Criminal Law: Responsibility for Injurious Conduct

These two courses, I and II together analyze society's focus on individual rights over collective responsibilities and examine adjudication, guilt, punishment, and deterrence. Each course provides a perspective on the central theme of the function and content of the prevailing legal standards for civil and criminal responsibility: malice and intent, causation and fault (including negligence), protected and unprotected interests, the legal duty to act, and several exceptions to accountability when an action causes harm. Each course covers the legal concepts and categories that shape these doctrinal areas. The Torts course explores theories of negligence, intentional torts, and strict liability, including in-depth study of status, causation, assumption of risk, contributory and joint liability, defenses, and remedies. The Criminal Law course covers both the common law and statutory elements of misdemeanors and felonies, while also exploring the legal implications of status, causation, conspiracy and accomplice liability, defenses, and sentencing. In both courses, students identify and assess the political sources and social implications of the ways in which responsibility is defined and allocated, and consider the efficiency and/or justice of varying allocations of risk, cost, and harm.