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Full-Text Articles in Law
Self-Defense And The Psychotic Aggressor, George P. Fletcher, Luis E. Chiesa
Self-Defense And The Psychotic Aggressor, George P. Fletcher, Luis E. Chiesa
Faculty Scholarship
This brief essay, written for the Criminal Law Conversations Project, examines whether one can justifiably kill a faultless, insane assailant to save oneself or another from imminent and serious harm. Although scholars on both sides of the Atlantic agree that the person attacked should not be punished for defending herself from the psychotic aggressor, there is significant disagreement with regards to whether the defensive response should be considered justified or merely excused. Furthermore, amongst those who argue that the appropriate defense in such cases is a justification, there is disagreement regarding whether the specific ground of acquittal should be self-defense …
Symposium On Pursuing Racial Fairness In Criminal Justice: Twenty Years After Mccleskey V. Kemp, Jeffrey Fagan, Mukul A. Bakhshi
Symposium On Pursuing Racial Fairness In Criminal Justice: Twenty Years After Mccleskey V. Kemp, Jeffrey Fagan, Mukul A. Bakhshi
Faculty Scholarship
Last year marked the twentieth anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in McCleskey v. Kemp, a case whose ramifications for the pursuit of racial equality within criminal justice are still felt today. McCleskey set an impossibly high bar for constitutionally-based challenges seeking fundamental racial fairness in capital punishment. The McCleskey decision strengthened a jurisprudential climate that shifted and increased the burden onto defendants seeking constitutional relief from discriminatory and biased decisions at every step of the criminal justice process, from arrest to conviction and punishment. The McCleskey court articulated a crime-control rationale for tolerance of error and refused to …
Abolition In The U.S.A. By 2050: On Political Capital And Ordinary Acts Of Resistance, Bernard E. Harcourt
Abolition In The U.S.A. By 2050: On Political Capital And Ordinary Acts Of Resistance, Bernard E. Harcourt
Faculty Scholarship
The United States, like the larger international community, likely will tend toward greater abolition of the death penalty during the first half of the twenty-first century. A handful of individual states – states that have historically carried out few or no executions – probably will abolish capital punishment over the next twenty years, which will create political momentum and ultimately a federal constitutional ban on capital punishment in the United States. It is entirely reasonable to expect that, by the mid-twenty-first century, capital punishment will have the same status internationally as torture: an outlier practice, prohibited by international agreements and …