Criminal Law Study Materials
This podcast will be deep dive discussions on the textbooks: Criminal Law Concepts and Practice (5th edition) and the Supplement: Mastering Criminal Law (2nd edition).
Criminal Law Study Materials
Week 11, Supplemental Chapter 18 Defending Self, Others, and Property
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Week 11, Supplemental Reading review, Crim Law I, Summer. This episode does a deep dive on Chapter 18 (Defending Self, Others, and Property) from the Supplemental reading: Mastering Criminal Law, 2nd Edition by Ellen S. Podgor, et al.
You know, when you really stop to think about the uh the foundational structure of our legal system, there is this underlying expectation of absolute uncompromising boundaries.
SPEAKER_00Oh, absolutely. It's built on these rigid lines.
SPEAKER_01Right. It is almost like structural engineering. We have these load-bearing pillars of society. And one of the absolute thickest, most uncompromising pillars is this idea that society categorically condemns physical violence. Full stop. Exactly, full stop. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Striking another human being is a crime. It is essentially the baseline rule of modern civilization that the state, and you know, only the state holds a strict monopoly on violence. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And it is entirely binary in its fundamental design. And honestly, it kind of has to be. I mean, if you look at the underlying social contract we all implicitly sign, just by, well, living in a governed society, we are surrendering our individual biological right to use force.
SPEAKER_01Trevor Burrus, Jr.: We're handing it over.
SPEAKER_00Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Exactly. We hand that right over to the government, to the police, to the courts, and we do this specifically so that we do not have to live in a constant chaotic state of vigilante street warfare. Right. That surrender of force is really what separates a functioning society from total anarchy.
SPEAKER_01Trevor Burrus, Jr. Yeah. But, and this is where it gets fascinating. You step into the world of criminal defense and you realize that this ironclad load-bearing pillar actually has a trapdoor hidden right in the middle of it.
SPEAKER_00A very complicated trapdoor.
SPEAKER_01Very complicated. We're looking at a legal landscape where the state, despite fiercely guarding its monopoly on violence, occasionally grants this temporary, highly conditional license to everyday citizens to use force. Right. And not just a little push or a shove, but up to and including deadly force. Figuring out exactly when you hold that license in your hand and the exact millisecond it gets revoked is well, I mean, it is a graduate level legal paradox.
SPEAKER_00Trevor Burrus, Jr. It is the absolute definition of diagnostic muddy waters. And uh setting the precise graduate level tone for our discussion today is absolutely crucial. Because when we talk about this, we have to divorce ourselves from our gut reactions. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01Which is hard to do.
SPEAKER_00It's incredibly hard. Because this isn't just about what feels, you know, fair, you know, visceral street fight. It's about centuries of dense legal philosophy desperately trying to balance two massive, incredibly powerful conflicting forces. Right. On one side, you have the primal, undeniable human instinct for self-preservation. On the other side, you have the state's desperate existential need to prevent unauthorized killings and maintain order.
SPEAKER_01Okay, let's really unpack this because our entire mission for this deep dive is to guide you, the listener, right across that exact tightrope. We want you to understand the actual architecture of this exception. Yeah. So we'll start by exploring the foundational definitions and the seven very strict elements that have to be present for self-defense to even be a conversation.
SPEAKER_00Right, the checklist.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. From there, we're going to get into the intense, almost philosophical doctrinal debates between what you subjectively believe in the heat of the moment versus what an objective reasonable person would believe. That is the classic battle between traditional common law and the model penal code.
SPEAKER_00And we really can't stop at the pristine examples because, well, real life isn't pristine.
SPEAKER_01No, it's messy.
SPEAKER_00Very messy. So we have to dissect the outer boundaries of this license to use force. We'll explore concepts like imperfect self-defense, the duty to retreat, and the initial aggressor rule. Because the law does not just look at a freeze frame of the exact moment a punch is thrown or a trigger is pulled.
SPEAKER_01Right, it rewinds the tape.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. It rewinds the tape and examines the entire timeline of the conflict.
SPEAKER_01And the timeline itself is being challenged by modern realities, right? We'll examine how courts are wrestling with things like battered spouse syndrome, which, you know, fundamentally alters those traditional rigid timelines of when danger is actually happening.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. That's a huge area of shift.
SPEAKER_01And finally, we'll draw the stark, bright lines the law creates when evaluating the defense of a human life versus the defense of your property, your stuff, and your home. But to really understand all these complex exceptions, like the duty to retreat, the defense of your house, we first have to strip it all down to the absolute most primal exception of them all: defending your own physical body.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And to understand the foundation of that specific right, you actually have to look back before modern statutes were even written.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00American courts traditionally recognize self-defense based on an inherent theory of personal autonomy. There is a deeply resonant case that sums up this underlying rationale perfectly.
SPEAKER_01Oh, which one?
SPEAKER_00If we look at the exact wording the court used in the case of State v. Holland, the judges noted, and I quote, our law has recognized that self-preservation under such circumstances springs from a primal impulse and is an inherent right of natural law.
SPEAKER_01Wow. A primal impulse and an inherent right of natural law. That is, I mean, that's incredibly powerful language for a court to use.
SPEAKER_00It really is.
SPEAKER_01It's almost biological. It's the legal system acknowledging that before you are a citizen, before you have a social security number or pay taxes, you are a living organism that fundamentally wants to survive. The law is admitting it cannot legislate away your biological imperative to not be killed.
SPEAKER_00Precisely. They cannot legislate it away, but and this is the flip side, the state cannot simply let people act on primal impulses without incredibly strict boundaries either.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Right, because that's anarchy again.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. So they build a highly structured framework around that impulse to contain it.
SPEAKER_01And that framework is basically a checklist, right? A set of pillars holding up the defense.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell He's a very rigid checklist. In general, across the common law landscape, there are seven required elements that an actor must entirely satisfy to assert a valid claim of self-defense.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00If you miss even one of these elements, just one, your license to use force evaporates and you are just committing a crime.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell So what exactly are we looking for in this checklist? Let's break down the actual mechanics of a justifiable fight.
SPEAKER_00We can walk through them sequentially. First, there must be the use or the threat of imminent force.
SPEAKER_01Meaning right now.
