Cases and Materials on Criminal Law

Book excerpt: Premised on the belief that criminal law is an exciting subject to learn and teach, this popular casebook provides a balanced and creative overview of classic and modern criminal law cases and issues while covering both common law foundations and modern statutory reform, including the Model Penal Code. The casebook invites classroom consideration of many controversies in the field (e.g., rape law, race-based jury nullification, Internet crime, and anti-stalking legislation) and defenses (e.g., battered women?s self-defense). Using imaginative examples from literature and music to illustrate criminal law issues (e.g., examining insanity with Edgar Allen Poe?s The Tell-Tale Heart and homicide with Willa Cather?s O Pioneers!), the casebook allows law students to confront some of the Big Questions with which philosophers, theologians, scientists, poets, and lawyers have grappled for centuries.