This engaging and accessible book focuses on high-profile criminal trials and examines the strategy of the lawyers, the reasons for conviction or acquittal, as well as the social importance of these famous cases.

Premised on the belief that criminal law is an exciting subject to learn and teach, this popular casebook provides a balanced and creative overview of classic and modern criminal law cases and issues while covering both common law foundations and modern statutory reform, including the Model Penal Code. The casebook invites classroom consideration of many controversies in the field (e.g., rape law, race-based jury nullification, Internet crime, and anti-stalking legislation) and defenses (e.g., battered women?s self-defense). Using imaginative examples from literature and music to illustrate criminal law issues (e.g., examining insanity with Edgar Allen Poe?s The Tell-Tale Heart and homicide with Willa Cather?s O Pioneers!), the casebook allows law students to confront some of the Big Questions with which philosophers, theologians, scientists, poets, and lawyers have grappled for centuries.

Students today expect learning to be both efficient and interesting. They use online materials and study aids to supplement class-assigned materials and to "hack" the law. This textbook cuts out the middle person by integrating challenging principal cases that are aggressively edited into an engaging overview of the black letter law. The explanatory sections describe the law through lively language and colorful examples that students can readily grasp and remember. Providing students with a clear doctrinal overview permits the selection of cases that drill down deeper into fundamental or cutting-edge issues. Many of the principal cases put the old wine of the criminal law into new bottles that students will find meaningful and interesting. In addition to homicide, rape, assault, traditional property crimes and drug offenses, the cases selected include environmental and white collar crime, obstruction of justice, criminal copyright infringement, hate crimes, sex trafficking, online threats, revenge porn and computer crimes. Short discussion questions follow each case that stimulate understanding of the holding and the deeper issues at stake. Additional materials raise important critical perspectives dealing with issues of race, class and gender. Practice problems and links to online video clips allow students to apply what they are learning, and the appendix contains numerous materials for engaging lawyering exercises.

This text, the only criminal law casebook authored by two progressive female law professors of color, provides the reader with both critical race and critical feminist theory perspectives on criminal law. The book focuses on the cultural context of substantive criminal law, integrating issues of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation where relevant