Speluncean Explorers-Nine New Opinions

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THE CASE OF THE SPELUNCEAN
EXPLORERS
"Lon Fuller's Case· of the Speluncean Explorers" first appeared in the Harvard
Law Review in 1949. It is the greatest fictitious legal case of all time. The Case if
the Speluncean Explorers: .Nine new opinions is, however, the first book-length treat-
ment of this classic article available. Peter Suber brings Lon Fuller's portrait of
American legal thought up-to-date with contemporary issues in his nine new
opmlOns.
The original case, reprinted here in full, considers five cave explorers who,
trapped inside a cave, end up eating one of their companions in order to survive.
When they are rescued they are prosecuted for murder, a crime carrying a
mandatory death sentence. The legal dilemmas raised by this case were origi-
nally addressed by Fuller's five fictitious Supreme Court Justices. Their opinions
mirrored the range of legal philosophies dominant in Anglo-American thought
half a century ago. Peter Suber has written nine new opinions which reflect
changing times, but illuminate the original questions. One of the reasons why
this case is so widely cited is that the questions it raises are clearly still pertinent:
Are judicial opinions merely rationalizations of the judge's politics and person-
ality? Why do judges disagree so deeply about how the law applies to a
particular case? Suber's nine new opinions extend the argument.
Teaching the major positions in jurisprudence painlessly by connecting them
to a fascinating and concrete case, this book presupposes no familiarity with law
or the philosophy of law. Peter Suber's playful and simple style makes this book
an invaluable tool for anyone wanting an introduction to contemporary legal
thought.
Peter Suber, who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and aJ.D. (in law), is Professor
of Philosophy at Earlham College. He is the author of The Paradox if Se!f
Amendment, the first book-length study of self-reference problems in law.
THE CASE OF THE
SPELUNCEAN
EXPLORERS
Nine new opinions
Peter Suber
London and New York
First published 1998
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OXI4 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an infonna business
© 1998 Peter Suber
Part I reprinted by kind permission of
The Trustees of the Lon L. Fuller Trust.
Typeset in Baskerville by Routledge
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library if Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Suber, Peter
The case of the speluncean explorers: nine new opinions / Peter Suber
p:cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

I. Law-Philosophy. 2. Fuller, Lon L., 1902~ ---Contributions in law. I. Title.
K230.F842S8 1998
340' .1-dc21
ISBN 10: 0-415-18546-7 (pbk)

ISBN 10: 0-415-18545-9 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-0-415-18546-2 (pbk)

ISBN 13: 978-0-415-18545-5 (hbk)
FOR MY MOTHER,
GRACE MAY STERN,
PROBISSIMAE LEGUM SCRIPTORI.
}fON ERAT UNA PUERORUM.
CONTENTS
Priface IX
Introduction
PART I
Lon Fuller's Case of the Speluncean Explorers 5
Opinion of Chief Justice Truepenny 7
Opinion of Justice Foster 10
Opinion of Justice Tatting 15
Opinion of Justice Keen 20
Opinion of Justice Handy 25
Opinion of Justice Tatting 31

Postscript 32
PART II
Nine New Opinions 33
Opinion of Chief Justice Burnham 35
Opinion of Justice Springham 45
Vll
CONTENTS
Opinion of Justice Tally 57
Opinion of Justice Hellen 64
Opinion of Justice Trumpet 73
Opinion of Justice Goad 79
Opinion of Justice Frank 89
Opinion of Justice Reckon 91
Opinion of Justice Bond 99
Index 108
Vlll
PREFACE
Lon Fuller's Case if the Speluncean Explorers is the greatest fictitious legal case of all
time. That is saying a lot, for it has some stiff competition. While its competitors
may outdo it in courtroom drama, character development, or investigative
suspense, none matches it in legal depth or dialectical agility. It shows not what
makes some lawyer's caseload interesting, but what makes law itself interesting. It
would not make a good movie; it is all "talking heads." In fact, the parts that
would make a good movie - the events within the cave - are over and done with
by the time Fuller begins his piece. Moreover, these events are not depicted with
cinematic vivacity, but described after the fact with judicial precision and bland-
ness.
Fuller's five Supreme Court justices tranquilly but rigorously show the
complexity of the facts and the flexibility of legal reasoning. The five opinions
focus on different factual details and legal precedents, and fit them into different
background structures of legal and political principle. By these means Fuller
crystallizes important conflicts of principle and illustrates the major schools of
legal philosophy in his day. Fuller's case has been called "a classic in jurispru-
dence," "a microcosm of this century's debates," and a "breathtaking intellectual
accomplishment."*
Although only half a century separates us from the date of Fuller's essay, the
legal landscape has changed profoundly. I have written nine new judicial opin-
ions on his case, with roughly Fuller's own objectives in view, hoping to explore
important issues of principle and in the process to bring the depiction of legal
philosophy up to date.
While I would like to depict the major schools of legal philosophy today,
giving each its due, there are a few obstacles that subtly constrain the project.
* The first quotation is from Anthony D'Amato, "The Speluncean Explorers - Further
Proceedings," Stariford Law &view, 1980, vol. 32, pp. 467-85 at p. 467. The second and third are
from William N. Eskridge, Jr, "The Case of the Speluncean Explorers: Twentieth-Century
Statutory Interpretation in a Nutshell," George Washington Law Review, August \993, vol. 61, no. 6,
pp. 1731-53 at p. 1732.
ix
PREFACE
First, I must stick to the facts and law of this case. I cannot illustrate a contempo-
rary legal philosophy using its own favorite examples, but must discover how it
would approach the case of the speluncean explorers. Fortunately most of the
major contemporary movements in jurisprudence can find a foothold in these
facts, which we may take as one small symptom of their depth and generality.
Second, I would like to say something new about the case. Before I began to
write these opinions, I unreflectively assumed that Fuller's five justices had
already offered just about every plausible legal argument that could be brought
to bear on these facts. But once I gave myself the assignment, some resolute,
quasi-speluncean exploration persuaded me that I had been mistaken. Now I
have nearly the opposite conviction: to say that serious thinking about this case
has been exhausted is to say that serious thinking about law, adjudication, crime,
homicide, punishment, excuse, justification, and justice have been exhausted.
Third, I cannot have more than nine opinions. More would begin to strain
credibility and tire even the generous reader of good will. The bad news is that
there are far more than nine important movements and strands of contemporary
legal thought. The good news is that they are not all incompatible. I could not
embody every distinct strand of contemporary thought in a distinct opinion; and
I did not want to limit myself to just nine positions. So I have blended perspec-
tives when consistency and plausibility allowed. This meant, in turn, that the
purity of individual opinions could not be a constraint.
Finally, I felt the same tug that Fuller must have felt to arrange for a tie vote -
the tug of pedagogical neutrality, requiring that I place the burden of decision
squarely on the reader. The odd number of judges is only one obstacle here.
Some movements in contemporary jurisprudence naturally pull toward acquittal,
and some toward conviction. If I fmd more of one kind than another, then I
must combine some of the "majority" opinions, or multiply some of the
"minority" views, or dig more deeply for other veins of contemporary thought.
At times I also felt constrained not to invent new facts about the history of
Newgarth, and to play within the four corners of the playground I inherited
from Fuller. But at other times I felt that to play this game in Lon Fuller's spirit- I
was entitled to a few liberties. I have kept my own inventions to a minimum,
hoping they would not be material to the holding. At some points I found that I
was required to take the paths of "restraint" and "activism" at the same time.
For example, I resolved to invent no new legal precedents for Newgarth, and
nearly succeeded, but that forced me to invent an explanation for the small
number of cases cited by the Court.
The result of all these constraints is that some contemporary movements are
not represented, some are blended as far as consistency allows with others, and
some are given undue prominence by their recalcitrance to be so blended. What
emerges is one person's updating of Lon Fuller's group portrait of American
legal philosophies and a deeper exploration of the issues raised by his case.
It follows from these constraints that there is not a one-to-one correspondence
between these opinions and nine schools of contemporary jurisprudence. Both
PREFACE
ways of deviating from one-to-one correspondence are present here. Blending