SPEAKER_00Right now, not tomorrow, not next week. Second, that force being used against you must be unlawful.
SPEAKER_01Unlawful.
SPEAKER_00Third, it has to actually be physical force.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Words are not enough. Someone insulting you doesn't trigger the right to hit them. Right. Fourth, that force does or could cause physical injury.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so a real threat to your body.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. Fifth, you must be in a situation which a reasonable person would believe could not be avoided without the use of physical force.
SPEAKER_01So it's really a last resort.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Sixth, the actor defends themselves by using only a reasonable amount of force. That's the proportionality requirement.
SPEAKER_01You can't bring a bazooka to a fist fight.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. And finally, the seventh element. The actor asserted the defense was not responsible for the situation that prompted the need to use force to begin with.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so seven pillars. The threat has to be imminent, it has to be an unlawful, it has to be actual physical force that risks injury, it has to be unavoidable, your response has to be proportional, and you didn't start the fight.
SPEAKER_00That's the core of it.
SPEAKER_01When you lay it out like that, it sounds incredibly straightforward. But knowing how the law works, the devil has to be entirely in the application of those words.
SPEAKER_00Oh, it is always in the details. The real complexity emerges when you take those ancient common law concepts and try to write them down into modern statutes. Every single word becomes a battleground.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, let's actually look at how a state tries to write this down. If you look at Arizona's state law, for example, their statute perfectly illustrates how these elements get codified into a single breath. Right. The law specifically says that a person is justified in using force, and I'll quote it exactly here, when and to the extent a reasonable person would believe that physical force is immediately necessary to protect himself against the other's use or attempted use of unlawful physical force.
SPEAKER_00If you dissect that single sentence, you can see the heavy lifting the language is doing. It's like to the extent a reasonable person would believe, that phrase alone contains both the proportionality element and the objective standard.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00And then immediately necessary captures the imminence and the unavoidability. And unlawful physical force is the absolute required trigger.
SPEAKER_01Here is where it gets really interesting to me, though, because I want to zero in on that specific requirement. Unlawful. Because it brings up a scenario that I think completely baffles the average person.
SPEAKER_00Okay, let's hear it.
SPEAKER_01Imagine you are walking down the street and a police officer decides to arrest you. But you know, for an absolute verifiable fact that the arrest is entirely illegal, maybe they have the wrong person entirely, or they are operating outside their jurisdiction with no warrant and no cause. Okay. If the arrest itself is objectively unlawful, isn't the police officer's use of force to physically restrain you technically unlawful force? And if it's unlawful force, doesn't that primal right to self-defense kick in? Like, can you fight back against a bad arrest?
SPEAKER_00That raises a brilliant and highly contentious question. This is the exact intersection where that primal impulse crashes headfirst into the hard wall of public policy.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00You might logically deduce that if a cop uses unlawful force, it triggers your right to self-defense. But the vast majority of states explicitly and categorically prohibit the use of any force to resist an arrest, even if you reasonably, accurately, and perfectly know the arrest is unlawful.
SPEAKER_01Wait, so the law literally forces you to submit to an illegal act committed by an agent of the state?
SPEAKER_00It absolutely does. Let's look at how Delaware handles this in their criminal code, because their wording is incredibly blunt.
SPEAKER_01What do they say?
SPEAKER_00Their statute explicitly states that the use of force is not justifiable to resist an arrest which the defendant knows or should know is being made by a peace officer. And here is the exact quote: whether or not the arrest is lawful. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01Whether or not the arrest is lawful. That is staggering. It completely strips away the unlawful trigger we just talked about.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell It does. And the underlying theory here is all about the venue of the dispute. The state is demanding that citizens use the legal system, the courts, the judges, civil rights lawsuits, to contest an unlawful arrest.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Not your fists.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. You are not allowed to contest it with violence on the street. The policy calculation the law makes is that physically resisting an arrest, even a completely bogus one, almost universally escalates the situation into a deadly encounter.
SPEAKER_01That makes sense. It's dangerous.
SPEAKER_00It is. It leads to considerable physical harm for both the citizen and the officer. So society dictates that the courtroom is the only appropriate venue for sorting out the legality of the detention, not the sidewalk.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell So what does this all mean for our understanding of self-defense? It means that the physical elements, you know, the actual mechanics of a fist swinging, a gun being drawn, a baton being used, are pretty clear on paper. But as we just saw with the unlawful arrest example, the law actually cares far more about the invisible context.
SPEAKER_00Oh, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01It cares deeply about what is going on in the mind of the person using the force and the status of the person they're fighting, which uh transitions us perfectly into understanding the mental game. What happens when the reality of the threat doesn't actually exist in the physical world, but only exists in the mind of the defender.
SPEAKER_00This is where we step away from the physical mechanics and enter the true psychological labyrinth of criminal law. This is the doctrinal debate between subjective and objective beliefs.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00The absolute core of self-defense, the beating heart of the doctrine is whether the force was necessary. But the million-dollar question that has divided legal scholars for a century is necessary according to whom?
SPEAKER_01Right, because necessity is entirely a matter of perception. When we were looking at the Arizona statute earlier, it specifically used the phrase reasonable person. That introduces the objective approach, which, as I understand it, is the majority rule in the United States today.
SPEAKER_00Yes, it is. The majority rule demands a two-part test. First, it requires that the person asserting self-defense has an honest, subjective belief that force was needed at that exact moment.
SPEAKER_01They genuinely had to feel fear.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. But most jurisdictions completely reject stopping there. They refuse a purely subjective approach. They add a second objective component. Okay. If we look at Georgia's legal code for a prime example, their law requires that the person, and I quote, reasonably believes that such force is necessary to defend himself or herself or a third person against such other's imminent use of unlawful force.
SPEAKER_01Okay, let's really put that reasonably believe standard to the test with a hypothetical. I want you to imagine the classic parking lot fake gun scenario.
SPEAKER_00Ah, the classic.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. It is 2.0 AM. You are walking alone to your car in a poorly lit, isolated concrete parking garage. Suddenly, a figure jumps out from behind a concrete pillar, aggressively points a dark metallic-looking object right at your chest, and screams that they are going to kill you if you don't hand over your keys.
