Every Bundle includes the complete text from each of the titles below:
PLUS: Hundreds of law school topic-related videos from
The Understanding Law Video Lecture Series™:
Choose Your Subscription:
--OR--
Register and Subscribe Now
Every Bundle includes the complete text from each of the titles below:
PLUS: Hundreds of law school topic-related videos from
The Understanding Law Video Lecture Series™:
Choose Your Subscription:
--OR--
Some people always want what the other person has. And they’ll do anything to get it: take it, trick the owner into giving it up, hide it, perhaps even destroy the property if they can’t have it.
These unhappy facts of life have given rise to one of the most arcane areas of criminal law: property offenses. The doctrines of the various crimes that constitute property offenses—larceny, embezzlement, taking under false pretenses, extortion, and others—are laced with rules and a host of exceptions to the rules. Courts have created fictional devices to reach the “right results” when the rules would not allow such a result. The doctrines also reflect tension between courts and legislatures about the reach of the criminal law and the impact of the death penalty.
There are three “major” property offenses: larceny, embezzlement, and taking under false pretenses. At the risk of grossly oversimplifying, one might say that the characteristics that distinguish these crimes from each other are as follows:
These simplifications hide a vast array of interlocking and overlapping requirements and fact patterns. The ingenuity of persons who want someone else’s property is vast and unlikely to be hemmed in by specific differences among the “elements” of various crimes. Nevertheless, it may help if you keep your eye on these skeletal definitions.
Prior to the common law,[1] most legal systems, including both Greek and Roman law, had treated most infringements against property as torts, with only damages as a remedy.[2] In sharp contrast, however, the common law punished larceny with death, as it punished all felonies, until the early part of the nineteenth century.[3] However, many judges, opposed either to the penalty itself or to its imposition for “mere” invasions of property, gave restrictive readings of the “elements” of larceny so as to avoid imposing the death penalty. In the eighteenth century, as the death penalty became more discretionary, the need to restrict the reach of property offenses ebbed, and courts upheld liability in larceny (most notably in Pear’s Case, infra). And when, in the nineteenth century, the death penalty was removed as a possible penalty for most property offenses unconnected with potential physical violence, courts gave increasingly broad readings to the elements of larceny. Similarly, legislatures enacted a wide range of new statutes proscribing other interferences with property, but not punishable by death.