Please balance elements with theory. Carol Chase (Pepperdine) would always first put the elements on the board. First, here's the elements for murder. Second, let's discuss the cases to see how courts have interpreted these elements. Third, let's discuss the theory behind, e.g., mens rea (how do we know the contents of someone's mind? Is is possible? Is it just a legal fiction we use to make ourselves feel like we're truly only punishing the "guilty").

Sometimes professors would forget that the theoretical tail should not wag the criminal law dog. Free will is interesting to discuss (though, I was always suspicious of people who had neither a Ph.D. or even B.A. in philosophy so arrogantly waxing about such philosophical problems). But it's pretty irrelevant (in a criminal law class) unless we first discuss intent. So, first, teach the class that there can only be a murder if there is an intentional act. Second, is this sound? Do any of us act intentionally? If our acts are only partially volitional, should that negate conviction of an intent crime, or should that go to sentencing? Etc.

My criminal law professor focused on one crime--common-law burglary. We spent significant time on each element. (One student asked if we were going to study additional crimes, and my professor responded that he was trying to teach us how to conduct legal analysis. Once we learned how to do that, reviewing different substantive crimes would be of limited benefit). Once we had common-law burglarly down, we compared it to various statutory definitions of burglary, seeing how state legislatures kept expanding the net by weakening elements. Then we learned about attempt. Then conspiracy. We finished with RICO--the ultimate enlargement of the net.

This was the best class I had during law school, and I think his method was the most effective way of teaching 1Ls.

The best criminal law class I took was a white collar crime class taught by an adjunct professor whose "day job" was Assistant US Attorney.

Her technique was to use actual indictments to walk us through the elements of crimes AND to teach us a little procedure on the side.

I had your fellow UCLA colleague Peter Arenella for criminal law as a first year and found his approach very effective. Prof. Arenella was very methodical about starting the discussion of each case by analyzing the particular code in question and breaking down its elements by having the class identify the "mens rea", the "actus reus", etc. It may seem like an obvious approach but I noticed that friends of mine in other sections seemed very lost when it came time to study for crim. law finals because they lacked this discplined approach to their initial thinking.
I personally found Prof. Arenella's crim. law class to be one of the best that I had at UCLA and would recommend asking him directly if he has any advice.

I'd urge you to spend some time on the competing theories behind criminal laws (for instance, just desserts vs. deterrence).

I realize this sounds esoteric, but a conceptual framework helps students understand both the substance of the law (why do we treat one killer one way and another killer differently?), and also how to formulate the kinds of normative arguments they will need to make as practitioners (why SHOULD we treat my client THIS way?).

One good trick that my crim law professor (Schulhofer) would use was, if one student gave a wrong answer, to immediately go to the student next to them with "Mr/Ms. X, what do you think?", and so on down the line. Kept things snappy, and eventually created a social norm of being prepared so as not to put your friends in the splash zone.

Dan Kahan at Yale teaches a mixed MPC/common law course. Because the MPC is so much more explicit and detailed, one teaching trick he used regularly was to treat the MPC as a commentary on the common law in a givern area. Thus, was the MPC trying to codify the common-law rule or to change it? And, either way, was the MPC's drafters' vision of the common-law rule actually borne out by the cases? Especially in mistake-of-fact cases, it's easy to get confused quickly by the common-law decisions. Focusing on the law-reform goals of the MPC was a nice way of leveraging their relative clarity to help make the common-law system more comprehensible.

Actus reus is a strange category, and it generates strange hypoes. Choose your words with special care when teaching it, and make sure your students see what is and isn't on the table when a court is considering an actus reus question.

I agree that the theoretical perspectives are important and need to be front-loaded. For that reason, it's also important that students know what the various perspectives entail, rather than just thinking of the theory part of the course as a time for some fun debates. Kahan was very good about pressing us to understand how each rationale could be used to argue for more punishment or for less, depending on the circumstances.

Ellen Podgor, who was a guest lecturer from Georgia State, had what I thought was a very sensitive approach. Instead of the typical socratic treatment of the crime of rape, she divided us into groups. Each was asked to write their own rape statute. (This crime was examined relatively late in the semester after we had some experience with statutory construction.) Comparisons of the different laws was a good way to thresh out the difficulties of defining the crime at the margins. It had the advantage of not putting any one person on the spot who wanted to remain anonymous. I would not say that this approach gave us students as detailed an understanding of the crime as we had of murder or theft, but I thought this was a good middle ground between ignoring an important criminal subject and diving so deeply into it that it traumatizes the students.

I took 1st year criminal law from Jim Lindgren. Some years later, to illustrate the concept of "conspiracy," he joined one.

Remember that your students will be in a torts frame of mind, and spending a semester on Palsgraf makes the human creature infinitely creative in finding justifications to punish. Two minutes of due-process theory at the top of the order will be worth hours of confusion avoided later. Make sure they all know how to say nulla poena sine lege. Correct their pronunciation often; students respect that level of attention to detail.