SPEAKER_00Terrifying.
SPEAKER_01You happen to have a legally concealed firearm, adrenaline floods your system, you draw your weapon, and you shoot them.
SPEAKER_00A completely harrowing split-second situation.
SPEAKER_01But then the police arrive. The footlights come on. And as the crime scene technicians are looking at the body, they realize the mugger wasn't holding a glock. They were holding a highly realistic looking plastic airsoft gun. Or maybe it was just a black cell phone that they pointed aggressively in the dark. Yeah. Objectively speaking, in physical reality, there was zero deadly threat to you. You shot an unarmed person.
SPEAKER_00Under the majority objective standard, the prosecutor and the jury have to engage in a very specific mental exercise. They cannot judge you based on the 2020 hindsight of the floodlights and the crime scene photos.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00They have to ask, would a hypothetical person of ordinary firmness and reason, standing in that exact dark, terrifying parking garage at 2 a.m., experiencing that same sudden ambush, believe that the threat was real and deadly? Okay. If the jury decides the answer is yes, if that mistake in perception was completely reasonable given the circumstances, your self-defense claim holds entirely. It legally does not matter that the gun was a piece of plastic. The reasonableness of the belief is evaluated entirely from the defender's point of view at the exact clarifying moment of the confrontation.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell But that feels so, I don't know, ambiguous. How does a jury of twelve random people actually figure out what is reasonable? Is it just a gut feeling? Do they just vote on whether they think they would have been scared too?
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell It can't just be a gut feeling, or the application of the law will be complete chaos. The law tries to provide a structured framework to rein in that ambiguity.
SPEAKER_01Oh, they do.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Some jurisdictions actually list specific statutory factors that a jury must weigh. Utah is an excellent example of a state trying to carefully balance these objective and subjective realities. Their state code actually provides a specific checklist of factors to consider when determining the imminence of a threat or the reasonableness of a defender's perception.
SPEAKER_01So what are the actual factors a jury is told to look at to determine if my panic was reasonable?
SPEAKER_00The statute specifically directs the trier, a fact, the jury, to look at several key things. The nature of the danger, the immediacy of the danger, the probability that the unlawful force would actually result in death or serious bodily injury.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00The other person's prior violent acts or violent propensities, and crucially, any patterns of abuse or violence in the party's relationship.
SPEAKER_01That last one is a massive inclusion. Patterns of abuse or violence. That completely changes the definition of our hypothetical reasonable person.
SPEAKER_00It really does.
SPEAKER_01It means the reasonable person isn't just a blank slate, an emotionless robot dropped into a scenario. They are a person who has lived through whatever the defendant has lived through with this specific attacker. It contextualizes the fear.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. It acknowledges history. If someone has repeatedly beaten you in the past, a sudden aggressive movement from them means something very different to you than it would to a stranger on the street. But, and this is vital, it is still firmly tethered to what a reasonable person would do with that specific history. Now, if we want to see a completely different philosophy, we have to contrast this majority view with the minority approach, which is heavily championed by the model penal code.
SPEAKER_01Often referred to as the MPC.
SPEAKER_00Right. The MPC embraces an almost entirely subjective test. It throws out the objective reasonable person and focuses intensely on the honest belief requirement.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Let's look at the actual text of the MPC to spot the philosophical difference. The Model Penal Code specifically states that the use of force toward another person is justifiable, and I'll quote, when the actor believes that such force is immediately necessary for the purpose of protecting himself against the use of unlawful force by such other person on the present occasion.
SPEAKER_00So if you compare that to the Georgia statute we discussed earlier, what crucial word is completely missing from the MPC's formulation?
SPEAKER_01Reasonably. It just says when the actor believes it completely omits the phrase reasonably believes.
SPEAKER_00Precisely. It is a stunning omission by design. Under this purely subjective approach, the jury's job is not to ask what an ordinary person would do.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00The jury has to literally place itself inside the defendant's specific, flawed, potentially irrational mind and view the acts entirely in light of the facts and circumstances exactly as the defendant perceived them. Wow. If the defendant genuinely, authentically, honestly believed they were in imminent danger, that completely satisfies the element of necessity.
SPEAKER_01Wait, let's follow the logic of that to its absolute extreme. Does the MPC just legally protect the honest fool? Let's invent an incredibly uncomfortable hypothetical. Sure. What if a defender is deeply, fundamentally prejudiced? Let's say this person is heavily influenced by racist stereotypes. They're walking down the street in broad daylight and they see someone of a certain ethnicity walking toward them holding a cane. Okay. Because of their own internalized racism and deep-seated paranoia, they hallucinate a threat. They honestly but completely unreasonably and inaccurately believe this person is pulling a weapon to rob and kill them. So out of genuine but completely racist panic, they use deadly force. Under a strict reading of the MPC's subjective standard, do they just get away with murder because their belief, however abhorrent, was honest?
SPEAKER_00You have just articulated the single greatest, most devastating criticism of the purely subjective approach.
SPEAKER_01I mean, it seems like a huge loophole.
SPEAKER_00Critics argue that it essentially allows a jury to validate the prejudices, the paranoia, and the idiosyncratic, irrational views of a defendant. It sets the standard of human life to the lowest, most irrational, common denominator.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But to be fair to the legal scholars who drafted the model penal code, they were not fools. They anticipated exactly this horrifying hypothetical, and they built in a very elegant, complex safety valve to address it.
SPEAKER_01Okay, I am fascinated. How does the MPC catch the honest but violently racist or just deeply paranoid and negligent defender? Because you can't just let that person walk free.
SPEAKER_00You don't let them walk free, but you also don't execute them for intentional murder. The MPC catches them through the mens ray, which is the Latin term for the mental state required for the subsequent criminal charges.
SPEAKER_01Okay, the mental state.
SPEAKER_00Right. Yes, if a prosecutor tries to charge that highly prejudiced defendant with first degree intentional murder, the defendant might actually have a valid self-defense claim based on their honest, mistaken belief. The logic is that they did not form the specific intent to murder an innocent person in cold blood.
