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Stuffed Deer And The Grammar Of Mistakes, Daniel B. Yeager

Faculty Scholarship

Impossible attempts were first officially recognized as non-criminal in 1864, the idea being that a person whose anti-social bent poses no appreciable risk of harm is no criminal.

To reassure myself the subject doesn’t “smell of the lamp,” I tapped “impossibility” into Westlaw, which designated nearly 1500 criminal cases as on point, 900 or so more recent than 1999. Impossible attempts thus turn out to be not merely a professorial hobby horse, but instead, expressive of a non-trivial tension between risk-taking and harm-causing within the very real world of criminal litigation.

Although it is now hornbook that impossible attempts are …