George P. Fletcher

Last updated
George P. Fletcher
Born (1939-03-05) March 5, 1939 (age 85)
Chicago, Illinois
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Cornell University
University of California, Berkeley (BA)
University of Chicago (JD)
Scientific career
Fields Criminal law, legal philosophy
Institutions Columbia Law School

George P. Fletcher (born March 5, 1939) is the Cardozo Professor of Jurisprudence at Columbia University School of Law. [1]

Contents

Fletcher attended Cornell University from 1956 to 1959, studying mathematics and Russian. He received a B.A. in 1960 from University of California, Berkeley and his J.D. in 1964 from the University of Chicago. He studied at the University of Freiburg from 1964 to 1965 and received a Masters in Comparative Law in 1965 from the University of Chicago. He taught at the law schools of the University of Florida, University of Washington, and Boston College and then UCLA, from 1969 to 1983. Since then he has taught at Columbia Law School in New York where he was made Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law in 1989 and Cardozo Professor of Jurisprudence in 1994. He has been a visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Free University of Brussels, the University of Frankfurt, Germany, and Yale Law School. [2]

An internationally recognized scholar of criminal law, torts, comparative law, and legal philosophy, Fletcher is one of the most cited experts in the United States on criminal law. [3] The 2003 Propter Honoris Respectum issue of the Notre Dame Law Review was dedicated to the study of his work, [4] and symposia on his scholarship have been hosted by the Cardozo Law Review [5] and Criminal Justice Ethics. [6]

Fletcher's most widely-taught book Rethinking Criminal Law is a "well known time-honored classic of criminal law jurisprudence and the most cited scholarly book on criminal law second only to Glanville Williams Criminal Law: The General Part." The book was cited both by the majority opinion by Justice O'Connor and the dissenting opinion of Justice Brennan in the U.S. Supreme Court case, Tison v. Arizona, 481 U.S. 137 (1987). Fletcher was honored on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its publication with a "Symposium: Twenty-Five Years of George Fletcher's Rethinking Criminal Law." [7]

In 2013, Oxford University Press published Fletcher's Essays on Criminal Law, edited by Russell L. Christopher and with contributions by an international panel of leading scholars including Kyron Huigens, Douglas Husak, John Gardner, Larry Alexander and Kimberly Ferzan, Heidi Hurd, Susan Estrich, Peter Westen, Alon Harel, Joshua Dressler, Victoria Nourse, Judge John T. Noonan, Jr., Alan Wertheimer, and Stephen Schulhofer. [8]

In 1989, the American Bar Association awarded the Silver Gavel for outstanding lawbook of the year to Fletcher's study of the trial of the "subway vigilante," Bernard Goetz, "A Crime of Self-Defense." The bar noted the book probed the complex question of self-defense and its legal and moral implications for contemporary urban life. [9]

Fletcher has been active in several high-profile legal disputes. He was an expert witness in the Agent Orange case, presenting evidence for the court that the use of herbicides and defoliants violated international law as they were considered chemical weapons. However, the court ruled that the use of herbicides and defoliants in Vietnam were not meant to poison humans but to destroy plants which provided cover or concealment to the enemy, therefore Agent Orange fall under the category of herbicidal warfare. The court also used the British's use of Agent Orange during the Malayan Emergency to help dismissed the claims of people exposed to Agent Orange in their suit against the chemical companies that had supplied it. [10] His brief before the U.S. Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld argued that the customary law of war did not recognize the crime of conspiracy, and therefore the U.S. military commissions had no jurisdiction over a charge of conspiracy. [11] This argument was adopted by Justice Stevens in his opinion for the majority. [12]

Basic Concepts of the Criminal Law

Fletcher has restated some of his early work in Basic Concepts of Criminal Law, which has also been the foundation for much of his later work in criminal theory and international criminal law. In it, he argues that there is a danger in too much variation from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Rather, it is better to see the criminal law not as a purely codified enterprise but as a series of localized resolutions to twelve recurrent issues: (1) The tension between substantive criminal law and the procedures of criminal investigation and prosecution. (2) The distinction between criminal punishment and other state-induced burdens, like deportation. (3) The treatment of a suspect as a subject or as an object (or as a person or as a means for influencing other persons). (4) The difference between causation and occurrence of harm. (5) The problem of attribution of wrongdoing to a given person or persons. (6) The difference between an offense and a defense. (7) The difference between negligence and intent. (8) The role of self-defense contrasted with necessity. (9) The relevance or irrelevance of a mistake to criminality. (10) The role of attempt or incompleteness of an offense. (11) The difference between perpetrators and accessories. (12) The conflict between legality and justice.[ citation needed ]