SPEAKER_01Because they thought they were defending themselves.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. They intended to defend their own life, however misguided that thought process was. However, the safety valve that catches them is found in a different section of the code, specifically MPC section 3.09.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell And what is the mechanism of that safety valve? How does it trigger? Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00It acts as a sliding scale of culpability. It states that if the defendant's honest belief was ultimately mistaken and that mistaken belief was formed recklessly or negligently, they completely lose the shield of self-defense for any crime where the required mental state is just recklessness or negligence.
SPEAKER_01Okay, walk me through how that applies to the guy with the cane.
SPEAKER_00So the person in your hypothetical wouldn't be convicted of first-degree premeditated murder because they genuinely thought they were fighting for their life. Right. But because their racist assumption that a cane was a weapon was wildly, phenomenally negligent and reckless, they can and absolutely will be prosecuted and sent to prison for reckless manslaughter or negligent homicide. It really does.
SPEAKER_01The law is basically saying you aren't a cold-blooded assassin who planned a murder, so we won't punish you as one, but you are a dangerously reckless, negligent person whose flawed worldview just cost an innocent person their life, and you will go to prison for that fatal recklessness.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. It threads the needle between punishing bad intent and punishing bad judgment. Getting the belief wrong has profound life-altering consequences, which naturally transitions our conversation into the next major area of self-defense law. We spent a lot of time talking about pristine, perfect self-defense, where you do everything right. But what happens when you step outside those strict boundaries? What actions completely void your pristine claim? We need to look at things like using too much force, or being the person who starts the fight in the first place, or refusing to simply walk away when you have the chance.
SPEAKER_01Beliefs by adjusting the charges. Right. But what about the majority of states? The ones that require an objective, reasonable belief. Under that strict objective standard, what happens if you honestly genuinely believe you are in danger? But a jury looks at all the facts and decides your belief was totally objectively unreasonable, does the safety net just vanish and you are instantly guilty of first-degree murder?
SPEAKER_00In a rigid common law system, that was often the harsh reality. But many modern jurisdictions recognized how brutal that was, so they developed a mitigation doctrine known as imperfect self-defense.
SPEAKER_01Imperfect. Okay.
SPEAKER_00Think of it as a legal halfway house. If a defendant has an honest but ultimately unreasonable belief that deadly force was necessary to save their life, or if they face a real threat, but they use an unreasonable, excessive amount of force to respond to it, say, shooting someone who just slapped them, they lose their claim to perfect self-defense.
SPEAKER_01Because it wasn't reasonable.
SPEAKER_00Right. They cannot get a total acquittal. They are going to prison. But the law recognizes that their mental state was fundamentally different from a cold-blooded killer. They lacked the traditional malice aforethought that is required for a murder conviction.
SPEAKER_01Because they were acting out of a state of panic and fear, not out of calculated cold-blooded malice or revenge.
SPEAKER_00Correct. Their motivation was survival, even if their judgment was terrible. So the doctrine of imperfect self-defense drops the top-level murder charge down to voluntary manslaughter. Let's look at how the courts explain this. There is a New Jersey case, State v. Tyranny, which perfectly encapsulates this compromise. The court in that case stated that imperfect self-defense is present when there was, and I quote, an honest subjective belief on the part of the killer that his or her actions were necessary for his or her safety, even though an objective appraisal by reasonable people would have revealed not only that the actions were unnecessary, but also that the belief was unreasonable.
SPEAKER_01So imperfect self-defense is essentially society saying, you were wrong, you made a terrible judgment call, and an innocent person is dead because of it, so you absolutely must be punished. But you weren't evil, you were just tragically mistaken, so we won't brand you or punish you as a murderer.
SPEAKER_00That is a very ab summary of the moral compromise the law is making. Now, let's shift from flawed judgment to flawed actions. Let's look at another very definitive way to completely lose your license to use force, being the person who starts the violence. In the legal world, this is known as the initial aggressor rule.
SPEAKER_01Right. It makes perfect intuitive sense. You can't intentionally start a fire, panic when it gets out of control, and then claim self-defense when you bring someone else trying to put it out.
SPEAKER_00That is a great analogy. The law absolutely loaths rewarding the instigator of violence. It explicitly denies the shield of self-defense to the person who throws the first punch. Right. If we look at how Missouri structures their laws, it serves as a perfect example of this categorical ban. Their state statutes outline that a person is permitted to use force in self-defense, quote, unless the actor was the initial aggressor.
SPEAKER_01So let's put this into a classic messy real-world scenario: a bar fight.
SPEAKER_00Well, a bar fight's always a good example.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. If I walk up to you in a crowded bar, completely unprovoked, and I punch you square in the face, and you respond by grabbing a heavy glass beer bottle off the bar to hit me back, I cannot then pull out a knife and claim I had to stab you in self-defense because you had a dangerous weapon. Even though you are about to hit me with a bottle, I am barred from defending myself because I started the entire physical confrontation.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. You are trapped by your own instigation. The law views your initial unprovoked punch as unlawful force. Therefore, my response, picking up the beer bottle to defend myself, is categorized as lawful self-defense. Right. And this is a critical rule. You cannot legally use force to resist lawful force. Right. My defense is lawful. Therefore, your knife attack is just aggravated assault or attempted murder. However, as with almost everything in the law of self-defense, nothing is absolute. There are two very specific, narrowly tailored ways an initial aggressor can actually cleanse their hands and regain their right to self-defense.
SPEAKER_01Okay, this sounds like a legal magic trick. How does the bad guy, the instigator, get his rights back in the middle of a fight?
SPEAKER_00The first mechanism is called withdrawal. The law wants to encourage people to stop fighting. So if the initial aggressor genuinely quits the affray, stops attacking, and effectively communicates their intent to withdraw to victim, but the victim ignores the surrender and keeps attacking anyway, the legal roles completely flip.
SPEAKER_01So, going back to our chaotic bar fight, I punch you in the face. But immediately I realize I made a huge mistake. I put my hands up in the air, I back away quickly, and I yell at the top of my lungs, I'm sorry, I'm done, I'm leaving. And I turn and run for the exit. Okay. But you are so enraged that you chase me out into the parking lot with a broken bottle, corner me and try to stab me with it.
