The highly anticipated Second Edition of Criminal Law introduces students to the underlying principles, legal doctrine, and rules regarding crimes, defenses, and punishment in substantive criminal law. Innovative in its case study approach, this thoroughly updated revision will help students develop analytical skills, while learning the content and context of substantive criminal law. Now with a more student-friendly format, this text guides students through theory and practice, using a blend of old and new materials to foster understanding of what the law is, how it evolved, the principles on which it is based, and how it applies to various circumstances.

This classic introduction to criminal law for criminal justice students combines the best features of a casebook and a textbook. Criminal Law covers substantive criminal law and explores its principles, sources, distinctions, and limitations. Definitions and elements of crimes are explained, and defenses to crimes are thoroughly analyzed. A unique strength of Criminal Law is its discussion of the federal criminal code and the specific recognition of the common-law origins of modern law. NEW to this Edition: Coverage of terrorism and associated law. Student ancillary aids, including self assessment, a question bank, and case study assets. Updated Legal News sections. Features: Each chapter includes outline, key terms and concepts, guidance to help the reader understand what is important in each chapter, as well as Legal News sections, highlighting current criminal law issues. Part II contains briefs of judicial decisions related to the topics covered in the text, in order to help the reader learn rule of law as well as the reasoning of the court that guides future court rulings. Part III contains a glossary and a table of cases.

In Pursuing Johns, Thomas C. Mackey studies the New York Committee of Fourteen and its members' attempts to influence vagrancy laws in early-20th-century New York City as a way to criminalize men's patronizing of female prostitutes. It sought out and prosecuted the city's immoral hotels, unlicensed bars, opium dens, disorderly houses, and prostitutes. It did so because of the threats to individual "character" such places presented. In the early 1920s, led by Frederick Whitin, the Committee thought that the time had arrived to prosecute the men who patronized prostitutes through what modern parlance calls a "john's law." After a notorious test case failed to convict a philandering millionaire for vagrancy, the only statutory crime available to punish men who patronized prostitutes, the Committee lobbied for a change in the state's criminal law. In the process, this representative of traditional 19th-century purity reform allied with the National Women's Party, the advanced feminists of the 1920s. Their proposed "Customer Amendment" united the moral Right and the feminist Left in an effort to alter and use the state's criminal law to make men moral, defend their character, and improve New York City's overall morality. Mackey's contribution to the literature is unique. Instead of looking at how vice commissions targeted female prostitutes or the commerce supporting and surrounding them, Mackey concentrates on how men were scrutinized. Book jacket.