Law Commons^™

The Uneasy Entente Between Legal Insanity And Mens Rea: Beyond Clark V. Arizona, Stephen J. Morse, Morris B. Hoffman

All Faculty Scholarship

There is uneasy tension in the criminal law between the doctrines of mens rea and the defense of legal insanity. Last term, the Supreme Court addressed both these issues, but failed to clarify the relation between them. Using a wide range of interdisciplinary materials, this article discusses the broad doctrinal, theoretical, and normative issues concerning responsibility that arise in this context. We clarify the meaning of mental disorder, mens rea and legal insanity, the justification for and the relation between the latter two, and the relation among all three. Next we consider the reasoning in Clark, and for the most …