The Universal Grammar of Criminal Law

Abstract

concepts such as murder and manslaughter, intent and negligence, and insanity and mistake, are characteristic of other systems of criminal law as well, and, if so, what role they play there. In the last generation, no criminal law scholar has made better use of comparative law techniques than George Fletcher, the Cardozo Professor of Jurisprudence at Columbia Law School. And, not coincidentally, no scholar has done more to define and probe the fundamental principles of our own system of criminal justice. Now, twenty years after the publication of his classic Rethinking Criminal Law,' Fletcher offers Basic Concepts of Criminal Law, a concise, fair-minded, and remarkably clear synthesis of virtually all of the major debates in contemporary criminal law theory. Basic Concepts should be of interest to at least three groups of readers. The first group comprises students in advanced criminal law classes, who will benefit from Fletcher's gift for finding concrete language to explain abstract concepts. The second group consists of teachers and scholars of substantive criminal law, who will want to see how Fletcher has clarified and augmented many of the arguments first made in Rethinking. The third group is potentially much broader. The most novel and provocative feature of Basic Concepts is its claim to offer a deep structure or universal grammar of criminal law, one that transcends the enacted law of particular states and coun-