sometimes put more than one contemporary movement into one opinion, and
disagreements within a movement over details or direction sometimes required
that it be represented in more than one opinion.
Each opinion has a dominant orientation within jurisprudence, but each also
shows the mixed doctrinal influences and variations on the theme that real opin-
ions do. Or at least I hope the opinions show this much real texture, for my
constraints did not force all of it.
At the end of his article (p. 32, below), Fuller wrote, "The reader ... who
seeks to trace out contemporary resemblances where none is intended or
contemplated, should be warned that he is engaged in a frolic of his own, which
may possibly lead him to miss whatever modest truths are contained in the opin-
ions delivered by the Supreme Court of Newgarth." If the first half of this
sentence means that Fuller intended no resemblances, then he must have been
winking. But if he meant that there are undoubtedly resemblances he did not
intend, and that identifYing any of the resemblances is less profitable than
confronting the arguments, then I embrace his gentle warning and adopt it as
my own.
The second half of Fuller's sentence I adopt with no hedging or winking. The
positions I have distilled into judicial opinions are serious and significant
attempts to understand the nature of law. Whether they contain only "modest
truths" or truths of a grander kind is the primary question here for the student,
scholar, and citizen. I wrote for the reader who is less interested in position-
labeling and allusion-hunting than in grappling with these serious and significant
arguments, assessing their strengths and weaknesses, and seeing how they matter
for a concrete case. For these reasons, I hope that scholars who are already
familiar with the positions represented here will not put secondary questions
ahead of primary ones, except as a frolic of their own. For the same reasons, I
do not believe these nine opinions presuppose any acquaintance with contempo-
rary law or philosophy of law.
I am not the first to write new opinions on the Case if the Speluncean Explorers.
Anthony D'Amato wrote three for the Stanford Law Review in 1980 (vol. 32, pp.
467-85), and Naomi Cahn, John Calmore, Mary Coombs, Dwight Greene,
Geoffrey Miller, Jeremy Paul, and Laura Stein wrote one apiece, from different
legal and political standpoints, for the George Washington Law Review in 1993 (vol.
61, pp. 1754-1811). I recommend D'Amato's three opinions for their clear
exploration of the moral issues raised by the case. I recommend the George
Washington Seven for opinions that are more pure, or less mixed, than mine in
their representation of contemporary positions, and more willing to invent new
facts about Newgarth in order to permit sharper comment on the state of
American law.
When reading Fuller's original piece one naturally asks which of the
contending legal philosophies is most acceptable, most compelling, most
persuasive. In addition, however, one wonders whether the plurality and incom-
Xl
PREFACE
patibility of these legal philosophies it itself a clue to the nature of adjudication.

Is all judicial reasoning just ex post facto rationalization of ideology and interest,
politics and personality? This question was an important one in Fuller's day and
is, if anything, even more important today. The question is raised less by any
single opinion than by the spectrum of opinions. Each is reasoned in its own
way, but what does this show about reasoning itself? If legal reasoning is
infinitely flexible, if it can serve any master, if (as Hume said of reason in
general) it is the slave of the passions, then the idea that law constrains judges
would be entirely illusory. But if law properly understood does constrain judges,
then why do reasonable judges disagree so deeply? I am happy that my project
raises these questions, and just as happy that it does not permit me to digress
from law into philosophy in order to answer them. That is another project for
another time.
I gratefully thank the estate of Lon Fuller for permission to reprint his article
in this volume. If I could not include his original text, my book would be impov-
erished and untethered. I thank Deanna Airgood for her speedy and accurate
typing of Fuller's article, and Jennifer Laurin for her sharp proofreading eye. I
thank Jim Bower, Marya Bower, Len Clark, Hal Hanes, Pablo Nagel, Mark
Packer, Diana Punzo, Vince Punzo, Monteze Snyder, A.L.P. Thorpe, and two
reviewers for Routledge, for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of these
opinions. I thank A. Varner Seaman for the "body shield" analogy that I gave to
Justice Goad. Finally, I thank my philosophy of law students over the past fifteen
years for their insights, for their passion, for seeing what was at stake, and for
their willingness to let a fictitious legal case teach them something important
about law in the real world.
xu
INTRODUCTION
Fuller based his fictitious case on some disturbingly real ones. The two upper-
most in his mind were undoubtedly US. v. Holmes (1842) and Regina v. Dudley &
Stephens (1884), two lifeboat cases in which disaster at sea was followed by homi-
cide and prosecution. In the Holmes case, the homicides were to lighten a badly
overloaded lifeboat. In Dudley & Stephens, the homicide was to create a meal for
the starving survivors.
In Holmes, an immigrant ship, the William Brown, en route from Liverpool to
Philadelphia, hit an iceberg and sank off the coast of Newfoundland. The eighty
passengers and crew had to share two lifeboats. Forty-one passengers and sailors
ended up in a twenty-two-foot longboat. Nine officers and crew members occu-
pied the smaller jolly boat, built for six or seven. The remaining thirty souls were
left to go down with the ship; most were children; not one was crew. The captain
ordered a mate, with a map and compass, to join the longboat. This made forty-
two in the longboat, eight in the jolly boat. The longboat had oars but no sails;
the jolly boat had both.
The jolly boat moved toward the Newfoundland coast where it was eventually
picked up by a fishing vessel. The longboat was too overloaded to move and
drifted for a day, its gunwales perilously close to the water. As the weather picked
up, water began spilling into the boat. Already leaky, the longboat sprang a
larger hole that required feverish bailing. Mter being swamped by a few large
waves, it teetered on the verge of going down. The mate shouted to the sailors to
lighten the load. Sailor Holmes responded, and with the help of another sailor,
tossed more than six men and two women overboard. The next morning he
tossed two more men overboard.
They drifted east, fighting starvation with their meager rations, and were
picked up off the French coast a few weeks later. Their story fascinated and
shocked the world. Those survivors who returned to the United States pressed
the Philadelphia district attorney to prosecute the longboat sailors for murder.
Unluckily, Holmes was the only sailor from the longboat in Philadelphia at the
time, and was arrested. The grand jury would not indict him for murder, forcing
the prosecutor to reduce the charge to voluntary manslaughter.
Holmes offered a necessity defense. If the killings were necessary for the
INTRODUCTION
survival of those on board, he argued, then they were legally justified. The case
was heard by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Henry Baldwin, temporarily sitting as
a Philadelphia trial judge. He instructed the jury that some sailors were needed
to navigate the longboat; but beyond tha! critical number, they were not entitled
to any privilege over the passengers. The excess sailors must stand their chances
in a lottery with the passengers. With these instructions, the jury convicted
Holmes of voluntary manslaughter. Justice Baldwin sentenced him six months in
prison and fined him twenty dollars. Holmes served his prison time, but was
spared the fine when pardoned by President John Tyler.
In the Dudley & Stephens case, the sinking of the Australian yacht Mignonette, en
route from Essex to Sydney, threw four survivors into one thirteen-foot lifeboat,
with only two cans of turnips for food. Thomas Dudley was the captain, Edwin
Stephens the mate, Edwin Brooks an able seaman, and Richard Parker an ordi-
nary seaman. Parker was seventeen years old and, before long, clearly the most
sickly and ailing of the four. The four sailors made one can of turnips last two
days, and had nothing but rain water for the two days after that, when they
caught a turtle. They finished the second can of turnips the same day, perhaps
thinking they could catch another turtle. A week later they had eaten everything
edible from the turtle, and there was still no sign of rescue in sight. Nor were
they able to catch any other food. Their lips and tongue blackened from dehy-
dration, their feet and legs swollen, and their skin covered in unhealing sores,
they began to drink their urine. Parker drank seawater, which sailors believed
would bring certain death.
On the nineteenth day Dudley proposed a lottery in which one of them
would be killed and eaten by the rest. Brooks said no and Stephens was indeci-
sive, so they put the plan aside. Dudley then spoke in confidence to Stephens.
Parker would die first anyway, from his weakened condition; and he had no
family. Why wait? Stephens was persuaded. Dudley then killed Parker, and all
three fed on his body.
They fed on the body for four days, and finished about half of it, before they
were rescued by the German sailing ship Moctezuma, en route from Punta Arenas,
Chile, to Hamburg. When the Moctezuma put in at Falmouth on the way home,
Dudley, Stephens, and Brooks were arrested for murder and taken into custody.
The decision to prosecute them for murder was approved by Sir William
Harcourt, the British home secretary, after consulting with the attorney general,
solicitor general, and officers of the crown. But the Falmouth public was entirely
on the side of the defendants. Fearing acquittal, the judge asked the jury for a
special verdict. This meant that the jury was asked only to find the facts, not to
rule on the ultimate question whether the facts amounted to murder. (This
procedure allowed the court to convict the defendants even with a sympathetic
jury.) On the facts found by the jury, the judge convicted the defendants of
murder, rejecting their necessity defense. He sentenced them to hang, but they
were pardoned by Queen Victoria, on the advice of the same Sir William
Harcourt who had recommended prosecution.
INTRODUCTION
For more information see A.W Brian Simpson's engrossing and detailed
accounts in Cannibalism and the Common Law (University of Chicago Press, 1984).
The stories are retold more briefly and dramatically in Leo Katz's excellent
meditation on the criminal law, Bad Acts and Guilty Minds (University of Chicago
Press, 1987). Excerpts from the judicial opinions are often found in casebooks
used in Anglo-American law schools.
One can easily see the large clusters of fact that Fuller borrowed from these
cases for his own: extremities of desperation, lotteries, cannibalism, popular
sympathy for the defendants, politically difficult prosecutions, defenses of stark
necessity, jury convictions, the possibility of pardons. Even small details, like the
jury's special verdict in Dudley & Stephens, come up again in Fuller's case. But an
inventory of these borrowed elements only brings into relief the extent of
Fuller's creativity.. He moved the accident from the high seas to a cave within
Newgarth. This simultaneously sharpened questions about jurisdiction and
permitted the all-important radio communications. He added the radio, and the
expert medical and engineering opinions delivered by the radio; these gave the
spelunkers reliable knowledge, not mere panic surmise, that starvation would
come before rescue. He added the foresight of the spelunkers to ask their profes-
sional organization to begin a rescue if they did not return by a certain date. He
added the ten workmen killed in the rescue attempt. He added the complex
dance of Whetmore's consent: at first consenting to join the death pact, then
revoking his consent, then assenting to the fairness of the dice throw made on his
behalf by the others. He added the Newgarthian history of social contract and
civil war, the mandatory death penalty for murder, the ancient act of judicial
legislation that created the exception for self-defense, and dozens of other details,
including a handful of precedents, whose weight and significance each judge
measures differently.
It would oversimplify Fuller's ingenuity to say that he fine-tuned the facts until
the case for acquittal was just about exactly as strong as the case for conviction.
For if that were so, then conscientious judges would be unable to make up their
minds, or would do so only in great uncertainty, with large concessions to the
other side. Instead, Fuller fine-tuned the facts until they gave some kinds of
judges good grounds to acquit, and other kinds of judges good grounds to
convict. Most judges of both kinds are quite sure that the facts are not balanced,
and that the imbalance should be read their way. If in the end there are as many
votes to acquit as to convict, this is due less to the balance of the facts than to the
balance of legal philosophies on the high court. Good judges are philosophically
diverse; Fuller fine-tuned the facts in order to draw attention to this diversity of
legal thought.
The case would be balanced in a broader sense if the several opinions
were equally strong in their arguments or equally faithful to the law. But it
would short-circuit Fuller's shrewdness and hard work to suppose that these
diverse legal philosophies were equally adequate just because he includes them
in the case, or just because they have arguments to offer, or just because they
INTRODUCTION
authentically emerge from important moral, legal, political, or philosophical

