Law Commons^™

Culpable Aggression: The Basis For Moral Liability To Defensive Killing, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan

All Faculty Scholarship

The use of the term, "self-defense, " covers a wide array of defensive behaviors, and different actions that repel attacks may be permissible for different reasons. One important justificatory feature of some defensive behaviors is that the aggressor has rendered himself liable to defensive force by his own conduct. That is, when a culpable aggressor points a gun at a defender, and says, "I am going to kill you," the aggressor's behavior forfeits the aggressor's right against the defender's infliction of harm that is intended to repel the aggressor's attack. Because the right is forfeited, numbers do not count (the …

Justification And Excuse, Law And Morality, Mitchell N. Berman

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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 …

Testing Competing Theories Of Justification, Paul H. Robinson, John M. Darley

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Present criminal law theory reflects a disagreement over the underlying theory of the justificatory principle, and thus the proper legal formulation of such defenses. At the core of the debate about the principle is the following question. Are justification defenses given because the actor's deed avoids a greater harm, or because she acted for the right reason? The deeds theory of justification justifies conduct that avoids a greater harm, because the conduct is conduct that we would be happy to tolerate under similar circumstances in the future: that is, because the actor has done the right deed. The reasons theory …

Justice, Liability, And Blame: Community Views And The Criminal Law, Paul H. Robinson, John M. Darley

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This book reports empirical studies on 18 different areas of substantive criminal law in which the study results showing ordinary people’s judgments of justice are compared to the governing legal doctrine to highlight points of agreement and disagreement. The book also identifies trends and patterns in agreement and disagreement and discusses the implications for the formulation of criminal law. The chapters include:

Chapter 1. Community Views and the Criminal Law (Introduction; An Overview; Why Community Views Should Matter; Research Methods)

Chapter 2. Doctrines of Criminalization: What Conduct Should Be Criminal? (Objective Requirements of Attempt (Study 1); Creating a Criminal Risk …