Law Commons^™

The advent of new defensive claims, such as the battered woman's defense and the cultural defense, has led to debates that invoke a variety of important legal and political principles on both sides of the issues. But asking whether we ought to adopt new defenses in the criminal law raises a more fundamental question: why do we ever adopt defenses in the criminal law? Two simple reasons come to mind - (1) defenses may be necessary to our system of criminal law, or (2) defenses may be good for our system of criminal law. In this Article, I consider what …