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< | It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | | | White noise
-- By MinChoi - 16 Feb 2012 | | | "Criminal law appears to say parents have no right to kill their children.
The law also, however, has from time to time mitigated murder to manslaughter where the perpetrator was an immigrant from a country with different criminal standards by which the perpetrators' acts were accepted customs." | |
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> | You don't say where this quote comes from. | | | 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." | |
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> | I don't understand why your response to this is the particular flood
of rhetorical questions in the middle graf, or what the rewording of
the original unattributed quotation is supposed to clarify. One could
certainly write a useful and interesting essay about the complexities
and contradictions of "cultural practice" defenses to criminal
liability. But you don't seem to be intending that. If I knew where
the first quotation came from I might understand better its confusing
mix of apparent knowledge and evident naivete. But it is not, at any
rate, completely obscure why a court might conclude (on the basis of
an evidentiary record we don't see) why the required intent to kill
might be absent in an actor who, evidence establishes, has grown up in
a culture which believes firmly that death cannot or will not result
from conduct the actor has intentionally engaged in. On such a
record, or in other interculturally complex situations one could
hypothesize, a court might indeed find the evidence to support a
lesser, included homicide offense but not a murder conviction.
If this possibility is for some reason a basis for the flood of
rhetorical questions above and below, you should explain why.
| | | | | | ... but why won't we admit we don't know what we're talking about? Legal writing, from what I've heard, has moved toward clarity and straightforwardness. Why not clarify the substance as well as the style? I'd like to see what practicing the amorphous blob we call the "law" is, stripped bare of all its abstraction and reduced to concrete terms. A start would be to see how it is described. | |
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> | 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. | | | | |
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