This coursebook offers an exciting new approach to teaching criminal law to graduate and undergraduate students, and indeed to the general public. Each well-organized and student-friendly chapter offers historical context, tells the story of a principal historic case, provides a modern case that contrasts with the historic, explains the legal issue at the heart of both cases, includes a unique mapping feature describing the range of positions on the issue among the states today, examines a key policy question on the topic, and provides an aftermath that reports the final chapter to the historic and modern case stories. By embedding sophisticated legal doctrine and analysis in real-world storytelling, the book provides a uniquely effective approach to teaching American criminal law in programs on criminal justice, political science, public policy, history, philosophy, and a range of other fields.

It has long been a commonly shared wisdom that humans need government to bring social order to what would otherwise be a chaotic and dangerous world. But recent thinking suggests that governmental law is not the wellspring of social order--after all, thousands of years ago early humans on the Serengeti Plain, surrounded by faster, stronger, and bigger predators, had no government or law yet produced the most successful species in the history of the planet. Presumably they found ways to cooperate and survive what was a harsh and forbidding environment. Does modern man retain this same cooperative inclination, or has it atrophied in humans' modern conditions? Living Beyond the Law: Lessons from Pirates, Prisoners, Lepers, and Survivors mines the amazing natural experiments and accidents of modern human history: shipwrecks, plane crashes, leper colonies, pirate crews, escaped slaves, Gold Rush prospectors, prison uprisings, utopian hippie communes, Nazi concentration camps, and a host of other situations in which modern man has been thrown into a situation beyond the reach of law, to explore the fundamental nature of human beings and how we act when we don't necessarily have to behave. History is rife with examples of how people perform when rules of civility collapse and here, Sarah and Paul Robinson explain that humans in such situations are neither devils nor angels. The real stories included in this book show that modern individuals naturally incline toward reasonable action, even in desperate conditions where survival is at issue. Applying insights from psychology, biology, political science, and social science to these historical and contemproary examples demonstrates that an innate cooperative spirit prevails only in the presence of a system to punish serious wrongdoing within the group and only when that punishment is perceived as just. Living Beyond the Law provides an optimistic picture of human nature--wherein humans are predisposed to be cooperative within limits--that is essential to understanding our contemporary society and to formulate modern criminal law and policy.