USD School of Law Institute for Law & Philosophy Criminal Defenses Round Table

The topic of the 2019 Institute for Law and Philosophy round table will be Criminal Defenses. Though we can discuss individual defenses — such as self-defense, necessity, insanity, and duress — the focus will be on issues about the underlying structure of defenses and their inter-relations.

Topics include:

• What is the division of labor between justifications and excuses?

• Are all policy-based exemptions non-exculpatory?

• Might self-defense be a special case of necessity?

• Is necessity best conceptualized as a justification or an excuse?

• Is duress best conceptualized as a justification or an excuse?

• In what ways are duress and necessity similar and in what ways different?

• Should there be partial justifications or excuses?

• Is provocation a (partial) justification or excuse or just an element of actus reus?

• Does a particular kind of defense (e.g. necessity or duress) always sound in justification or excuse, or can our answer vary with the details of the defense?

• Should justifications be fact-relative, evidence-relative, or belief-relative.