Law Commons^™

Battered By Men, Bruised By Injustice: The Plight Of Women Who Fight Back And The Need For The Battered Women Defense In West Virginia, Jeffrey M. Shawver

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Self-Defense And The Mistaken Racist, Stephen P. Garvey

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

How should the law respond when one person (D) kills another person (V), who is black, because D believes that V is about to kill him, but D would not have so believed if V had been white? Should D be exonerated on grounds of self-defense? Some commentators argue that D's claim of self-defense should be rejected. He should be convicted and punished.

I argue, however, that denying D's claim of self-defense would be at odds with the principle that criminal liability and punishment should only be imposed on an actor if he chooses to cause or risk causing a …

The Natural Right Of Self-Defense: Heller's Lesson For The World, David B. Kopel

David B Kopel

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in District of Columbia v. Heller constitutionalized the right of self-defense, and described self-defense as a natural, inherent right. Analysis of natural law in Heller shows why Justice Stevens' dissent is clearly incorrect, and illuminates a crucial weakness in Justice Breyer's dissent. The constitutional recognition of the natural law right of self-defense has important implications for American law, and for foreign and international law.

Self-Defense And The State, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan

All Faculty Scholarship

This article is a contribution to a symposium honoring Sandy Kadish. This article seeks to explore whether and to what extent our understanding of self-defense depends upon a citizen's relationship with the state. Part II begins by setting forth Professor Kadish's claim that self-defense is "a right to resist aggression" that is held by a citizen against the state. After contending that such an account is insufficient to justify self-defense, the remainder of the article seeks to explore the relationship between the state and self-defense. Part III argues that self-defense is a pre-political moral right, as opposed to a political …

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 …

After The Reasonable Man: Getting Over The Subjectivity Objectivity Question, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article challenges the conventional notion of the “reasonable man.” It argues that we make a category mistake when we adopt the metaphor of a human being as the starting point for analysis of the criminal law and instead offers an alternate approach based on heuristic theory, reconceiving the reasonable man as a heuristic that serves as the site for debate over majoritarian norms. The article posits that the debate over having a purely subjective standard and a purely objective standard obscures the commonsense necessity of having a hybrid standard, one which takes into account the characteristics of a particular …

The Rhetoric Of Self Defense, Janine Young Kim

Janine Kim