You don't say where this quote comes from.

If this possibility is for some reason a basis for the flood of rhetorical questions above and below, you should explain why.

This draft begins with a couple of grafs posing, apparently, a puzzle in the nature of "cultural practices" defenses to criminal liability. The puzzle isn't stated clearly, the legal reasoning that comprises the moving parts of the puzzle isn't explained at all, and the puzzle—which in most situations has a stable, if not uncontroversial, solution, isn't solved.

The draft, however, then falls into four grafs of rhetorical questions and largely imprecise speculations about "abstractions" in law. I don't know what those grafs mean after three readings, which is more than any non-professional reader would undertake before giving up.

Two possible routes to an improved draft seems viable to me. First, there could be an essay here about cultural practice defenses in crime. That would involve stating the puzzle (individual liability based on the offender's state of mind and the nature of the intended consequences, on the one hand, uniformity of application on the other), and working out how the particulars of one or more illustrative situations demonstrate the reasons the puzzle is difficult.

Second, you could drop that introduction, and instead begin from a clear, non-interrogative statement of the central idea you mean to express about concreteness as opposed to abstraction in legal description. You could explain your idea by both precept and example, and provide analysis or illustration of the advantages flowing from more concrete (or less abstract) articulation of law. (You would also want, of course, to consider any downsides or drawbacks.)

This is your essay, not mine, and I've no idea which of these (or what third way) appeals to you. The present draft is too imprecise, however, to let stand, so one or another way should be taken.

White noise

Before the onslaught of confusion - but I thought ignorance is not an excuse? Isn’t the law supposed to protect the weak and helpless? You mean just because some person is abused in her home country, it’s understandable for her to be abused here too? Is this the way lawyers think? But I thought this was America, why do we apply the reasonable person standard of a different country? – let’s try again:

"Criminal law, or to be more concrete, courts, or even more concretely, judges have held that parents have no right to kill their children. Some other judges, however, have from time to time mitigated murder to manslaughter when the perpetrator was an immigrant from a country with different criminal standards by which the perpetrators' acts were accepted customs."

Paper Title

-- By MinChoi - 16 Feb 2012

Section I

Subsection A

Subsub 1

Subsection B

Subsub 1

Subsub 2

Section II

Subsection A

Subsection B

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