Thursday, December 13, 2012

Dressler on Dudley and Stephens, Again

Joshua Dressler, Ohio State Law, has posted Reflections on Dudley and Stephens and Killing the Innocent: Taking a Wrong Conceptual Path, which will appear in The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law: The Legacy of Glanville Williams, ed. Dennis J. Baker and Jeremy Horder (Cambridge University Press, 2013),  Here is the abstract:  
In this chapter I argue that the famous "lifeboat" case of Dudley and Stephens was wrongly decided because Lord Coleridge failed to distinguish between the criminal law defense concepts of justification and excuse; and Professor Glanville Williams, in his critique of the case, also failed to focus on this important distinction.