Which gets you to Prof. Kerr's point: Err on the side of more statutes. Start with ones drafted well, then graduate them to studying ones drafted poorly. And teach the screwball stuff, too, once in a while. New York has outlawed fortune telling, e.g.; how cool is that?

Have you considered shooting someone the first day of class? I'm sure that would drive things home.

I remember my crim. law prof. spending most of the time talking about culpability and I thought at the time it was an incredible waste of time. Now I'm a prosecutor with an exclusively appellate practice and realize how important those lessons were. To make that topic interesting ,the trick is finding the cases at the edges of the various culpable mental states.

I finished Crim Law last semester at UVA. The class was great but highly unorthodox. The keys to understanding Crim? The Moral Compass and the Mommy Meter.

Yeah. Exactly.

HUMOR!!! It's all about humor. More than anything, that's what all of us loved about CrimLaw - It was HILARIOUS! Guys hitting other guys with numchucks, people getting drunk and doing stupid things, werid and improbable hypotheticals, and then cases that were even weirder than that.

I had CrimLaw last spring with Prof. Donald Dripps (former of Univ. of MN, now of San Diego). He was so funny that we actually began keeping a list of crazy things he said in class.

A short list of classics:

“Not just an assault, but an assault with style points.”

“By contrast, what jackass would buy a crate of hand grenades?”

“It makes a good story if everybody lives.”

“So far as the law is concerned, what you and your stereo and your liquor cabinet do together is your own damn business.”

“I had to defend myself with my handy numchucks.”

“There are lot of people in jail who thought it was the thing to do at the time.”

“Birkenstock wearing types who can’t park their bicycles straight.”

“The court says it’s a vehicle. One hundred to one it’s a pickup truck.”

“I think that means that if you are the first burglar, you get to shoot the second one.”

“And everyone is liquored up of course . . . And he hasn’t been idle either . . . And so everyone is completely lit.”

“You can not duel yourself, except in a Freudian sense.”

“You can not commit bigamy by yourself, even in Utah.”

“People are bleeding to death, but they are doing it slow enough to wander around and cause trouble.”

The funnier the better. I cannot stress this enough. Make the class fun and everyone will learn more and will pay greater attention.

My law professor at NYU started us off with a class devoted to simply drafting a statue criminalizing some activity. (His example, I believe, was to criminalize driving through Central Park). It really set the tone in driving home the fact that Criminal Law is entirely statutory, that while we would study common law sources of criminal law, if "it ain't written down, it ain't a crime". It also helped clarify actus reus, mens rea, and various justifications right off the bat.

-TS

I teach criminal law at the undergraduate level and I use a strategy that students say is effective and enjoyable. Students select a "home state" and use those criminal statutes as their framework for learning the elements of the crimes. Class discussions focus on how states differ: New York versus California, for example, in the economy and clarity of statutory language. The rape statutes are especially instructive in this approach.

I cannot underscore the importance of prior posters' commentaries on passion, humor, and engaging the students. I had Larry Kessler (Hofstra), and I *never* missed that class!

Peggy DeStefano—Bakersfield College

I had what you probably can't give - war stories. We loved them. Our prof was an adjunct who had practiced on both sides of the bar, esp. capital cases, and I see him maybe once or twice a year as a talking head.

One reason that the war stories were so great was in comparison with torts and contracts, which were taught by tenured profs who probably hadn't practiced in those areas. So, the occasional war stories livened things up a bit, esp. in this era of Law and Order, etc.

One of the things that he said though haunted me during the OJ trial - that in his experience, the cleaner the hit, the more premediation, while the messier, the more passion. Mafia hits were typically almost bloodless, and if you saw blood all over the place, it was usually a crime of passion. Never could figure this out with the OJ trial - it would have taken a lot of premediation to pull it off, but cutting your wife's throat is usually not premedicated.

That said, possibly interesting recent felony murder conviction recently thrown out by Colo. Supreme Ct. - see:
Rocky Mountain News Article and Colorado Supreme Court Opinion

Woman was convicted of felony murder and was serving life even though murder was after she was already in custody (but wasn't cooperating - so may not have been the end of her criminal enterprise). Vacated because wrong jury instruction for underlying crime of burglery given (but some pundits think that the right one would have gotten her too - the instructions missed one alternative that was not discussed by the Co Supreme Ct., but may have been relevant).

The reason I like it is that it is an example of how felony murder works (at least in some states), and how if the underlying felony is vacated, then the felony murder conviction is also vacated. Also, the importance of jury instructions, esp., now when criminal law is now statute based - something that I really did not comprehend until after law school.

I had Leon Letwin at UCLA years ago. Not all good, not all bad. Here's an approach that I think would be helpful to most students: First, manage expectatons--tell them early and often that the class is only going to cover rape and homicide (if that's the case); second, remind them that it is a bar class, so at a minimum they should end the class knowing a rape or homicide when they see one (i.e., knowing the elements), and being able to run through the dozen or so recognized defenses to those crimes--the basic algorithm is pretty simple; third, don't oversell the old english cases (i remember a bunch of "mistaken-spouse" types where the underlying facts seemed pretty suspect) but do try to introduce current and topical factual settings (these super-resistant AIDS guys walking around, for instance); and finally, wait until about Thanksgiving, when the students whip themselves into a froth of confusion and nerves--then drop the BAJI on them. I didn't find the jury instruction book until I was studying for the bar, and if it were not assize time, I would have driven back to Westwood and slugged Letwin. Good Luck!