SPEAKER_00In that exact moment, my continued attack becomes the new unlawful force. Because you clearly and unequivocally withdrew, you are no longer a threat. I am now acting out of vengeance, not defense.
SPEAKER_01Wow, okay.
SPEAKER_00I have become the new initial aggressor of a secondary conflict, and miraculously, your right to self-defense is fully restored. If you have to fight me off in the parking lot, you are legally justified. That is the first exception. The second exception is called escalation.
SPEAKER_01How does escalation restore the rights of the person who started the fight? That seems counterintuitive.
SPEAKER_00This happens when the victim of the initial attack responds with completely unreasonable, disproportionate, deadly force to a minor non-deadly threat. Let's go back to the bar one more time. You walk up to me and you punch me in the shoulder. A basic non-deadly battery. In response to that minor physical contact, I immediately draw a concealed handgun and try to shoot you point blank in the chest.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, my punch definitely does not justify you executing me on the spot.
SPEAKER_00Right. My response is wildly disproportionate. It violates the proportionality element we discussed in the very beginning. By instantly escalating a minor scuffle into a deadly force encounter, I completely deprive myself of any self-defense claim.
SPEAKER_01Oh, I see.
SPEAKER_00And by creating an unjustified, deadly threat, I actually restore your right to defend yourself against my gun. You became the victim in the eyes of the law the exact moment I used excessive force.
SPEAKER_01It's like a high-stakes, deadly game of legal ping-pong. The label of aggressor and victim can bounce back and forth in a matter of seconds, depending on who escalates the violence and who tries to flee.
SPEAKER_00It absolutely can.
SPEAKER_01Which actually brings us to perhaps the most culturally debated and geographically varied aspect of self-defense law, the geography of the fight, specifically the duty to retreat versus the concept of stand your ground.
SPEAKER_00Yes. The ultimate polarizing question of if you are attacked, do you legally have to run away?
SPEAKER_01Let's trace the history of this. Let's start with the traditional common law approach, before modern statutes started changing things.
SPEAKER_00The traditional common law, which originated in England and is still the governing law in a minority of U.S. states today, is based entirely on a safety first philosophy.
SPEAKER_01Safety first.
SPEAKER_00It maintains a very strict moral hierarchy. Human life is vastly more important than personal honor or pride. Therefore, before you are legally permitted to use deadly force against an attacker, you must exhaust every possible avenue to escape. You have a legal duty to retreat, but with one massive caveat. Only if you know you can do so with complete safety.
SPEAKER_01Let's look at how a state codifies that duty to run away. Connecticut is a great example. Their state statutes explicitly say that one cannot use deadly force if they know they can avoid the necessity of using such force with complete safety, quote, by retreating.
SPEAKER_00Complete safety is the operative crucial phrase in that statute. The law is not demanding that you turn your back and run blindly away from someone pointing a firearm at you, because that is the opposite of complete safety.
SPEAKER_01You don't have to outrun a bullet.
SPEAKER_00You don't have to retreat from a bullet. But imagine a different scenario. Imagine an elderly person, clearly unstable, slowly walking toward you from 50 yards away, holding a baseball bat. And your car is parked right next to you, the engine is running, and the door is wide open. Okay. The traditional minority view says you absolutely must get in a car and drive away. You cannot simply plant your feet, wait for them to get close and shoot them, because you had a completely safe, obvious avenue of retreat.
SPEAKER_01You have to swallow your pride and leave. Unless, of course, you are inside your own house.
SPEAKER_00Ah, yes. The universal ancient exception to the duty to retreat, the castle doctrine. Even in the strictest states that mandate retreat in public, that duty completely evaporates the moment you cross the threshold of your own home.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00If we look at Alaska's legal code as an example, their law specifies there is no duty to retreat for a person who is, quote, in the premises or a vehicle the person owns or leases. Your home is your ultimate sanctuary. The law universally recognizes that you should not be forced to flee from the one place on earth you're supposed to be safest.
SPEAKER_01But then we look at the modern expansion of this concept, which has radically changed the legal landscape in a huge portion of the country over the last two decades. I'm talking about stand your ground laws.
SPEAKER_00Yes, a doctrine endorsed very famously by states like Florida and subsequently adopted by many others. Stand your ground laws take the philosophy of the Castle doctrine and aggressively expand it outward into the public sphere. It completely removes the legal duty to retreat, regardless of where you are. Let's examine the exact, powerful wording of the Florida statute. It states that a person who is not engaged in unlawful activity, quote, does not have a duty to retreat, and has the right to stand his or her ground if the person using or threatening to use the deadly force is not engaged in a criminal activity and is in a place where he or she has a right to be.
SPEAKER_01A place where he or she has a right to be. That phrasing is a massive paradigm shift. That means if I am legally standing on a public sidewalk or in a grocery store aisle or at a public park and someone attacks me, I am under absolutely no legal obligation to even look for an escape route.
SPEAKER_00None at all.
SPEAKER_01Even if my car is running right next to me and escape is perfectly 100% safe, I do not have to leave. I could plant my feet, stand my ground, and use deadly force to defend myself.
SPEAKER_00That is exactly the literal interpretation and the intended effect of the law. It extends the inviolability of your living room to every single square inch of public space where you have a legal right to exist.
SPEAKER_01I really want you, the listener, to mentally pause here for a second and consider the philosophical weight of this. This is not just a minor tweak to a legal code. Does the rapid proliferation of stand your ground laws signify a massive foundational shift in our society's values?
SPEAKER_00It's a huge question.
SPEAKER_01Think about it. For centuries, the common law insisted on preserving human life above all else. Even the life of a guilty, violent attacker was deemed more valuable than your personal pride, as long as you could safely walk away. Now, these modern statutes seem to suggest that personal honor, autonomy, and the fundamental right to simply be in a public space without yielding to a criminal have begun to outweigh that ancient preference for preserving human life.
SPEAKER_00It is an undeniably profound philosophical shift. It prioritizes the absolute autonomy and right of movement of the innocent actor over the biological life of the guilty aggressor. The logic is that the burden of avoiding the violence, the burden of de-escalation, should fall entirely and exclusively on the shoulders of the person who decided to start the violence, not on the innocent victim who's just trying to buy groceries.