traditions. This is just what we should think about, not what we should take from
the case without thinking; it is not Fuller's conclusion, but his question.
A case whose facts are balanced in this special way, giving judges of different
persuasions good grounds to find the facts unbalanced in different directions, is
not so peculiar that it cannot teach us anything about real cases. On the
contrary, most cases that stir public controversy possess the same troublesome
property. For example, consider recent Supreme Court cases asking whether
statutes prohibiting sodomy, flag burning, or assisted suicide are constitutional.
The public divides on them, as if the facts were balanced, but individual judg-
ments are strongly held, as if the facts were not balanced. Actually, of course, the
balance lies less in the facts themselves than in the legal principles and perspec-
tives held by the American public. This is just the complex and delicate sort of
balance that Fuller achieved in his case, through his cunning invention of the
facts and his judicious reading of the judiciary. That is only one reason why his
case can teach us very much indeed about our own hard cases.
Lon Fuller (1902-78) was a Texan, educated at Stanford, who taught at

Harvard. The author of eight books* and many articles, he was one of the
leading legal philosophers of the 20th century. He conducted a long-running
dispute in the law journals with H.L.A. Hart on the merits of positivism in law;
Fuller took the anti-positivist position. To his credit, if one did not already know
that Fuller was critical of legal positivism, then an honest reading of The Case if
the Speluncean Explorers would not reveal it. In his major statement of legal philos-
ophy, The Morality if Law (1964), he drew together and made systematic his case
against positivism and argued for a limited form of natural law. As an appendix,
he included his second and less famous, fictitious legal case, The Case if the Grudge
Informer.
I've heard that Fuller was a superb contracts professor. But he died the year
before I entered law school and I have not read his case book on contracts. To
me his greatness lies in his lifelong proof that rigorous legal thought does not
exclude creativity, does not require jargon, and does not make morality an
independent variable or an afterthought.
* Law in Qyest qf Itself, Foundation Press, 1940; Reason and Fiat in Case Law, American Book-
Stratford Press, 1943; Basic Contract Law, West Publishing Co., 1947, 2nd edn, 1964; Problems qf
Jurisprudence, Foundation Press, 1949; Human Purpose and Natural Law, Notre Dame Law School,
1958; The Morality qf Law, Yale University Press, 1964, rev. edn, 1969; Legal Fictions, Stanford
University Press, 1967; andAnatonry qf Law, Praeger, 1968.
Part I
LON FULLER'S CASE OF THE

SPELUNCEAN EXPLORERS
In the Supreme Court of Newgarth, 4300 *
The defendants, having been indicted for the crime of murder, were convicted
and sentenced to be hanged by the Court of General Instances of the County of
Stowfield. They bring a petition of error before this Court. The facts sufficiently
appear in the opinion of the Chief Justice.
* The opinions stated in Part I have been reprinted with permission from Lon L. Fuller, "The
Case of the Speluncean Explorers," Harvard Law Review, 1949, vol. 62, no. 4, pp. 616-45.
OPINION OF CHIEF JUSTICE
TRUEPENNY
The four defendants are members of the Speluncean Society, an organization of

