The felony murder doctrine is one of the most widely criticized features of American criminal law. Legal scholars almost unanimously condemn it as irrational, concluding that it imposes punishment without fault and presumes guilt without proof. Despite this, the law persists in almost every U.S. jurisdiction. Felony Murder is the first book on this controversial legal doctrine. It shows that felony murder liability rests on a simple and powerful idea: that the guilt incurred in attacking or endangering others depends on one's reasons for doing so. Inflicting harm is wrong, and doing so for a bad motive-such as robbery, rape, or arson-aggravates that wrong. In presenting this idea, Guyora Binder criticizes prevailing academic theories of criminal intent for trying to purge criminal law of moral judgment. Ultimately, Binder shows that felony murder law has been and should remain limited by its justifying aims.

""Literary Criticisms of Law" shows what can happen when two shrewd law professors take the time and have the theoretical sophistication to master the wide variety of today's state-of-the-art literary criticism. This absorbing book both maps efforts in the last two decades to understand law as a kind of literature and makes a compelling case for the most productive way to do so. Avoiding the twin traps of radical skepticism and moralizing sentimentality that have snared even some of the best work in the field, Binder and Weisberg demonstrate how law shapes culture and vice versa."--Brook Thomas, author of "Cross-Examinations of Law And Literature, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics," and "American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract"

"No other work attempts what this one does, a synthetic account of all the genres within the field of law and literature. As a synthesis, this book is first-rate. It not only summarizes but also puts to work a strong, acerbic critical intelligence, clarifying what the authors think is valuable in some approaches and deficient in others. The ability to provoke argument is one of the qualities that makes "Literary Criticisms of Law" consistently interesting. It is more theoretically sophisticated, historically informed, and deeply reflective than any similar work in its field."--Robert W. Gordon, Yale Law School

"A very impressive book. Each chapter contains numerous original, sweeping, and, for the most part, convincing arguments about large swaths of current legal intellectual history. As the first and only attempt so far to synthesize and assess this interdisciplinary field, the book will be extremely useful to manyscholars in the humanities and social sciences."--Robin West, Georgetown University Law Center

Many controversies in American criminal law reflect the tension between older and newer conceptions of the purposes of punishment. The English common law of crimes was centrally concerned with suppressing vengeance and asserting royal authority. Thus it enforced a royal peace by conditioning punishment on unauthorized force and harm to particular victims. The development of American criminal law has been the story of the emergence of this utilitarianism of criminal offending as the imposition of risk or the violation of consent, combined with culpability. This conception is reflected in the Model Penal Code and many state codes. Yet understanding contemporary criminal law requires that we also remember the model of offending as trespass against sovereignty out of which it emerged. In The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Criminal Law, Guyora Binder reviews the development of American criminal law and explains its key concepts and persistent controversies in light of its history. These key concepts include retribution and prevention as purposes of punishment; the requirements of a criminal act and a culpable mental state; criteria of causal responsibility; modes of violating consent; doctrines of attribution of liability for incomplete offenses, including attempt, conspiracy and complicity; and defenses of justification and excuse.