Comparative Law and American Law

The contrasts and resonances of other legal systems best explain American law. In many works, particularly in torts and criminal law, Fletcher has argued that the tensions in U.S. law are resolved similarly in other legal systems but with critical variations that highlight the unique aspects of American approaches. This is particularly true in the continuing role between rules based on reasonableness or on the right or on reciprocity.[ citation needed ]

Books

Selected Honors

Related Research Articles

In ordinary language, a crime is an unlawful act punishable by a state or other authority. The term crime does not, in modern criminal law, have any simple and universally accepted definition, though statutory definitions have been provided for certain purposes. The most popular view is that crime is a category created by law; in other words, something is a crime if declared as such by the relevant and applicable law. One proposed definition is that a crime or offence is an act harmful not only to some individual but also to a community, society, or the state. Such acts are forbidden and punishable by law.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jurisprudence</span> Theoretical study of law

Jurisprudence is the philosophy and theory of law. It is concerned primarily with both what law is and what it ought to be. That includes questions of how persons and social relations are understood in legal terms, and of the values in and of law. Work that is counted as jurisprudence is mostly philosophical, but it includes work that also belongs to other disciplines, such as sociology, history, politics and economics.

The right of self-defense is the right for people to use reasonable or defensive force, for the purpose of defending one's own life (self-defense) or the lives of others, including, in certain circumstances, the use of deadly force.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Criminal justice</span> Justice to those who have committed crimes

Criminal justice is the delivery of justice to those who have been accused of committing crimes. The criminal justice system is a series of government agencies and institutions. Goals include the rehabilitation of offenders, preventing other crimes, and moral support for victims. The primary institutions of the criminal justice system are the police, prosecution and defense lawyers, the courts and the prisons system.

Legal positivism is a modern intellectual tradition in the philosophy of law and jurisprudence that holds that law is a set of rules created by human beings who prescribe certain procedures for its enactment. This contrasts with natural law theory, which has ancient roots and holds that inherent moral principles provide a basis for the law, and that an immoral law is not a true law. Legal positivists oppose this view, maintaining that the validity of a law is determined by social facts such as enactment by a recognized authority following accepted procedures, rather than from any moral criterion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">International Military Tribunal for the Far East</span> Post–World War II war crimes trials

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), also known as the Tokyo Trial and the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, was a military trial convened on 29 April 1946 to try leaders of the Empire of Japan for their crimes against peace, conventional war crimes, and crimes against humanity, leading up to and during the Second World War. The IMTFE was modeled after the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, Germany, which prosecuted the leaders of Nazi Germany for their war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity.

The legal term peace, sometimes king's peace or queen's peace, is the common-law concept of the maintenance of public order.

Legality, in respect of an act, agreement, or contract is the state of being consistent with the law or of being lawful or unlawful in a given jurisdiction, and the construct of power.

People v. Goetz, 68 N.Y.2d 96, was a court case chiefly concerning subjective and objective standards of reasonableness in using deadly force for self-defense; the New York Court of Appeals held that a hybrid objective-subjective standard was mandated by New York law.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Command responsibility</span> Doctrine of hierarchical accountability

In the practice of international law, command responsibility is the legal doctrine of hierarchical accountability for war crimes, whereby a commanding officer (military) and a superior officer (civil) is legally responsible for the war crimes and the crimes against humanity committed by his subordinates; thus, a commanding officer always is accountable for the acts of commission and the acts of omission of his soldiers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sociology of law</span> Sub-discipline of sociology relating to legal studies

The sociology of law, legal sociology, or law and society is often described as a sub-discipline of sociology or an interdisciplinary approach within legal studies. Some see sociology of law as belonging "necessarily" to the field of sociology, but others tend to consider it a field of research caught up between the disciplines of law and sociology. Still others regard it as neither a subdiscipline of sociology nor a branch of legal studies but as a field of research on its own right within the broader social science tradition. Accordingly, it may be described without reference to mainstream sociology as "the systematic, theoretically grounded, empirical study of law as a set of social practices or as an aspect or field of social experience". It has been seen as treating law and justice as fundamental institutions of the basic structure of society mediating "between political and economic interests, between culture and the normative order of society, establishing and maintaining interdependence, and constituting themselves as sources of consensus, coercion and social control".

Barry I. Slotnick is a New York City-based defense attorney. Slotnick is well-known for defending infamous Mafia crime boss, John Gotti and New York City subway shooter, Bernhard Goetz. Along with his son Stuart, he negotiated former First Lady, Melania Trump's pre-nuptial agreement with Donald Trump. In 2021, he was the subject of a NY Times best seller, The Defense Lawyer, written by author, James Patterson, chronicling Slotnick's life.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Islamic criminal jurisprudence</span> Criminal law in line with Sharia prescriptions

Islamic criminal law is criminal law in accordance with Sharia. Strictly speaking, Islamic law does not have a distinct corpus of "criminal law". It divides crimes into three different categories depending on the offense – Hudud, Qisas, and Tazir. Some add the fourth category of Siyasah, while others consider it as part of either Hadd or Tazir crimes.