amateurs interested in the exploration of caves. Early in May of 4299 they, in
the company of Roger Whetmore, then also a member of the Society, pene-
trated into the interior of a limestone cavern of the type found in the Central
Plateau of this Commonwealth. While they were in a position remote from the
entrance to the cave, a landslide occurred. Heavy boulders fell in such a manner
as to block completely the only known opening to the cave. When the men
discovered their predicament, they settled themselves near the obstructed
entrance to wait until a rescue party should remove the detritus that prevented
them from leaving their underground prison. On the failure of Whetmore and
the defendants to return to their homes, the Secretary of the Society was notified
by their families. It appears that the explorers had left indications at the head-
quarters of the Society concerning the location of the cave they proposed to
visit. A rescue party was promptly dispatched to the spot.
The task of rescue proved one of overwhelming difficulty. It was necessary to
supplement the forces of the original party by repeated increments of men and
machines, which had to be conveyed at great expense to the remote and isolated
region in which the cave was located. A huge temporary camp of workmen,
engineers, geologists, and other experts was established. The work of removing
the obstruction was several times frustrated by fresh landslides. In one of these,
ten of the workmen engaged in clearing the entrance were killed. The treasury
of the Speluncean Society was soon exhausted in the rescue effort, and the sum
of eight hundred thousand frelars, raised partly by popular subscription and
partly by legislative grant, was expended before the imprisoned men were
rescued. Success was finally achieved on the thirty-second day after the men
entered the cave.
Since it was known that the explorers had carried with them only scant provi-
sions, and since it was also known that there was no animal or vegetable matter
within the cave on which they might subsist, anxiety was early felt that they
might meet death by starvation before access to them could be obtained. On the
twentieth day of their imprisonment it was learned for the first time that they
had taken with them into the cave a portable wireless machine capable of both
LON FULLER'S SPELUNCEAN EXPLORERS
sending and receiving messages. A similar machine was promptly installed in the
rescue camp and oral communication established with the unfortunate men
within the mountain. They asked to be informed how long a time would be
required to release them. The engineers in charge of the project answered that
at least ten days would be required even if no new landslides occurred. The
explorers then asked if any physicians were present, and were placed in commu-
nication with a committee of medical experts. The imprisoned men described
their condition and the rations they had taken with them, and asked for a
medical opinion whether they would be likely to live without food for ten days
longer. The chairman of the committee of physicians told them that there was
little possibility of this. The wireless machine within the cave then remained
silent for eight hours. When communication was re-established, the men asked to
speak again with the physicians. The chairman of the physicians' committee was
placed before the apparatus, and Whetmore, speaking on behalf of himself and
the defendants, asked whether they would be able to survive for ten days longer if
they consumed the flesh of one of their number. The physicians' chairman
reluctantly answered this question in the affirmative. Whetmore asked whether it
would be advisable for them to cast lots to determine which of them should be
eaten. None of the physicians present was willing to answer the question.
Whetmore then asked if there were among the party a judge or other official of
the government who would answer this question. None of those attached to the
rescue camp was willing to assume the role of advisor in this matter. He then
asked if any minister or priest would answer their question, and none was found
who would do so. Thereafter no further messages were received from within the
cave, and it was assumed (erroneously, it later appeared) that the electric batteries
of the explorers' wireless machine had become exhausted. When the imprisoned
men were finally released, it was learned that on the twenty-third day after their
entrance into the cave Whetmore had been killed and eaten by his companions.
From the testimony of the defendants, which was accepted by the jury, it
appears that it was Whetmore who first proposed that they might find the nutri-
ment without which survival was impossible in the flesh of one of their own
number. It was also Whetmore who first proposed the use of some method of
casting lots, calling the attention of the defendants to a pair of dice he happened
to have with him. The defendants were at first reluctant to adopt so desperate a
procedure, but after the conversations by wireless related above, they finally
agreed on the plan proposed by Whetmore. Mter much discussion of the mathe-
matical problems involved, agreement was [mally reached on a method of
determining the issue by the use of the dice.
Before the dice were cast, however, Whetmore declared that he withdrew
from the arrangement, as he had decided on reflection to wait for another week
before embracing an expedient so frightful and odious. The others charged him
with a breach of faith and proceeded to cast the dice. When it came Whetmore's
turn, the dice were cast for him by one of the defendants, and he was asked to
declare any objections he might have to the fairness of the throw. He stated that
OPINION OF CHIEF JUSTICE TRUEPENNY
he had no such objections. The throw went against him, and he was then put to
death and eaten by his companions.
Mter the rescue of the defendants, and after they had completed a stay in a
hospital where they underwent a course of treatment for malnutrition and shock,
they were indicted for the murder of Roger Whetmore. At the trial, after the
testimony had been concluded, the foreman of the jury (a lawyer by profession)
inquired of the court whether the jury might not find a special verdict, leaving it
to the court to say whether on the facts as found the defendants were guilty. Mter
some discussion, both the Prosecutor and counsel for the defendants indicated
their acceptance of this procedure, and it was adopted by the court. In a lengthy
special verdict the jury found the facts as I have related them above, and found
further that if on these facts the defendants were guilty of the crime charged
against them, then they found the defendants guilty. On the basis of this verdict,
the trial judge ruled that the defendants were guilty of murdering Roger
Whetmore. The judge then sentenced them to be hanged, the law of our
Commonwealth permitting him no discretion with respect to the penalty to be
imposed. Mter the release of the jury, its members joined in communication to
the Chief Executive asking that the sentence be commuted to an imprisonment
of six months. The trial judge addressed a similar communication of the Chief
Executive. As yet no action with respect to these pleas has been taken, as the
Chief Executive is apparently awaiting our disposition of this petition of error.
It seems to me that in dealing with this extraordinary case the jury and the
trial judge followed a course that was not only fair and wise, but the only course
that was open to them under the law. The language of our statute is well known:
"Whoever shall willfully take the life of another shall be punished by death,"
N.C.S.A. (N.S.) §12-A. This statute permits of no exception applicable to this
case, however, our sympathies may incline us to make allowance for the tragic
situation in which these men found themselves.
In a case like this the principle of executive clemency seems admirably suited
to mitigate the rigors of the law, and I propose to my colleagues that we follow
the example of the jury and the trial judge by joining in the communications
they have addressed to the Chief Executive. There is every reason to believe that
these requests for clemency will be heeded, coming as they do from those who
have studied the case and had an opportunity to become thoroughly acquainted
with all its circumstances. It is highly improbable that the Chief Executive would
deny these requests unless he were himself to hold hearings at least as extensive
as those involved in the trial below, which lasted for three months. The holding
of such hearings (which would virtually amount to a retrial of the case) would
scarcely be compatible with the function of the Executive as it is usually
conceived. I think we may therefore assume that some form of clemency will be
extended to these defendants. If this is done, then justice will be accomplished
without impairing either the letter or spirit of our statutes and without offering
any encouragement for the disregard of law.
OPINION OF JUSTICE FOSTER
I am shocked that the Chief Justice, in an effort to escape the embarrassments of

