566: Law Every 1L Should Know -- Criminal Law

Today, we're talking about criminal law.

We're going to do two things in this episode.

First, we'll walk through the building blocks of any crime, the elements that the prosecution has to prove for someone to be found guilty.

The most important of those building blocks is the mental state, the guilty mind, and we'll spend the most time there.

Second, we'll take those building blocks and apply them to the single most heavily tested topic in 1L criminal law, homicide.

We'll see how the different homicide crimes are really distinguished by the defendant's mental state, and we'll work through a fact pattern at the end.

One note, we're focusing on substantive criminal law, what makes conduct a crime.

Criminal procedure, which is about police investigations, searches, and confessions, is a separate subject we'll save for another day.

A quick but important note on how we're going to approach mental states.

Criminal law describes the guilty mind using two overlapping systems.

There's the older common law vocabulary, terms like specific intent, general intent, and malice.

And there's a more modern set of culpability levels associated with the Model Penal Code, purposely, knowingly, recklessly, and negligently.

Your law school professor may teach you one of these systems or both, depending on how your course is built.

In this episode, we're going to cover both, because that's what the next gen bar exam tests.

It blends the two.

We're following the bar's approach because the next gen exam is being adopted by the large majority of states, and the older version of the bar exam is being phased out after February 2028, so most of you listening will end up taking the next gen exam when you graduate.

If your professor emphasizes one system over the other in class, follow your professor for your law school exams.

But the framework we walk through here is the one you'll need to recognize and apply on the bar.

With that, let's dive in.