Jonathan Simon is an American academic, the Lance Robbins Professor of Criminal Justice Law, and the former Associate Dean of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at the UC Berkeley School of Law. Simon’s scholarship concerns the role of crime and criminal justice in governing contemporary societies, risk and the law, and the history of the interdisciplinary study of law. His other interests include criminology; penology; sociology; insurance models of governing risk; governance; the origins and consequences of, and solutions to, the California prison "crisis"; parole; prisons; capital punishment; immigration detention; and the warehousing of incarcerated people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Superior orders</span> Criminal defense of following the orders of a superior

Superior orders, also known as the Nuremberg defense or just following orders, is a plea in a court of law that a person, whether a member of the military, law enforcement, or the civilian population, should not be considered guilty of committing crimes that were ordered by a superior officer or official.

State v. Mitchell, 170 Mo. 633, 71 S.W. 175 (1902), is a precedent-setting decision of the Supreme Court of Missouri which is part of the body of case law involving the prosecution of failed attempts to commit a crime. In United States law, cases involving failed criminal attempts can bring up interesting legal issues of whether the crime was unsuccessful due to factual impossibility or to legal impossibility.

An impossibility defense is a criminal defense occasionally used when a defendant is accused of a criminal attempt that failed only because the crime was factually or legally impossible to commit. Factual impossibility is rarely an adequate defense at common law. This is not to be confused with a "mistake of fact" defense, which may be a defense to a specific intent crime like larceny.

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References

  1. ↑ Fletcher Curriculum Vitae Archived February 14, 2005, at the Wayback Machine
  2. ↑ "Full-time Faculty". Archived from the original on 2014-01-02. Retrieved 2014-01-01.
  3. ↑ "Brian Leiter Most Cited Law Professors by Specialty, 2000-2007".
  4. ↑ "Notre Dame Law Review | Vol 78 | Iss 3".
  5. ↑ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-01-02. Retrieved 2014-01-01.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  6. ↑ McMahan, Jeff (2008). "Collective Crime and Collective Punishment". Criminal Justice Ethics. 27: 4–12. doi:10.1080/0731129X.2008.9992223. S2CID   143392529.
  7. ↑ Symposium: Twenty-Five Years of George Fletcher's Rethinking Criminal Law, Russell Christopher, University of Tulsa College of Law, Tulsa Law Review, Vol. 39, pp. 737-994, Summer 2004.
  8. ↑ Fletcher, George P. (2013-01-10). George Fletcher's Essays on Criminal Law. Oup USA. ISBN   9780199941230.
  9. ↑ http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/migrated/publiced/gavel/newsg1980s.authcheckdam.pdf [ bare URL PDF ]
  10. ↑ Vietnam Ass'n for Victims of Agent Orange v. Dow Chem. Co., 517 F.3d 104, 119 (2d Cir. 2008).
  11. ↑ https://www.oyez.org/sites/default/files/cases/2000-2009/2005/2005_05_184/briefs/Amicus%20Brief%20of%20Specialists%20in%20Conspiracy%20and%20International%20Law.pdf [ bare URL PDF ]
  12. ↑ "HAMDAN v. RUMSFELD (No. 05-184), 548 U.S. 557 (2006). https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/05-184.ZO.html (last visited Jan. 1, 2014).
  13. ↑ Fletcher, George P.; Sheppard, Steve (2005). American Law in a Global Context: The Basics. Oxford University Press. ISBN   0195167236.
  14. ↑ Fletcher, George P. (2003). Our Secret Constitution: How Lincoln Redefined American Democracy. Oxford University Press. ISBN   0195156285.
  15. ↑ Fletcher, George P. (1998-10-08). Basic Concepts of Criminal Law. Oup USA. ISBN   0195121716.
  16. ↑ Fletcher, George P. (1996). Basic Concepts of Legal Thought. Oxford University Press. ISBN   0195083350.
  17. ↑ Fletcher, George P. (January 1995). With Justice for Some: Victims' Rights in Criminal Trials . Basic Books. ISBN   0201622548.
  18. ↑ Loyalty: An Essay on the Morality of Relationships. Oxford University Press. 13 July 1995.
  19. ↑ Fletcher, George P. (1990-06-15). A Crime of Self-Defense: Bernhard Goetz and the Law on Trial. University of Chicago Press. ISBN   0226253341.
  20. ↑ "- AC4 Link - Columbia University".
  21. ↑ "George P. Fletcher". Archived from the original on 2015-01-13. Retrieved 2015-01-13.
  22. ↑ http://scholarship.law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1494&context=ndlr [ bare URL PDF ]
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