this tragic case, should have adopted, and should have proposed to his
colleagues, an expedient at once so sordid and so obvious. I believe something
more is on trial in this case than the fate of these unfortunate explorers; that is
the law of our Commonwealth. If this Court declares that under our law these
men have committed a crime, then our law is itself convicted in the tribunal of
common sense, no matter what happens to the individuals involved in this peti-
tion of error. For us to assert that the law we uphold and expound compels us to
a conclusion we are ashamed of, and from which we can only escape by
appealing to a dispensation resting within the personal whim of the Executive,
seems to me to amount to an admission that the law of this Commonwealth no
longer pretends to incorporate justice.
For myself, I do not believe that our law compels the monstrous conclusion
that these men are murderers. I believe, on the contrary, that it declares them to
be innocent of any crime. I rest this conclusion on two independent grounds,
either of which is of itself sufficient to justifY the acquittal of these defendants.
The fIrst of these grounds rests on a premise that may arouse opposition until
it has been examined candidly. I take the view that the enacted or positive law of
this Commonwealth, including all of its statutes and precedents, is inapplicable
to this case, and that the case is governed instead by what ancient writers in
Europe and America called "the law of nature."
This conclusion rests on the proposition that our positive law is predicated on
the possibility of men's coexistence in society. When a situation arises in which
the coexistence of men becomes impossible, then a condition that underlies all of
our precedents and statutes has ceased to exist. When that condition disappears,
then it is my opinion that the force of our positive law disappears with it. We are
not accustomed to applying the maxim cessante ratWne legis, cessat et ipsa lex [where
the reason for the law ceases, the law itself ceases] to the whole of our enacted
law, but I believe that this is a case where the maxim should be so applied.
The proposition that all positive law is based on the possibility of men's coex-
istence has a strange sound, not because the truth it contains is strange, but
simply because it is a truth so obvious and pervasive that we seldom have occa-
10
sion to give words to it. Like the air we breathe, it so pervades our environment
that we forget that it exists until we are suddenly deprived of it. Whatever partic-
ular objects may be sought by the various branches of our law, it is apparent on
reflection that all of them are directed toward facilitating and improving men's
coexistence and regulating with fairness and equity the relations of their life in
common. When the assumption that men may live together loses its truth, as it
obviously did in this extraordinary situation where life only became possible by
the taking of life, then the basic premises underlying our whole legal order have
lost their meaning and force.
Had the tragic events of this case taken place a mile beyond the territorial
limits of our Commonwealth, no one would pretend that our law was applicable
to them. We recognize that jurisdiction rests on a territorial basis. The grounds
of this principle are by no means obvious and are seldom examined. I take it
that this principle is supported by an assumption that it is feasible to impose a
single legal order upon a group of men only if they live together within the
confines of a given area of the earth's surface. The premise that men shall
coexist in a group underlies, then, the territorial principle, as it does all of law.
Now I contend that a case may be removed morally from the force of a legal
order, as well as geographically. If we look to the purposes of law and govern-
ment, and to the premises underlying our positive law, these men when they
made their fateful decision were as remote from our legal order as if they had
been a thousand miles beyond our boundaries. Even in a physical sense, their
underground prison was separated from our courts and writ-servers by a solid
curtain of rock that could be removed only after the most extraordinary expen-
ditures of time and effort.
I conclude, therefore, that at the time Roger Whetmore's life was ended by
these defendants, they were, to use the quaint language of nineteenth-century
writers, not in a "state of civil society" but in a "state of nature." This has the
consequence that the law applicable to them is not the enacted and established
law of this Commonwealth, but the law derived from those principles that were
appropriate to their condition. I have no hesitancy in saying that under those
principles they were guiltless of any crime.
What these men did was done in pursuance of an agreement accepted by all
of them and first proposed by Whetmore himself Since it was apparent that
their extraordinary predicament made inapplicable the usual principles that
regulate men's relations with one another, it was necessary for them to draw, as it
were, a new charter of government appropriate to the situation in which they
found themselves.
It has from antiquity been recognized that the most basic principle of law or
government is to be found in the notion of contract or agreement. Ancient
thinkers, especially during the period from 1600 to 1900, used to base govern-
ment itself on a supposed original social compact. Skeptics pointed out that this
theory contradicted the known facts of history, and that there was no scientific
evidence to support the notion that any government was ever founded in the
11
manner supposed by the theory. Moralists replied that, if the compact was a
fiction from a historical point of view, the notion of compact or agreement
furnished the only ethical justification on which the powers of government,
which include that of taking life, could be rested. The powers of government can
only be justified morally on the ground that these are powers that reasonable
men would agree upon and accept if they were faced with the necessity of
constructing anew some order to make their life in common possible.
Fortunately, our Commonwealth is not bothered by the perplexities that beset
the ancients. We know as a matter of historical truth that our government was
founded upon a contract or free accord of men. The archeological proof is
conclusive that in the first period following the Great Spiral the survivors of that
holocaust voluntarily came together and drew up a charter of government.
Sophistical writers have raised questions as to the power of those remote
contractors to bind future generations, but the fact remains that our government
traces itself back in an unbroken line to that original charter.
If, therefore, our hangmen have the power to end men's lives, if our sheriffs
have the power to put delinquent tenants in the street, if our police have the
power to incarcerate the inebriated reveler, these powers find their moral justifi-
cation in that original compact of our forefathers. If we can find no higher
source for our legal order, what higher source should we expect these starving
unfortunates to find for the order they adopted for themselves?
I believe that the line of argument I have just expounded permits of no
rational answer. I realize that it will probably be received with a certain discom-
fort by many who read this opinion, who will be inclined to suspect that some
hidden sophistry must underlie a demonstration that leads to so many unfamiliar
conclusions. The source of this discomfort is, however, easy to identify. The usual
conditions of human existence incline us to think of human life as an absolute
value, not to be sacrificed under any circumstances. There is much that is ficti-
tious about this conception even when it is applied to the ordinary relations of
society. We have an illustration of this truth in the very case before us. Ten
workmen were killed in the process of removing the rocks from the opening to
the cave. Did not the engineers and government officials who directed the rescue
effort know that the operations they were undertaking were dangerous and
involved a serious risk to the lives of the workmen executing them? If it was
proper that these ten lives should be sacrificed to save the lives of five imprisoned
explorers, why then are we told it was wrong for these explorers to carry out an
arrangement which would save four lives at the cost of one?
Every highway, every tunnel, every building we project involves a risk to
human life. Taking these projects in the aggregate, we can calculate with some
precision how many deaths the construction of them will require; statisticians
can tell you the average cost in human lives of a thousand miles of a four-lane
concrete highway. Yet we deliberately and knowingly incur and pay this cost on
the assumption that the values obtained for those who survive outweigh the loss.
If these things can be said of a society functioning above ground in a normal
12
and ordinary manner, what shall we say of the supposed absolute value of a
human life in the desperate situation in which these defendants and their
companion Whetmore found themselves?
This concludes the exposition of the first ground of my decision. My second
ground proceeds by rejecting hypothetically all the premises on which I have so
far proceeded. I concede for purposes of argument that I am wrong in saying
that the situation of these men removed them from the effect of our positive law,
and I assume that the Consolidated Statutes have the power to penetrate 500
feet of rock and to impose themselves upon these starving men huddled in their
underground prison.
Now it is, of course, perfectly clear that these men did an act that violates the
literal wording of the statute which declares that he who "shall willfully take the
life of another" is a murderer. But one of the most ancient bits of legal wisdom
is the saying that a man may break the letter of the law without breaking the law
itself. Every proposition of positive law, whether contained in a statute or a judi-
cial precedent, is to be interpreted reasonably, in the light of its evident purpose.
This is a truth so elementary that it is hardly necessary to expatiate on it.
Illustrations of its application are numberless and are to be found in every
branch of law. In Commonwealth v. Staymore the defendant was convicted under a
statute making it a crime to leave one's car parked in certain areas for a period
longer than two hours. The defendant had attempted to remove his car, but was
prevented from doing so because the streets were obstructed by a political
demonstration in which he took no part and which he had no reason to antici-
pate. His conviction was set aside by this Court, although his case fell squarely
within the wording of the statute. Again, in Fehler v. Neegas there was before this
Court for construction a statute, in which the word "not" had plainly been trans-
posed from its intended position in the final and most crucial section of the act.
This transposition was contained in all the successive drafts of the act, where it
was apparently overlooked by the draftsmen and sponsors of the legislation. No
one was able to prove how the error came about, yet it was apparent that, taking
account of the contents of the statute as a whole, an error had been made, since
a literal reading of the final clause rendered it inconsistent with everything that
had gone before and with the object of the enactment as stated in its preamble.
This Court refused to accept a literal interpretation of the statute, and in effect
rectified its language by reading the word "not" into the place where it was
evidently intended to go.
The statute before us for interpretation has never been applied literally.
Centuries ago it was established that a killing in self-defense is excused. There is
nothing in the wording of the statute that suggests this exception. Various
attempts have been made to reconcile the legal treatment of self-defense with the
words of the statute, but in my opinion these are all merely ingenious sophistries.
The truth is that the exception in favor of self-defense cannot be reconciled with
the words of the statute, but only with its purpose.
The true reconciliation of the excuse of self-defense with the statute making it
13
a crime to kill another is to be found in the following line of reasoning. One of

the principal objects underlying any criminal legislation is that of deterring men
from crime. Now it is apparent that if it were declared to be the law that a killing
in self-defense is murder such a rule could not operate in a deterrent manner. A
man whose life is threatened will repel his aggressor, whatever the law may say.
Looking therefore to the broad purposes of criminal legislation, we may safely
declare that this statute was not intended to apply to cases of self-defense.
When the rationale of the excuse of self-defense is thus explained, it becomes
apparent that precisely the same reasoning is applicable to the case at bar. If in
the future any group of men ever find themselves in the tragic predicament of
these defendants, we may be sure that their decision whether to live or die will
not be controlled by the contents of our criminal code. Accordingly, if we read
this statute intelligently, it is apparent that it does not apply to this case. The
withdrawal of this situation from the effect of the statute is justified by precisely
the same considerations that were applied by our predecessors in office centuries
ago to the case of self-defense.
There are those who raise the cry of judicial usurpation whenever a court,
after analyzing the purpose of a statute, gives to its words a meaning that is not
at once apparent to the casual reader who has not studied the statute closely or
examined the objectives it seeks to attain. Let me say emphatically that I accept
without reservation the proposition that this Court is bound by the statutes of
our Commonwealth and that it exercises its powers in subservience to the duly
expressed will of the Chamber of Representatives. The line of reasoning I have
applied above raises no question of fidelity to enacted law, though it may
possibly raise a question of the distinction between intelligent and unintelligent
fidelity. No superior wants a servant who lacks the capacity to read between the
lines. The stupidest housemaid knows that when she is told "to peel the soup and
skim the potatoes" her mistress does not mean what she says. She also knows that
when her master tells her to "drop everything and come running" he has over-
looked the possibility that she is at the moment in the act of rescuing the baby
from the rain barrel. Surely we have a right to expect the same modicum of
intelligence from the judiciary. The correction of obvious legislative errors or
oversights is not to supplant the legislative will, but to make that will effective.
I therefore conclude that on any aspect under which this case may be viewed
these defendants are innocent of the crime of murdering Roger Whetmore, and
that the conviction should be set aside.
14
OPINION OF JUSTICE TATTING
In the discharge of my duties as a justice of this Court, I am usually able to