SPEAKER_01It is a fascinating debate. But as we look back at all these rules we've spent time dissecting, the strict requirements of imminence, the debate over reasonable retreat, the ping-pong of the initial aggressor rules, they all seem perfectly designed for very specific, acute, explosive events.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, isolated incidents.
SPEAKER_01Right. They are built for bar fights, they are built for alleyway muggings, they are designed for scenarios where two strangers clash violently for a few minutes and then the event is over. But what happens to the law when the danger isn't an isolated event? What happens when the threat is a constant, suffocating, inescapable presence in your own home?
SPEAKER_00This brings us to one of the most challenging, heartbreaking, and rapidly evolving areas of modern criminal law: battered spell syndrome, and how the brutal reality of domestic abuse fundamentally breaks the traditional rigid mold of self-defense doctrines.
SPEAKER_01When we were laying out the foundation earlier, walking through the seven elements, the very first pillar was the requirement of imminent force. The danger has to be right here, right now, split second away.
SPEAKER_00Yes. The traditional mechanical rule of immanence is incredibly rigid. If an attacker violently punches a victim but then walks away, sits down on the couch, and goes to sleep, the threat of immediate physical harm has legally ended.
SPEAKER_01It's over.
SPEAKER_00The attack is over. If the victim then waits an hour, walks over, and kills the attacker while they're sleeping. Traditional common law views that as premeditated murder, not self-defense, because the danger was no longer imminent in that specific millisecond.
SPEAKER_01But applying that rigid stopwatch timeline completely ignores the psychological and physical reality of a severely abused spouse trapped in a cycle of violence.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. And eventually the courts could no longer ignore the immense friction between the sterile law and the horrific reality. The classic paradigm-shifting case application here is State v. Norman, which came out of North Carolina.
SPEAKER_01Oh, I've read about this one. It's tough.
SPEAKER_00The facts of the case are deeply harrowing and difficult to read. A spouse had been subjected to horrific, escalating, life-threatening abuse for years. Her husband forced her into sex work to support him. He beat her constantly. He repeatedly threatened to kill her and her family. He tortured her, and he deprived her of basic food and dignity.
SPEAKER_01Just awful.
SPEAKER_00Finally, one afternoon, after a particularly brutal series of beatings and death threats, while the abuser was taking a nap, the battered spouse took a gun and shot him.
SPEAKER_01Under a strict mechanical reading of the old common law rules we just talked about, a sleeping person poses absolutely no immediate physical threat. Their eyes are closed, they aren't swinging a fist.
SPEAKER_00Right, and technically, following the letter of the law, the trial court in the Norman case actually refused to even give a self-defense instruction to the jury because of that explicit lack of strict imminence. Wow. The judge looked at the sleeping man and said, there was no immediate threat. But the tragic facts of that case sparked a massive legal and cultural evolution. Psychologists and legal scholars argued that for a battered spouse, the danger is never truly over. The danger is a constant ambient environment. The abuser sleeping is just a temporary, terrifying pause in an ongoing, inevitable lethal attack. The fear of future harm is deeply and rationally based on a long, unbroken history of past continuous attacks.
SPEAKER_01So how did the legal system actually adapt to this? Did they just throw out the imminence requirement entirely for domestic abuse cases?
SPEAKER_00Not entirely, because the law still fears vigilante justice, but they drastically widen the lens of how they view the situation. Courts and legislatures remain somewhat divided on exactly how far to push this, but many jurisdictions evolve their statutory approach to allow evidence of battered spouse syndrome to deeply inform that reasonableness standard we talked about earlier.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Let's look at how a modern statute actually handles this integration of psychology and law. Georgia's legal code is a great example of this evolution. Their laws show how the concept actually expanded beyond just spouses. The statute explicitly allows a defendant arguing self-defense to offer expert testimony and evidence, quote, that the defendant had been the victim of acts of family violence or child abuse committed by the deceased.
SPEAKER_00By allowing that specific history of abuse into the courtroom, the law is fundamentally changing the instructions to the jury. It tells them, do not judge the imminence of the threat from the sterile perspective of a hypothetical stranger walking into the bedroom at that exact moment.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00Judge the absolute necessity of the force from the perspective of a person who has lived through that specific, personalized cycle of horrific violence. It contextualizes the terror. It helps the jury understand why the defendant reasonably and perhaps accurately believed that if they didn't act while the abuser slept, they would certainly be dead when the abuser woke up.
SPEAKER_01It is such a powerful example of the law realizing its own inadequacy and trying to bend its rigid ancient mechanics to fit the messy, traumatic reality of human psychology. Now, keeping with the theme of breaking the traditional mold, I want to pivot away from defending oneself and look at the rules for stepping in to save someone else. Defense of others.
SPEAKER_00This is another area that has seen massive, necessary doctrinal evolution. Historically, the common law was incredibly uncomfortably rigid here. It required a strict familial or legal relationship with the person you were trying to defend.
SPEAKER_01Like family members.
SPEAKER_00Right. A husband could legally use force to defend a wife, a parent could defend a child, a master could defend a servant, but using force to defend a total stranger being attacked in an alley. Historically, that was not justified.
SPEAKER_01That seems completely counterintuitive to the entire concept of a civilized society or the idea of being a good Samaritan. We want people to help each other.
SPEAKER_00It was counterintuitive. And what made it even worse was the old act apparel rule, which was also known in some jurisdictions as the alter ego rule.
SPEAKER_01Oh, I have a hypothetical for this one that completely blew my mind when I was researching the history of this. Okay, listener, I want you to imagine this scenario.
SPEAKER_00Except the scene.
SPEAKER_01You are walking down a city street in the middle of the day, you hear screaming, you turn the corner, and you see a scruffy, very aggressive looking man physically pinning a terrified woman to the ground, and he is pointing a gun directly at her face. She is screaming for someone to help her. You, being a brave, selfless, good Samaritan, pick up a heavy broof from a construction site, sprint over, and hit the aggressive man in the back of the head to save the woman's life.
SPEAKER_00A highly commendable, heroic, primal impulse to save a life.
