Law Commons^™

The rhetoric of self-defense is a powerful instrument in the hands of legal actors to shape our understanding of justified violence in society. This rhetoric is based not in the legal definition of self-defense but rather in the paradigmatic situation of deadly response to deadly attack, which offers useful guidance in interpreting the law's required elements. However, the paradigm also tends to embrace claims of morality and right that threaten to expand self-defense beyond recognition to consider inappropriate values such as vengeance and punishment.

In this Article, the author argues that self-defense should be viewed not only as a moral …

The advent of new defensive claims, such as the battered woman's defense and the cultural defense, has led to debates that invoke a variety of important legal and political principles on both sides of the issues. But asking whether we ought to adopt new defenses in the criminal law raises a more fundamental question: why do we ever adopt defenses in the criminal law? Two simple reasons come to mind - (1) defenses may be necessary to our system of criminal law, or (2) defenses may be good for our system of criminal law. In this Article, I consider what …

Critics sometimes maintain that hate crime law punishes an offender for her motive and character and is therefore doctrinally and morally illegitimate. This manuscript explores the concept of culpability to examine this challenge, and argues that critics inaccurately assume that our criminal law conditions culpability on a robust understanding of choice. This inaccuracy significantly undermines the doctrinal critique against hate crime law, which in fact appears to be consistent with many other laws that consider motive and character as relevant factors in determining degree of guilt and proportionate punishment. Notwithstanding the apparent doctrinal validity of hate crime law, the author …