The 1950s and 1960s

2021 ◽  
pp. 23-38
Author(s):  
Michael J. Rosenfeld
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Gay Rights ◽  
Penal Code ◽  
Model Penal Code ◽  
Red Scare ◽  
American Law ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Gay Rights Movement

Chapter 2 explores the early gay rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s during the Red Scare, which was also the period of greatest repression of gay people in U.S. history. The struggles of the tiny homophile movements such as the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society are described. U.S. popular culture was relentlessly hostile to homosexuality during this period. Hollywood had an official code requiring that gay characters be shown only in a negative light. At the same time, the American Law Institute published a model penal code that recommended the decriminalization of sodomy.

The draft code and reliance upon official statements

Legal Studies ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glanville Williams
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Code ◽  
Penal Code ◽  
Model Penal Code ◽  
Draft Code ◽  
American Law ◽  
The Law ◽  
Political Realities ◽  
Law Commission

Any project to draft a criminal code has to compromise between the desirable and the politically possible. It may be that the draft now produced by the Law Commission, or something like it, is the best that can safely be backed, though the contrast between it and the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code (which also had to take account of political realities, and yet has been adopted in many States) is a painful reflection on our stodginess. It is hard to avoid the impression that the Law Commission have been too cautious in their approach, leaning too much in favour of bare restatement of the existing law and against modifications that experience or reflection show to be necessary.

Toward a Contemporary Concept of Criminal Justice

1969 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-493
Author(s):  
Helen Silving
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Penal Code ◽  
The Other ◽  
Model Penal Code ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
American Law ◽  
The One

The state of our “criminal law” in 1905 was described by William H. Taft as “a disgrace to our civilization”. This state had not changed much almost half a century later, when Justice Frankfurter quoted Mr. Taft's statement. Several major modern reform projects formulated since 1952 introduced some noteworthy modifications. I have in mind particularly the American Law Institute Model Penal Code, on the one hand, and the German Draft of a Penal Code, both of 1962, on the other. In the former I should like to draw attention to the serious attempt at a systematization of punishment scales, and in the latter to the effort at a systematic structuring of the “guilt principle”. The German Draft incorporated results of various revisions introduced since the collapse of the National Socialist régime, by either statutory or judicial legislation—revisions born out of the growing concern in Germany with “guilt”. Prominent among these revisions, of course, is adoption of the defence of “error of law” of ancient origin, derived from biblical, talmudic and canon law teaching. Nevertheless, these two projects have but touched the surface of the profound problems that are involved in formulating truly modern penal legislation.

UNTYING THE GORDIAN KNOT OF MENS REA REQUIREMENTS FOR ACCOMPLICES

2016 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-183
Author(s):  
Heidi M. Hurd ◽  
Michael S. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Law ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Penal Code ◽  
Mens Rea ◽  
Model Penal Code ◽  
American Law ◽  
General Part ◽  
The Common ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Responsibility Model

Abstract:This essay undertakes two tasks: first, to describe the differing mens rea requirements for accomplice liability of both Anglo-American common law and the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code; and second, to recommend how the mens rea requirements of both of these two sources of criminal law in America should be amended so as to satisfy the goals of clarity and consistency and so as to more closely conform the criminal law to the requirements of moral blameworthiness. Three "pure models" of the mens rea requirements for complicity are distinguished, based on the three theories of liability conventionally distinguished in the general part of Anglo-American criminal law. One of these, the vicarious responsibility model, is put aside initially because of both its descriptive inaccuracy and its normative undesirability. The analysis proceeds using the other two models: that of the mens rea requirements for principal liability for completed crimes, and that of the mens rea requirements for attempt liability. Both the common law and the Model Penal Code are seen as complicated admixtures of these two models, the common law being too narrow in the scope of its threatened liability and the Model Penal Code being both too broad and too opaque in its demands for accomplice liability. The normative recommendation of the paper is to adopt the model for the mens rea of complicity that treats it as a form of principal liability, recognizing that the overbreadth of liability resulting from adoption of that model would have to be redressed by adopting a "shopkeeper's privilege" as an affirmative defense separate from any mens rea requirement.

The Treatment of Inchoate Crimes in the Model Penal Code of the American Law Institute: Attempt, Solicitation, and Conspiracy

1961 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 571 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert Wechsler ◽  
William Kenneth Jones ◽  
Harold L. Korn
Keyword(s):  
Penal Code ◽  
Model Penal Code ◽  
American Law
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