SPEAKER_01Right. You think you are a hero, but then the dust settles and you find out the horrifying truth. The scruffy man with the gun is actually an undercover, plainclothes police officer. And the terrified woman screaming for help is actually a violent, fleeing fugitive who just committed armed robbery. Oh boy. Under the old traditional act at peril rule, what happens to the hero who just tried to stop what looked like a murder?
SPEAKER_00Under that strict historical doctrine, you are going straight to prison for felony assault on a police officer.
SPEAKER_01Which just feels clinically insane.
SPEAKER_00It feels legally brutal and deeply unfair, but it followed a very strict, uncompromising mechanical logic. Under the Act at Peril rule, the rescuer literally stepped into the legal shoes of the person being rescued.
SPEAKER_01Oh, I see.
SPEAKER_00Because the fleeing fugitive had absolutely no legal right whatsoever to use force to resist a lawful arrest by an undercover officer, you who stepped into her shoes to defend her, also had zero legal right to use force. Wow. It didn't matter how reasonable your mistake was. It didn't matter that it looked exactly like a mugging, you acted at your own peril. If you guessed wrong about the invisible legal dynamics of a street fight, you became a criminal.
SPEAKER_01Talk about a massive chilling effect on Good Samaritans. If I know that I have to be 100% legally certain of the hidden context, the identities, and the background of a street fight before I intervene, I'm never going to intervene. I'm just going to keep my head down and keep walking.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. The law was actively punishing heroism. And the drafters of the Model Penal Code recognized how terrible this policy was for a functioning moral society. They realized you cannot demand perfection from people reacting to emergencies. So the MPC, and thankfully most modern jurisdictions today, completely reject the Draconian Act at Peril rule.
SPEAKER_01So what do they replace it with to protect the Good Samaritan?
SPEAKER_00They replace it with the reasonable belief test. Under the framework of the MPC, specifically Section 3.05, the law aligns the defense of others with the exact same requirements as self-defense.
SPEAKER_01Okay, that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00If the rescuer honestly and reasonably believes that their physical intervention is immediately necessary to protect the third party from unlawful force, they are legally justified. Even if they are completely factually wrong about the reality of the situation, exactly as in your undercover cop scenario. As long as a reasonable person would have made the same mistake based on appearances, the law now protects the Good Samaritan.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so we have extensively discussed the great length the law will go to protect our own physical bodies and the bodies of our neighbors and strangers. We've seen how surprisingly flexible these ancient doctrines can be when human life is on the line. But that brings us to our final major topic.
SPEAKER_00The stuff.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. We've covered bodies. What about protecting our belongings, our stuff? The law draws a fierce, uncompromising line in the sand here, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_00It does. This is where the flexibility completely stops. When we talk about defending property and habitation, the governing principle is perhaps the single, clearest, most universally agreed upon rule in all of criminal law. The legal system values human life infinitely more than it values property. Period.
SPEAKER_01It's the ultimate moral calculus. You can replace a stolen flat-screen TV. You can buy a new car. You cannot replace a human heartbeat.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. This expression of relative values represents the law's deep institutional effort to induce citizens to rely on the police, the courts, and the insurance companies rather than taking a human life over physical, replaceable items. Now, to be clear, you can legally use non-deadly force to prevent a theft or a trespass.
SPEAKER_01Like shoving someone.
SPEAKER_00Right. You can grab your purse back, you can shove someone off your lawn, but the limitations are incredibly strict.
SPEAKER_01For instance, going back to our earlier discussion, we saw that you absolutely cannot use force to resist the police.
SPEAKER_00Right. You cannot use force to resist a police seizure of your property. Even if the police are entirely objectively wrong and they are towing your car by mistake, you have to let them take it and you have to sue them later. Furthermore, the time frame you are allowed to use non-deadly force to take your property back from a thief is incredibly narrow. It must be almost immediate.
SPEAKER_01Let's look at how the Texas Criminal Cond illustrates this tight timeframe. Their laws justify the use of force to re-enter land or retake stolen property, only if that force is used, quote, immediately or in fresh pursuit after the dispossession.
SPEAKER_00Fresh pursuit is the absolute key concept there. If someone snatches your phone out of your hand while you are texting and they take off running, you can chase them down the block, tackle them to the ground, and pry your phone out of their hands. That is fresh pursuit.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00But if someone sneaks into your yard and steals your expensive lawnmower from your shed on a Tuesday night, and then you see it sitting in their front yard two days later on a Thursday, you absolutely cannot walk over to their yard and punch them in the face to take it back.
SPEAKER_01Even though it's yours?
SPEAKER_00Even though it's yours. The immediacy is entirely gone. The fresh pursuit is over. You must call the cops.
SPEAKER_01And most importantly, what about the level of force you can use? What if tackling them isn't enough?
SPEAKER_00This is the brightest, most neon line in the law. Deadly force is generally universally barred to protect mere property. You cannot kill someone over an object. If we look at the Colorado statutes, they spell this out perfectly. The law states a person can use reasonable force to prevent theft, but they may use deadly physical force, quote, only in defense of himself or another.
SPEAKER_01Only in defense of himself or another, not in defense of the lawnmower, not the jewelry, not the car.
SPEAKER_00Never just the stuff. The moment you introduce deadly force to protect an object, you become the aggressor. However, the law recognizes one massive, glowing historical exception to the property rule, and that is the home, habitation.
SPEAKER_01The castle.
SPEAKER_00Yes. The law deeply distinguishes mere property, like a watch or a bicycle, from the home you sleep in. The common law has always provided an exceptionally broad defense for situations involving violent invasions of a home, frequently allowing the use of deadly force against an unlawful entry. And modern statutes have expanded this protection even further.
SPEAKER_01All right, I'm going to look at Florida law again to see how broad this has gotten. Their statutes extend these protections significantly. The law provides an actual legal presumption of reasonableness for a resident to use deadly force against a person who is unlawfully and forcefully entering, quote, a dwelling, residence, or occupied vehicle.
SPEAKER_00That inclusion of occupied vehicle is a major, somewhat controversial modern expansion. But the underlying theory is consistent. A violent forced home invasion or a carjacking is almost always a prelude to terrible violence against the occupants inside.
SPEAKER_01Right, you don't know what they're going to do.
