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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Intimate Homicide: Gender And Crime Control, 1880-1920, Carolyn B. Ramsey
Intimate Homicide: Gender And Crime Control, 1880-1920, Carolyn B. Ramsey
Publications
The received wisdom, among feminists and others, is that historically the criminal justice system tolerated male violence against women. This article dramatically revises feminist understanding of the legal history of public responses to intimate homicide by showing that, in both the eastern and the western United States, men accused of killing their intimates often received stern punishment, including the death penalty, whereas women charged with similar crimes were treated leniently. Although no formal "battered woman's defense" existed in the late 1800s and early 1900s, courts and juries implicitly recognized one--and even extended it to abandoned women who killed their unfaithful …
Justification And Excuse, Law And Morality, Mitchell N. Berman
Justification And Excuse, Law And Morality, Mitchell N. Berman
All Faculty Scholarship
Anglo-American theorists of the criminal law have concentrated on-one is tempted to say "obsessed over"-the distinction between justification and excuse for a good quarter-century and the scholarly attention has purchased unusually widespread agreement. Justification defenses are said to apply when the actor's conduct was not morally wrongful; excuse defenses lie when the actor did engage in wrongful conduct but is not morally blameworthy. A near consensus thus achieved, theorists have turned to subordinate matters, joining issue most notably on the question of whether justifications are "subjective"-turning upon the actor's reasons for acting-or "objective"-involving only facts independent of the actor's beliefs …
Reconceptualizing Criminal Law Defenses, Victoria Nourse
Reconceptualizing Criminal Law Defenses, Victoria Nourse
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In 1933, one of the leading theorists of the criminal law, Jerome Michael, wrote openly of the criminal law "as an instrument of the state." Today, criminal law is largely allergic to claims of political theory; commentators obsess about theories of deterrence and retribution, and the technical details of model codes and sentencing grids, but rarely speak of institutional effects or political commitments. In this article, the author aims to change that emphasis and to examine the criminal law as a tool for governance. Her approach is explicitly constructive: it accepts the criminal law that we have, places it in …