The One-State Solution to Teaching Criminal Law

How should criminal law be taught to first-year law students? Professors preparing their classes for the first time, and even veterans of many semesters of criminal law, find themselves facing a dilemma. On the one hand, the common law is no longer good ―law‖ in nearly every state; it has been superseded by statute. 1 Even states that leave a large role for the common law usually have a combination of common law and statutory law or strongly limit the scope of the common law. 2 On the other hand, there is no uniform code that actually exists as law in all fifty states. While the Model Penal Code (MPC) may serve as a useful stand-in for such a uniform law, few, if any, states have adopted the MPC in its entirety, and most have rung interesting changes on it, accepting some parts and rejecting or modifying others. The result is that, as one wag has put it, criminal law professors are presented with the choice of teaching dead law (the common law) or mythical law (the MPC). 3 Or, in a more poetic vein, we might channel