SPEAKER_00The law has decided that you should not be forced to wait and find out if the intruder just wants to steal your television or if they want to kill your family. The violent breach of the sanctuary itself justifies the deadly force.
SPEAKER_01Which leads me to a crazy logistical question. I think literally every single law student asks this exact question during their 1L criminal law class.
SPEAKER_00I know exactly what you're going to ask.
SPEAKER_01If the law says I have the right to use deadly force to protect my home against an intruder while I am sleeping inside it, can I just save myself the trauma and set up a mechanical trap to do it for me? Like if I am going out of town, can I rig a loaded shotgun attached to a tripwire on my front door to shoot anyone who breaks in?
SPEAKER_00The infamous spring gun question. It is an absolute staple of criminal law textbooks for a very good reason. The most famous case application here is usually Bishop v State. And the legal maxim that comes out of that case, and cases like it, is profound and beautiful in its logic. You cannot do indirectly or mechanically what you are not permitted to do directly.
SPEAKER_01Meaning what exactly?
SPEAKER_00Meaning a machine has no capacity for judgment, it has no subjective belief, it has no objective reasonableness. It cannot analyze the seven elements of self-defense we talked about at the beginning of this deep dive.
SPEAKER_01Right. It's just a trigger.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. If you rig a shotgun to a door, yes, it will successfully kill an armed burglar trying to rob you. But it will also blindly blow away a firefighter trying to kick your door in to save your house from burning down. It will kill a police officer responding to a wellness check. It will kill a lost, freezing child seeking help in a storm.
SPEAKER_01Oh wow. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00A machine cannot distinguish between a violent felony and a desperate trespass. Therefore, the model penal code, specifically section 3.06, severely restricts the use of mechanical devices. They absolutely cannot be designed or intended to cause death or serious injury. If you set a lethal mechanical trap and it kills someone, even a guilty burglar, you are criminally liable for that death.
SPEAKER_01Because the machine cannot evaluate necessity or proportionality, that makes total logical sense when you strip it down. To wrap up this section on property and the limits of force, let's look at the broader concept of crime prevention in general. If I see a crime happening out in the world, am I allowed to use force to stop it?
SPEAKER_00For non-deadly force, generally, yes, you can use reasonable physical force to prevent a felony or a breach of the peace misdemeanor. But what about deadly force? That is historically and strictly limited to preventing what the law calls forcible or atrocious felonies. We're talking about crimes like murder, rape, armed robbery, kidnapping, arson, crimes that inherently, by their very nature, threaten human life.
SPEAKER_01The Model Penal Code is very specific about drawing this line. They limit the use of deadly force for crime prevention strictly to situations where the crime itself poses a, quote, substantial risk of death or serious bodily harm to any person. Correct. Okay, let me push back on this with one final agonizing hypothetical to make sure I have this crystal clear in my head. Imagine I am looking at the second-story window of my house. I look down at the street and I see a man breaking into my brand new custom-built $200,000 sports car that I just bought. Ouch. There is no one inside the car. The street is totally empty. The thief hot wires the engine. He's about to put it in gear and drive off forever. I happen to have a scoped hunting rifle right next to me, and I am an absolutely perfect shot. I could cleanly shoot him through the window and save my $200,000 property without endangering anyone else on the street. Does the law really demand that I just stand there, lower the rifle, and let him drive away with my life savings?
SPEAKER_00The law demands exactly that.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_00Yes. You must watch him drive away. Stealing a car, even a $200,000 car, is just a property crime. Wow. It's grand larceny, certainly, and he will face severe prison time if caught. But it is not a forcible felony that is actively threatening a human life. If you pull that trigger to save your property, making the conscious decision to take a human life merely to stop a theft, the legal paradigm completely shifts. You are no longer preventing a crime. You become the murderer in the eyes of the law.
SPEAKER_01That perfectly, almost uncomfortably, encapsulates the criminal law's ultimate priorities, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_00It truly does. It is the purest distillation of the value system our laws are built upon.
SPEAKER_01Well, let's bring this all together. What an absolutely incredible, mind-bending journey through the deepest, muddiest waters of the legal system. As we pull back and look at the key takeaways from everything we've discussed, we've clearly seen that the license to use force, the right to self-defense, is highly conditional and incredibly fragile.
SPEAKER_00It really is.
SPEAKER_01It strictly requires an immediate, unlawful threat that must be met with only proportional force. You deviate from that and you become the criminal.
SPEAKER_00We navigated the incredibly tricky, almost philosophical waters of subjective versus objective beliefs. We explored the deep tension of whether we judge a defender by the sterile standard of a hypothetical, reasonable person, or by their own honest, sometimes deeply flawed, and sometimes traumatized perceptions in the heat of the moment.
SPEAKER_01We saw how the law slowly, sometimes painfully, attempts to adapt to the trauma of continuous abuse via doctrines like battered spouse syndrome, literally bending the rigid ancient rules of imminence to fit the complex reality of human psychology and survival.
SPEAKER_00And finally, we drew the ultimate, brightest distinction in criminal law: the absolute sanctity of human life versus the lesser finite value of replaceable property, balanced only by the ancient, enduring protections of the home as a sanctuary.
SPEAKER_01Which leaves me with a final provocative thought for everyone listening to mull over on their own as we wrap up. We have spent this entire hour talking extensively about physical force, physical injury, and physical trespass. All of these ancient doctrines were built for a physical world. But as our world changes so rapidly, as our wealth becomes almost entirely digital, as our identities become irrevocably tied to devices and cloud servers and our castles increasingly exist in virtual spaces, how are these centuries-old doctrines going to adapt?
SPEAKER_00It is genuinely the next great frontier of criminal jurisprudence.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. Will the legal system ever evolve to view a catastrophic digital intrusion, say? Someone hacking in and permanently destroying your life's work, draining your life's savings and erasing your digital identity. Will the law ever view that as violently as a physical intrusion? Will you ever be allowed to use physical force to stop a digital theft? Or is the physical biological body the final only boundary the law will ever continue to protect with legal force? It is absolutely something to think about the next time you lock your physical front door for the night and then log into your digital one. Thank you for joining us on this deep dive into the limits of self defense. Keep questioning the structures of the law around you. We'll see you next time.