dissociate the emotional and intellectual sides of my reactions, and to decide the
case before me entirely on the basis of the latter. In passing on this tragic case I
find that my usual resources fail me. On the emotional side I find myself torn
between sympathy for these men and a feeling of abhorrence and disgust at the
monstrous act they committed. I had hoped that I would be able to put these
contradictory emotions to one side as irrelevant, and to decide the case on the
basis of a convincing and logical demonstration of the result demanded by our
law. Unfortunately, this deliverance has not been vouchsafed me.
As I analyze the opinion just rendered by my brother Foster, I find that it is
shot through with contradictions and fallacies. Let us begin with his first proposi-
tion: these men were not subject to our law because they were not in a "state of
civil society" but in a "state of nature." I am not clear why this is so, whether it is
because of the thickness of the rock that imprisoned them, or because they were
hungry, or because they had set up a "new charter of government" by which the
usual rules of law were to be supplanted by a throw of the dice. Other difficulties
intrude themselves. If these men passed from the jurisdiction of our law to that
of "the law of nature," at what moment did this occur? Was it when the
entrance to the cave was blocked, or when the threat of starvation reached a
certain undefined degree of intensity, or when the agreement for the throwing of
the dice was made? These uncertainties in the doctrine proposed by my brother
are capable of producing real difficulties. Suppose, for example, one of these
men had had his twenty-first birthday while he was imprisoned within the moun-
tain. On what date would we have to consider that he had attained his majority
- when he reached the age of twenty-one, at which time he was, by hypothesis,
removed from the effects of our law, or only when he was released from the cave
and became again subject to what my brother calls our "positive law"? These
difficulties may seem fanciful, yet they only serve to reveal the fanciful nature of
the doctrine that is capable of giving rise to them.
But it is not necessary to explore these niceties further to demonstrate the
absurdity of my brother's position. Mr Justice Foster and I are the appointed
judges of a court of the Commonwealth of Newgarth, sworn and empowered to
15
administer the laws of that Commonwealth. By what authority do we resolve

ourselves into a Court of Nature? If these men were indeed under the law of
nature, whence comes our authority to expound and apply that law? Certainly
we are not in a state of nature.
Let us look at the contents of this code of nature that my brother proposes we
adopt as our own and apply to this case. What a topsy-turvy and odious code it
is! It is a code in which the law of contracts is more fundamental than the law of
murder. It is a code under which a man may make a valid agreement empow-
ering his fellows to eat his own body. Under the provisions of this code,
furthermore, such an agreement once made is irrevocable, and if one of the
parties attempts to withdraw, the others may take the law into their own hands
and enforce the contract by violence - for though my brother passes over in
convenient silence the effect of Whetmore's withdrawal, this is the necessary
implication of his argument.
The principles my brother expounds contain other implications that cannot
be tolerated. He argues that when the defendants set upon Whetmore and killed
him (we know not how, perhaps by pounding him with stones) they were only
exercising the rights conferred upon them by their bargain. Suppose, however,
that Whetmore had had concealed upon his person a revolver, and that when he
saw the defendants about to slaughter him he had shot them to death in order to
save his own life. My brother's reasoning applied to these facts would make
Whetmore out to be a murderer, since the excuse of self-defense would have to
be denied to him. If his assailants were acting rightfully in seeking to bring about
his death, then of course he could no more plead the excuse that he was
defending his own life than could a condemned prisoner who struck down the
executioner lawfully attempting to place the noose about his neck.
All of these considerations make it impossible for me to accept the first part of
my brother's argument. I can neither accept his notion that these men were
under a code of nature which this Court was bound to apply to them, nor can I
accept the odious and perverted rules that he would read into that code. I come
now to the second part of my brother's opinion, in which he seeks to show that
the defendants did not violate the provisions of N.C.S.A. (N.S.) §12-A. Here the
way, instead of being clear, becomes for me misty and ambiguous, though my
brother seems unaware of the difficulties that inhere in his demonstrations.
The gist of my brother's argument may be stated in the following terms: No
statute, whatever its language, should be applied in a way that contradicts its
purpose. One of the purposes of any criminal statute is to deter. The application
of the statute making it a crime to kill another to the peculiar facts of this case
would contradict this purpose, for it is impossible to believe that the contents of
the criminal code could operate in a deterrent manner on men faced with the
alternative of life or death. The reasoning by which this exception is read into
the statute is, my brother observes, the same as that which is applied in order to
provide the excuse of self-defense.
On the face of things this demonstration seems very convincing indeed. My
16
brother's interpretation of the rationale of the excuse of self-defense is in fact

supported by a decision of this court, Commonwealth v. Parry, a precedent I
happened to encounter in my research on this case. Though Commonwealth v.
Parry seems generally to have been overlooked in the texts and subsequent deci-
sions, it supports unambiguously the interpretation my brother has put upon the
excuse of self-defense.
Now let me outline briefly, however, the perplexities that assail me when I
examine my brother's demonstration more closely. It is true that a statute should
be applied in the light of its purpose, and that one of the purposes of criminal
legislation is recognized to be deterrence. The difficulty is that other purposes
are also ascribed to the law of crimes. It has been said that one of its objects is to
provide an orderly outlet for the instinctive human demand for retribution:
Commonwealth v. Scape. It has also been said that its object is the rehabilitation of
the wrongdoer: Commonwealth v. Makeover. Other theories have been propounded.
Assuming that we must interpret a statute in the light of its purpose, what are we
to do when it has many purposes or when its purposes are disputed?
A similar difficulty is presented by the fact that, although there is authority for
my brother's interpretation of the excuse of self-defense, there is other authority
which assigns to that excuse a different rationale. Indeed, until I happened on
Commonwealth v. Parry I had never heard of the explanation given by my brother.
The taught doctrine of our law schools, memorized by generations of law
students, runs in the following terms: The statute concerning murder requires a
"willful" act. The man who acts to repel an aggressive threat to his own life does
not act "willfully," but in response to an impulse deeply ingrained in human
nature. I suspect that there is hardly a lawyer in this Commonwealth who is not
familiar with this line of reasoning, especially since the point is a great favorite of
the bar examiners.
Now the familiar explanation for the excuse of self-defense just expounded
obviously cannot be applied by analogy to the facts of this case. These men
acted not only "willfully" but with great deliberation and after hours of
discussing what they should do. Again we encounter a forked path, with one line
of reasoning leading us in one direction and another in a direction that is exactly
the opposite. This perplexity is in this case compounded, as it were, for we have
to set off one explanation, incorporated in a virtually unknown precedent of this

