer would-be solicitors one consolation prize. It allows them to “undo” their solicitation by renouncing it. If a person completely and voluntarily renounces his criminal intent and either persuades the person he solicited to abandon the crime prevents them from committing it, then he will not be guilty of solicitation. Under the common law, there is no going back, however, as the crime is complete once the words leave your mouth (or once you hit send on your email client).
- The MPC creates wider criminal liability for solicitation. Criminal liability applies to
- The MPC creates wider criminal liability for solicitation. First, it applies to any crime, not just felonies or certain misdemeanors. Second, it extends not just to solicitations to commit a crime but to any conduct that would either constitute an attempt or make the other person an accomplice. So if I ask you to hand me a gun so that I can shoot someone, I am not soliciting a crime under the common law because your handing me a gun is not a crime in and of itself. I would be guilty of solicitation under the MPC because if you did hand me the gun after being told that I was going to shoot someone, you would be an accomplice to the shooting (as we will discuss later).
- If a person completely and voluntarily renounces his criminal intent, and either persuades the
- Open Chapter
Chapter 11. Common Law Murder 13 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Although such extreme cases are relatively easy to spot and label as depraved-heart murder, milder cases can be less clear. The line between the sort of carelessness that constitutes murder and the sort that constitutes involuntary manslaughter (discussed below) tends to blur, causing headaches for criminal attorneys and law students alike. How reckless or indifferent do you have to be? What about your garden-variety drunk driver who has too much to drink and misses a stop sign? Or your garden-variety idiot who plays Russian roulette with his friends? Should murder or manslaughter be the crime if death results? Cases go both ways, although the recent trend has been decidedly in favor of prosecuting aggravated drunk driving cases as murder.
- You may have heard the colorful phase “killing with malice aforethought.” Malice was the common law’s definition of the mental state required for murder. If you killed someone with malice, then it was murder. If you killed with some lesser mental state then it was probably manslaughter, unless it was excused or justified. What you will quickly figure out is that malice actually refers to a bunch of different mental states. Most modern homicide codes specify these mental states instead of relying upon the concept of malice. Many cases in common law jurisdictions still discuss malice, and a few codes in common law jurisdictions don’t specify the mental states required for murder but instead rely on judges to apply the common-law definition of murder. In these jurisdictions—and on the Multistate Bar Exam (a multiple-choice test that many jurisdictions use as part of their bar exam)—you will need to know the common-law definition of murder.
- Understanding the common law definition of murder remains important because a number of common law jurisdictions—though not all—do not define the term “murder” in their statutes. These statutes often define different degrees of murder, but the word “murder” itself is never defined. Jurisdictions taking a more modern approach define the different degrees of murder by specifying what mental state must accompany the conduct that caused the death.
- some common-law jurisdictions do not define murder in their statutes, it is important to know the common law’s definition of malice in homicide cases.
- The idea here is that the killer only meant to injure the victim seriously or grievously, not kill them. At common law this was murder, but today only a minority of jurisdictions recognize killings as murder. Imagine that Joey the Loan Shark decides to cut off your pinky finger because you owe him money and have been late paying. You unexpectedly bleed to death. Joey would be guilty of murder at common law. He clearly did not intend for you to die, because if you die he will never get his money. He just wanted to send a message to you and all of his other deadbeat customers about the importance of timely payment. He may not even have been reckless with respect to the risk of your death (he handed you a sterile compress bandage as soon as he finished amputating the finger). But the amputation of even a pinky finger is a grievous injury, and the common law considered people who would intentionally grievously hurt someone to be just as bad as an intentional killer, when that grievous...
- Open Chapter
Chapter 27. Tips for Writing Law School Exam Answers 16 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Even a fact pattern that contains a single question such as “what criminal liability exists on these facts?” can best be thought of as a series of questions. There may be multiple actors who are criminally liable. There may be multiple crimes for each actor that should be considered. Each
- In the first part of the earlier chapter titled “Thinking Like a Lawyer and Learning Like a Law Student,” I discuss much of what you need to know about law school exams, as well as how to prepare for exams during the course of the semester. In this short chapter I share tips on
- One of the most difficult issues that first-year law students confront is distinguishing between one-sided and two-sided issues. Sometimes law students will see two sides where there is really only one, and discuss really spurious issues out of fear that they may be missing something. For example, whether an entry occurred in the case of the burgling butt is a one-sided issue. The rule defining the elements provides that an entry occurs when any part of the human anatomy enters the dwelling. So in our hypo, stepping through the door constitutes an entry. You get no points and will actually lose points with some professors if you say, “on the other hand, a judge might find that stepping into the room is not sufficient for burglary” (because that is inconsistent with the law) or “if he had not stepped into the room he would not have entered” (because that is inconsistent with the facts).
- Law exams come in all shapes and sizes. Professors write and grade them differently. Figuring out how your professor likes to test is key. The best way to do that is to look at your professor’s past exams, take them under simulated test conditions, and then compare your answers to any model answers or top scoring answers available. That said, here are some general observations about how most professors test, and how law most students make mistakes.
- The professor may have narrowed the scope of the question. Instead of simply saying “discuss all issues of criminal liability,” she may have said “discuss all liability for homicide crimes,” or even more specifically, “discuss felony murder liability.” Sometimes students cannot resist the temptation to go beyond the call of the question. These students know something about the issues left out of the call of the question and hope to impress the professor by showing what they know. Big mistake! Your professor left those issues out for a reason. She wanted you to focus on other issues. She cannot grade all the exams consistently and fairly if she awards points for issues that most students do not address, that’s why they were excluded from the question. Ignoring the call of the question also makes you seem careless, which will hurt you when the professor is deciding whether to give you the benefit of the doubt regarding something you wrote about an issue that was included in the question.
- Open Chapter
West Academic Publishing’s Emeritus Advisory Board 14 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Professor of Law Emeritus, Pepperdine University Professor of Law Emeritus, University of California, Los Angeles
- Arthur J. Kania Dean and Professor of LawVillanova University Charles Widger School of Law
- Professor of LawUniversity of Houston Law Center
- Dean & Professor of LawUniversity of Maryland Carey School of Law
- Professor of Law, University of Houston Law Center
- Open Chapter
- Publication Date: March 1st, 2024
- ISBN: 9798887865836
- Subject: Criminal Law
- Series: Short & Happy Guides
- Type: Overviews
- Description: This book leaves newcomers to criminal law with what they need most: key concepts they can remember! Too many criminal law guides bury the novice in detailed rules when nine times out of ten mastery of the fundamental concepts is the key to success on the exam or in practice. Remembering these concepts is made easier by a “forest before the trees” organization and the use of quirky, often funny examples that stick the concepts to the reader’s memory. Outlines of key doctrinal points for each chapter are included. You'll laugh and learn. Bonus chapters offer valuable tips for students on how to succeed in the study of the law. This third edition includes updates to the doctrines of felony murder, rape, and diminished capacity and a short section on abolitionism.
