Criminal Law

Catalog description

This course is part of the required first-year JD curriculum. It examines the traditional general issues in the substantive criminal law, including the purposes of punishment and the appropriate limits on the use of the criminal sanction. It focuses predominantly on how criminal statutes are organized around objective offense elements (conduct, causation, and attendant circumstances) and mental states, and to a lesser degree on inchoate crimes, complicity, justification and excuse.