3. Strain, Christopher Barry. “Civil Rights and ... - Freedom Archives

attacks" ; broadly considered, it also concerns "fending off possible violation of rights." s
It is fundamentally a matter of legal and ethical concern. The Model Penal Code, a
standardized American legal reference drafted in 1962, declares that "the use of force
upon . . . another is justifiable when the actor believes that such force is immediately
necessary." 9 Throughout history, philosophers, legal scholars and even some pacifists
have tended to agree that self-defense is permissible ; controversies surrounding it have
centered on whether the impending violation was sufficient to trigger a legitimate
response . Self-defense is traditionally understood as a legal defense of justification as
opposed to a defense of excuse (insanity, for example); therefore, a person justified in
self-defense who is otherwise guilty of an egregious wrongdoing such as murder has, in
the eye of the law, done nothing wrong .
Justifiable self-defense necessitates three considerations : imminence, necessity,
and proportionality.° The attack must be imminent, which means that it is about to
BGeorge P. Fletcher, "Domination in the Theory of Justification and Excuse,"
Universit o ' sb rah Law Review 57 (Spring 1996) : 556 . I have adopted Fletcher's
definition of self-defense as my own. The University of Pittsbur~ Law Review has
devoted an entire issue to self-defense as related to battered women ; much of what I have
learned about the modern legal aspects of self-defense stems from this source . See
"Symposium : Self-defense and Relations of Domination : Moral and Legal Perspectives
on Women Who Kill," University of Pittsburgh Law Review 57 (Spring 1996) : 461-824 .
MModel Penal Code ~ 3.04(1).
'°For an overview of traditional self-defense doctrine, especially in relation to
minorities, see Cynthia Kwei Yung Lee," Race and Self-defense : Toward a Normative
Conception of Reasonableness," Minnesota Law Review 81(December1996): 377-398 ;
see also "Symposium,"~E8 note S, and the Model Penal Code , supra note 7 . See also
Suzanne Uniacke, Permissible Killing: The Self-Defenrc Justification of Hotticide
(Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1994) .