Court, against another explanation, which forms a part of the taught legal tradi-
tion of our law schools, but which, so far as I know, has never been adopted in
any judicial decision.
I recognize the relevance of the precedents cited by my brother concerning
the displaced "not" and the defendant who parked over time. But what are we to
do with one of the landmarks of our jurisprudence, which again my brother
passes over in silence? This is Commonwealth v. Vaijean. Though the case is some-
what obscurely reported, it appears that the defendant was indicted for the
larceny of a loaf of bread, and offered as a defense that he was in a condition
approaching starvation. The court refused to accept this defense. If hunger
17
cannot justifY the theft of wholesome and natural food, how can it justify the
killing and eating of a man? Again, if we look at the thing in terms of deter-
rence, is it likely that a man will starve to death to avoid a jail sentence for the
theft of a loaf of bread? My brother's demonstrations would compel us to over-
rule Commonwealth v. ViJijean, and many other precedents that have been built on
that case.
Again, I have difficulty in saying that no deterrent effect whatever could be
attributed to a decision that these men were guilty of murder. The stigma of the
word "murderer" is such that it is quite likely, I believe, that if these men had
known that their act was deemed by the law to be murder they would have
waited for a few days at least before carrying out their plan. During that time
some unexpected relief might have come. I realize that this observation only
reduces the distinction to a matter of degree, and does not destroy it altogether.
It is certainly true that the element of deterrence would be less in this case than
is normally involved in the application of the criminal law.
There is still a further difficulty in my brother Foster's proposal to read an
exception into the statute to favor this case, though again a difficulty not even
intimated in his opinion. What shall be the scope of this exception? Here the
men cast lots and the victim was himself originally a party to the agreement.
What would we have to decide if Whetmore had refused from the beginning to
participate in the plan? Would a majority be permitted to overrule him? Or,
suppose that no plan were adopted at all and the others simply conspired to
bring about Whetmore's death, justifYing their act by saying that he was in the
weakest condition. Or again, that a plan of selection was followed but one based
on a different justification than the one adopted here, as if the others were athe-
ists and insisted that Whetmore should die because he was the only one who
believed in an afterlife. These illustrations could be multiplied, but enough have
been suggested to reveal what a quagmire of hidden difficulties my brother's
reasoning contains.
Of course I realize on reflection that I may be concerning myself with a
problem that will never arise, since it is unlikely that any group of men will ever
again be brought to commit the dread act that was involved here. Yet, on still
further reflection, even if we are certain that no similar case will arise again, do
not the illustrations I have given show the lack of any coherent and rational prin-
ciple in the rule my brother proposes? Should not the soundness of a principle
be tested by the conclusions it entails, without reference to the accidents of later
litigational history? Still, if this is so, why is it that we of this Court so often
discuss the question whether we are likely to have later occasion to apply a prin-
ciple urged for the solution of the case before us? Is this a situation where a line
of reasoning not originally proper has become sanctioned by precedent, so that
we are permitted to apply it and may even be under an obligation to do so?
The more I examine this case and think about it, the more deeply I become
involved. My mind becomes entangled in the meshes of the very nets I throw out
for my own rescue. I find that almost every consideration that bears on the deci-
18
sion of the case is counterbalanced by an opposing consideration leading in the

opposite direction. My brother Foster has not furnished to me, nor can I discover
for myself, any formula capable of resolving the equivocations that beset me on
all sides.
I have given this case the best thought of which I am capable. I have scarcely
slept since it was argued before us. When I feel myself inclined to accept the
view of my brother Foster, I am repelled by a feeling that his arguments are intel-
lectually unsound and approach mere rationalization. On the other hand, when
I incline toward upholding the conviction, I am struck by the absurdity of
directing that these men be put to death when their lives have been saved at the
cost of the lives of ten heroic workmen. It is to me a matter of regret that the
Prosecutor saw fit to ask for an indictment for murder. If we had a provision in
our statutes making it a crime to eat human flesh, that would have been a more
appropriate charge. If no other charge suited to the facts of this case could be
brought against the defendants, it would have been wiser, I think, not to have
indicted them at all. Unfortunately, however, the men have been indicted and
tried, and we have therefore been drawn into this unfortunate affair.
Since I have been wholly unable to resolve the doubts that beset me about the
law of this case, I am with regret announcing a step that is, I believe, unprece-
dented in the history of this tribunal. I declare my withdrawal from the decision
of this case.
19
OPINION OF JUSTICE KEEN
I should like to begin by setting to one side two questions which are not before
this Court.
The fIrst of these is whether executive clemency should be extended to these
defendants if the conviction is affirmed. Under our system of government, that
is a question for the Chief Executive, not for us. I therefore disapprove of that
passage in the opinion of the Chief Justice in which he in effect gives instructions
to the Chief Executive as to what he should do in this case and suggests that
some impropriety will attach if these instructions are not heeded. This is a
confusion of governmental functions - a confusion of which the judiciary should
be the last to be guilty. I wish to state that if I were the Chief Executive I would
go farther in the direction of clemency than the pleas addressed to him propose.
I would pardon these men altogether, since I believe that they have already
suffered enough to pay for any offense they may have committed. I want it to be
understood that this remark is made in my capacity as a private citizen who by
the accident of his office happens to have acquired an intimate acquaintance
with the facts of this case. In the discharge of my duties as judge, it is neither my
function to address directions to the Chief Executive, nor to take into account
what he mayor may not do, in reaching my own decision, which must be
controlled entirely by the law of this Commonwealth.
The second question that I wish to put to one side is that of deciding whether
what these men did was "right" or "wrong," "wicked" or "good." That is also a
question that is irrelevant to the discharge of my office as a judge sworn to apply,
not my conceptions of morality, but the law of the land. In putting this question
to one side I think I can also safely dismiss without comment the fIrst and more
poetic portion of my brother Foster's opinion. The element of fantasy contained
in the arguments developed there has been sufficiently revealed in my brother
Tatting's somewhat solemn attempt to take those arguments seriously.
The sole question before us for decision is whether these defendants did,
within the meaning of N.C.S.A. (N.S.) §12-A, willfully take the life of Roger
Whetmore. The exact language of the statute is as follows: "Whoever shall will-
fully take the life of another shall be punished by death." Now I should suppose
20
that any candid observer, content to extract from these words their natural
meaning, would concede at once that these defendants did "willfully take the
life" of Roger Whetmore.
Whence arise all the difficulties of the case, then, and the necessity for so
many pages of discussion about what ought to be so obvious? The difficulties, in
whatever tortured form they may present themselves, all trace back to a single
source, and that is a failure to distinguish the legal from the moral aspects of this
case. To put it bluntly, my brothers do not like the fact that the written law
requires the conviction of these defendants. Neither do I, but unlike my brothers
I respect the obligations of an office that requires me to put my personal
predilections out of my mind when I come to interpret and apply the law of this
Commonwealth.
Now, of course, my brother Foster does not admit that he is actuated by a
personal dislike of the written law. Instead he develops a familiar line of argu-
ment according to which the court may disregard the express language of a
statute when something not contained in the statute itself, called its "purpose,"
can be employed to justifY the result the court considers proper. Because this is
an old issue between myself and my colleague, I should like, before discussing his
particular application of the argument to the facts of this case, to say something
about the historical background of this issue and its implications for law and
government generally.
There was a time in this Commonwealth when judges did in fact legislate
very freely, and all of us know that during that period some of our statutes were
rather thoroughly made over by the judiciary. That was a time when the
accepted principles of political science did not designate with any certainty the
rank and function of the various arms of the state. We all know the tragic issue
of that uncertainty in the brief civil war that arose out of the conflicts between
the judiciary, on the one hand, and the executive and the legislature, on the
other. There is no need to recount here the factors that contributed to that
unseemly struggle for power, though they included the unrepresentative char-
acter of the Chamber, resulting from a division of the country into election
districts that no longer accorded with the actual distribution of the population,
and the forceful personality and wide popular following of the then Chief
Justice. It is enough to observe that those days are behind us, and that in place of
the uncertainty that then reigned we now have a clear-cut principle, which is the
supremacy of the legislative branch of our government. From that principle
flows the obligation of the judiciary to enforce faithfully the written law, and to
interpret that law in accordance with its plain meaning without reference to our
personal desires or our individual conceptions of justice. I am not concerned
with the question whether the principle that forbids the judicial revision of
statutes is right or wrong, desirable or undesirable; I observe merely that this
principle has become a tacit premise underlying the whole of the legal and
governmental order I am sworn to administer.
Yet though the principle of the supremacy of the legislature has been
21
accepted in theory for centuries, such is the tenacity of professional tradition and
the force of fIxed habits of thought that many of the judiciary have still not
accommodated themselves to the restricted role which the new order imposes on
them. My brother Foster is one of that group; his way of dealing with statutes is
exactly that of a judge living in the 3900s.
We are all familiar with the process by which the judicial reform of disfavored
legislative enactments is accomplished. Anyone who has followed the written
opinions of Mr Justice Foster will have had an opportunity to see it at work in
every branch of the law. I am personally so familiar with the process that in the
event of my brother's incapacity I am sure I could write a satisfactory opinion
for him without any prompting whatever, beyond being informed whether he
liked the effect of the terms of the statute as applied to the case before him.
The process of judicial reform requires three steps. The fIrst of these is to
divine some single "purpose" which the statute serves. This is done although not
one statute in a hundred has any such single purpose, and although the objec-
tives of nearly every statute are differently interpreted by the different classes of
its sponsors. The second step is to discover that a mythical being called "the
legislator," in the pursuit of this imagined "purpose," overlooked something or
left some gap or imperfection in his work. Then comes the fInal and most
refreshing part of the task, which is, of course, to fill in the blank thus created.
Qyod eratfociendum [which was to be done].
My brother Foster's penchant for fmding holes in statutes reminds one of the
story told by an ancient author about the man who ate a pair of shoes. Asked
how he liked them, he replied that the part he liked best was the holes. That is
the way my brother feels about statutes; the more holes they have in them the
better he likes them. In short, he doesn't like statutes.
One could not wish for a better case to illustrate the specious nature of this
gap-filling process than the one before us. My brother thinks he knows exactly
what was sought when men made murder a crime, and that was something he
calls "deterrence." My brother Tatting has already shown how much is passed
over in that interpretation. But I think the trouble goes deeper. I doubt very
much whether our statute making murder a crime really has a "purpose" in any
ordinary sense of the term. Primarily, such a statute reflects a deeply-felt human
conviction that murder is wrong and that something should be done to the man
who commits it. If we were forced to be more articulate about the matter, we
would probably take refuge in the more sophisticated theories of the criminolo-
gists, which, of course, were certainly not in the minds of those who drafted our
statute. We might also observe that men will do their own work more effectively
and live happier lives if they are protected against the threat of violent assault.
Bearing in mind that the victims of murders are often unpleasant people, we
might add some suggestion that the matter of disposing of undesirables is not a
function suited to private enterprise, but should be a state monopoly. All of
which reminds me of the attorney who once argued before us that a statute
licensing physicians was a good thing because it would lead to lower life insur-
22
ance rates by lifting the level of general health. There is such a thing as over-
explaining the obvious.
If we do not know the purpose of §12-A, how can we possibly say there is a
"gap" in it? How can we know what its draftsmen thought about the question of
killing men in order to eat them? My brother Tatting has revealed an under-
standable, though perhaps slightly exaggerated, revulsion to cannibalism. How
do we know that his remote ancestors did not feel the same revulsion to an even
higher degree? Anthropologists say that the dread felt for a forbidden act may be
increased by the fact that the conditions of a tribe's life create special tempta-
tions toward it, as incest is most severely condemned among those whose village
relations make it most likely to occur. Certainly the period following the Great
Spiral was one that had implicit in it temptations to anthropophagy. Perhaps it
was for that very reason that our ancestors expressed their prohibition in so
broad and unqualified a form. All of this is conjecture, of course, but it remains
abundantly clear that neither I nor my brother Foster knows what the "purpose"
of §12-A is.
Considerations similar to those I have just outlined are also applicable to the
exception in favor of self-defense, which plays so large a role in the reasoning of
my brothers Foster and Tatting. It is of course true that in Commonwealth v. Parry
an obiter dictum justified this exception on the assumption that the purpose of
criminal legislation is to deter. It may well also be true that generations of law
students have been taught that the true explanation of the exception lies in the
fact that a man who acts in self-defense does not act "willfully," and that the
same students have passed their bar examinations by repeating what their profes-
sors told them. These last observations I could dismiss, of course, as irrelevant
for the simple reason that professors and bar examiners have not as yet any
commission to make our laws for us. But again the real trouble lies deeper. As in
dealing with the statute, so in dealing with the exception, the question is not the
conjectural purpose of the rule, but its scope. Now the scope of the exception in
favor of self-defense as it has been applied by this Court is plain: it applies to
cases of resisting an aggressive threat to the party's own life. It is therefore too
clear for argument that this case does not fall within the scope of the exception,
since it is plain that Whetmore made no threat against the lives of these defen-
dants.
The essential shabbiness of my brother Foster's attempt to cloak his remaking
of the written law with an air of legitimacy comes tragically to the surface in my
brother Tatting's opinion. In that opinion Justice Tatting struggles manfully to
combine his colleague's loose moralisms with his own sense of fidelity to the
written law. The issue of this struggle could only be that which occurred, a
complete default in the discharge of the judicial function. You simply cannot
apply a statute as it is written and remake it to meet your own wishes at the same
time.
Now I know that the line of reasoning I have developed in this opinion will
not be acceptable to those who look only to the immediate effects of a decision
23
and ignore the long-run implications of an assumption by the judiciary of a

