Law Commons^™

The Perplexing Borders Of Justification And Excuse, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

This Article's central theme is that Anglo-American criminal law should not attempt to distinguish between justification and excuse in a fully systematic way. I explore three possible bases for drawing the distinction: (1) a distinction between warranted and wrongful conduct; (2) a division between general and individual claims; and (3) a distinction based on the rights of others. I show why none of these bases yields a clear and simple criterion for categorization. The difficulty rests largely on the conceptual fuzziness of the terms ''justification" and "excuse" in ordinary usage and on the uneasy quality of many of the moral …