How to Outline Criminal Law

Organize by doctrine, not by casebook chapter order and never by case. Casebooks scatter mens rea across homicide, rape, and regulatory offenses; your outline should collect it in one place so you can apply it to any statute the exam invents.

Use this spine and fill it with whatever your professor actually covered. If a heading is empty because the course skipped it, delete it — do not import a commercial outline's coverage of crimes you were never taught.

Put the split inside each rule entry rather than in parallel outlines. Under each doctrine write two labeled lines — "CL:" and "MPC § ___:" — plus a third line, "Why it matters," describing the fact pattern where the two produce different answers. That third line is the analysis you get paid for.

Provocation is the model entry. CL: adequate provocation categories, no cooling time, objective reasonable-person standard, words alone generally insufficient (Girouard v. State), softened by Maher v. People's broader approach. MPC § 210.3: extreme mental or emotional disturbance with reasonable explanation judged from the defendant's situation as he believes them to be — no categories, no cooling-time bar, jury question. Why it matters: a stale insult that fails at common law can still reduce murder to manslaughter under the MPC.

How much MPC to include varies by course, and the driver is your professor's casebook and jurisdiction. Kadish- and Dressler-style courses run both tracks; some professors teach a single state code (New York, California, Texas) as the default and use the MPC only for contrast. Ask which body of law governs if the exam is silent, and write that instruction at the top of page one of your outline.

For actus reus, the outline needs three sub-entries: the voluntary act requirement (Martin v. State; MPC § 2.01, which excludes reflexes, convulsions, and conduct during unconsciousness), the timing move that saves the prosecution by locating an earlier voluntary act (People v. Decina — driving knowing he was subject to seizures), and omissions, which are criminal only with a legal duty from statute, status relationship, contract, voluntary assumption plus seclusion, or creation of the peril (Jones v. United States).

Mens rea is the highest-yield section in the course. Memorize MPC § 2.02's four terms — purposely, knowingly, recklessly, negligently — with their exact definitions, and memorize the interpretive defaults: § 2.02(3) supplies recklessness when a statute is silent, § 2.02(4) applies a single stated mens rea to every material element unless the statute plainly says otherwise, and knowledge of a fact can be shown by willful blindness (United States v. Jewell). Keep a short table of common law terms next to it — malice as intent or recklessness (Regina v. Cunningham), specific versus general intent, and the presumption against strict liability for offenses carrying real stigma and prison time (Morissette v. United States, 342 U.S. 246 (1952); Staples v. United States, 511 U.S. 600 (1994)).

Treat mistake as a mens rea question, not a freestanding defense. Mistake of fact negates the required mental state as to that element; mistake of law generally does not, subject to narrow exceptions for statutes making knowledge of the law an element (Cheek v. United States, 498 U.S. 192 (1991)), reasonable reliance on an official interpretation, and the notice outlier in Lambert v. California, 355 U.S. 225 (1957).

Causation gets two lines: actual cause (but-for; MPC § 2.03) and proximate/legal cause, analyzed through intervening acts, foreseeability, and whether the intervening cause was dependent or independent (People v. Kibbe). Note the MPC's framing — the result must not be too remote or accidental to have a just bearing on liability.

Build homicide as a ladder you can climb top to bottom on the exam, because homicide fact patterns are graded on whether you sort a single killing into every plausible grade rather than picking one.

Under each rung, record the element that distinguishes it from the rung above, plus the case that fixes the standard your professor teaches.

For attempt, your outline needs the mens rea point (purpose as to the result, even for crimes satisfiable by recklessness — so there is no attempted depraved-heart murder), the actus reus tests in competition (dangerous proximity in People v. Rizzo, versus MPC § 5.01(1)(c)'s substantial step strongly corroborative of purpose), abandonment, and impossibility. Reduce impossibility to one line: factual impossibility is no defense, true legal impossibility is, and the MPC and cases like People v. Dlugash largely collapse the distinction by asking whether the circumstances were as the defendant believed them to be.

For conspiracy, separate the elements (agreement, intent to agree, intent to achieve the object, overt act where required) from the consequences, which is where exams live: Pinkerton liability for foreseeable crimes in furtherance (Pinkerton v. United States, 328 U.S. 640 (1946)), which MPC § 2.06 rejects; scope and single-versus-multiple conspiracies (chain, wheel, and the rim problem in Kotteakos); withdrawal; Wharton's rule; and the co-conspirator hearsay exception's limits (Krulewitch v. United States). Flag that the MPC treats conspiracy unilaterally, so a feigned accomplice does not defeat liability.

For complicity, write the elements as assistance or encouragement plus the purpose of promoting or facilitating the offense, then log the recurring wrinkles: mere presence is not enough, encouragement need not cause the crime, the principal need not be convicted, natural-and-probable-consequences liability where recognized, and the derivative-liability limits for victims and protected classes (Gebardi v. United States).

Sort defenses into three buckets and label each one, because the label controls who bears the burden and whether accomplices are also off the hook. Failure-of-proof defenses (mistake, voluntary intoxication negating specific intent) attack an element. Justifications (self-defense, defense of others and property, necessity, law enforcement) say the act was not wrongful. Excuses (duress, insanity, involuntary intoxication, infancy) say the actor is not blameworthy.

For self-defense, record honest-and-reasonable belief, proportionality, imminence, the retreat rule and castle exception, the imperfect self-defense downgrade, and the objective-with-defendant's-circumstances standard from People v. Goetz. Keep State v. Norman next to the imminence element as the standard hard case. For necessity, note the MPC § 3.02 balancing approach against the common law's refusal to extend it to homicide (Regina v. Dudley and Stephens).

For insanity, list the tests in one block — M'Naghten (nature and quality, or wrongfulness), irresistible impulse, MPC § 4.01's substantial-capacity test, and the federal standard after the Insanity Defense Reform Act — and note the moral-versus-legal-wrong dispute (People v. Serravo). Which test your outline should lead with varies by jurisdiction and professor; write the one your course treats as the default in bold and the rest as alternatives.

Compress the outline into a one- to two-page attack sheet organized as a procedure, not as knowledge. The procedure: (1) identify every defendant and every discrete act or victim, and label them; (2) for each act, start with the most serious plausible charge and work down the ladder; (3) recite the elements of that offense and match facts to each; (4) if the completed offense fails, run attempt, solicitation, and conspiracy; (5) run complicity for anyone who did not personally do the act; (6) run defenses in the failure-of-proof, justification, excuse order; (7) state the answer under both the common law and the MPC where they diverge.

Outlines do not need Bluebook citations. On an exam, a bare case name used as shorthand for a rule is enough — "under Rizzo's dangerous-proximity test" — and Bluebook Rule 10.2 short case-name conventions are all you would ever need. Spend the time you would have spent formatting citations on writing your own hypotheticals instead.

Test the outline before the exam: take a past exam or a hypothetical from your casebook notes, answer it using only the attack sheet, and every time you have to flip back to the long outline, move that rule onto the attack sheet. An outline you never stress-tested is a reading document, not a tool.