Eugene: 1) If Legality is required since Hudson, 1812, why teach common law crimes? I don't know.

2) Mens rea is key to each element of a crime. No? One mens rea, one goes home. Another, one gets the needle. Same act, same damage. Here is news for the lawyer. Minds cannot be read. Very often, even the criminal has no recall of intent, nor the crime at all. There is no intent in half the crimes. Half the criminals are drunk. Half the crime victims are drunk. Let's spend lots of time and money studying and parsing the mens rea of drunk people.

3) Grotius enumerated the goals of criminal law. They are false. A real Volokh type. Hey, Eugene, he did college at 11. PhD? Age 15.

There is nothing from the 16th Century that meets modern standards of professional practice, except in the law. The reason is that the lawyer has immunized itself from any accountabilty to third party victims for gross deviations from self-evident standards of professional practice, applicable to all other fields, except the law. The legal immunity of prosecutors, judges is a catastrophe of epic proportion. It has crippled lawyer development and kept it in the Middle Ages.

4) The mens rea is from Scholasticism, a church doctrine illegal in this country. God would read man's mind and judge his crimes in Heaven. By reason, man could prove, discover, whatever, the nature of the Deity. This is from high school and Western Civ 101. Scholasticism is not true, said Ockham. Reason and faith. One seeks wordly truth, the other religious, spiritual truth. The lawyer has not gotten this message from the 1300's, yet. The Church origins of mens rea violate the Establishment Clause. Please, discuss.

5) There are 25 million FBI Index felony crimes a year, 5 million are violent. Criminal law is not protecting the American people. Lawyer management of crime is a failure. No lawyer should be allowed to make criminal law policy. No lawyer should be a judge, and certainly, never ever an appellate justice. They are good at creating procedure and lawyer welfare jobs.

6) Even with $1 mil budgets, the rate of false positives in capital cases is high.

7) Only the first blinded vote of a jury has scientific validity. Once, the discussion starts, the verdict is the the vote of a single domineering individual, and a bunch of people trying to get home. If 3 of 12 people vote not guilty that first secret ballot time, that is as good a measure of reasonable doubt as any. Current system violates Due Process and the 6th Amendment.

8) This absolutely not true: it is better to free a 1000 guilty men, then to convict 1 innocent man. Foreign, patriot bashing, Stamp Act voting, Tory, Blackstone backwash on the relentless drive toward greater procedure for lawyer jobs. The 1000 guilty men will commit 200,000 victimizations of the public each year the innocent man is out free. Because the victims have not paid a lawyer a fee, no one cares about their injuries and devastation.

Crime victims are slaughtered. Innocent defendants are executed. Nothing is safe or sacred except lawyer jobs. Nice subject you got assigned.

1) While I teach a fair amount of common law, I think it's important to use statutes (MPC and state statutes) to teach first years statutory construction. They don't get nearly enough of that elsewhere in the course. A drafting exercise would be good.

2) Every year, in lieu of the chapter on insanity, I spend two days on the Bonnie, Jeffries &Low book on John Hinckley and the Insanity Defense (Foundation Press, I think). I break the students into mock juries of about a dozen and have them deliberate. Every year, some juries convict in no time, some have one or two holdouts who cave, and some deadlock. Students consistently describe that experience as the high point of the course, enabling them to see how hard it is to apply doctrines to messy facts.

3) In the same vein, this past year I had students use Paul Robinson's case files (try Criminal Law Case Studies, 2d edition in conjunction with your regular book). It gives the statutes that were in effect for each of 20 famous cases. I randomly draw three students to prosecute and three to defend. One does the direct / cross examination of the defendant; one makes a closing argument under the statutes then in effect; and one makes a closing argument under the MPC. I jumped in and offered critiques and supplemented the arguments with additional comments from the audience. While some students were nervous about public speaking, most liked it and learned a ton about advocacy, developing facts through witnesses, construing statutes, and applying rules to messy and debatable facts.

Tim: Thanks to the anti-scientific drivel you were taught, the American people is subject to millions of crimes a year. Dressler committed a crime against humanity writing and teaching that Medieval hogwash. I read his book, Understanding Criminal Law. Wizardry and mystical nonsense are in 90% of the pages. That you fell for it without questioning is also disconcerting, whichever side you represent.

Medieval hogwash should not be taught to unquestioning 22 year olds, trying to pass a test, and still looking for their first serious job. It's irresponsible.

My prof contrasted the MPC and our state penal code. This was helpful to learn statutory construction and to consider the implications of different systems (e.g., MPC v. state penal code's treatment of causation, the felony murder rule, etc).