power of dispensation. A hard decision is never a popular decision. Judges have
been celebrated in literature for their sly prowess in devising some quibble by
which a litigant could be deprived of his rights where the public thought it was
wrong for him to assert those rights. But I believe that judicial dispensation does
more harm in the long run than hard decisions. Hard cases may even have a
certain moral value by bringing home to the people their own responsibilities
toward the law that is ultimately their creation, and by reminding them that
there is no principle of personal grace that can relieve the mistakes of their
representatives.
Indeed, I will go farther and say that not only are the principles I have been
expounding those which are soundest for our present conditions, but that we
would have inherited a better legal system from our forefathers if those princi-
ples had been observed from the beginning. For example, with respect to the
excuse of self-defense, if our courts had stood steadfast on the language of the
statute the result would undoubtedly have been a legislative revision of it. Such a
revision would have drawn on the assistance of natural philosophers and
psychologists, and the resulting regulation of the matter would have had an
understandable and rational basis, instead of the hodgepodge of verbalisms and
metaphysical distinctions that have emerged from the judicial and professorial
treatment.
These concluding remarks are, of course, beyond any duties that I have to
discharge with relation to this case, but I include them here because I feel deeply
that my colleagues are insufficiently aware of the dangers implicit in the concep-
tions of the judicial office advocated by my brother Foster.
I conclude that the conviction should be affirmed.
24
OPINION OF JUSTICE HANDY
I have listened with amazement to the tortured ratiocinations to which this

simple case has given rise. I never cease to wonder at my colleagues' ability to
throw an obscuring curtain of legalisms about every issue presented to them for
decision. We have heard this afternoon learned disquisitions on the distinction
between positive law and the law of nature, the language of the statute and the
purpose of the statute, judicial functions and executive functions, judiciallegisla-
tion and legislative legislation. My only disappointment was that someone did
not raise the question of the legal nature of the bargain struck in the cave ~
whether it was unilateral or bilateral, and whether Whetmore could not be
considered as having revoked an offer prior to action taken thereunder.
What have all these things to do with the case? The problem before us is what
we, as officers of the government, ought to do with these defendants. That is a
question of practical wisdom, to be exercised in a context, not of abstract theory,
but of human realities. When the case is approached in this light, it becomes, I
think, one of the easiest to decide that has ever been argued before this Court.
Before stating my own conclusions about the merits of the case, I should like
to discuss briefly some of the more fundamental issues involved ~ issues on
which my colleagues and I have been divided ever since I have been on the
bench.
I have never been able to make my brothers see that government is a human
affair, and that men are ruled, not by words on paper or by abstract theories, but
by other men. They are ruled well when their rulers understand the feelings and
conceptions of the masses. They are ruled badly when that understanding is
lacking.
Of all branches of the government, the judiciary is the most likely to lose its
contact with the common man. The reasons for this are, of course, fairly
obvious. Where the masses react to a situation in terms of a few salient features,
we pick into little pieces every situation presented to us. Lawyers are hired by
both sides to analyze and dissect. Judges and attorneys vie with one another to
see who can discover the greatest number of difficulties and distinctions in a
single set of facts. Each side tries to find cases, real or imagined, that will embar-
rass the demonstrations of the other side. To escape this embarrassment, still
25
further distinctions are invented and imported into the situation. When a set of
facts has been subjected to this kind of treatment for a sufficient time, all the life
and juice have gone out of it and we have left a handful of dust.
Now I realize that wherever you have rules and abstract principles lawyers are
going to be able to make distinctions. To some extent the sort of thing I have
been describing is a necessary evil attaching to any formal regulation of human
affairs. But I think that the area which really stands in need of such regulation is
greatly overestimated. There are, of course, a few fundamental rules of the game
that must be accepted if the game is to go on at all. I would include among these
the rules relating to the conduct of elections, the appointment of public officials,
and the term during which an office is held. Here some restraint on discretion
and dispensation, some adherence to form, some scruple for what does and what
does not fall within the rule, is, I concede, essential. Perhaps the area of basic
principle should be expanded to include certain other rules, such as those
designed to preserve the free civilmoign system.
But outside of these fields I believe that all government officials, including
judges, will do their jobs best if they treat forms and abstract concepts as instru-
ments. We should take as our model, I think, the good administrator, who
accommodates procedures and principles to the case at hand, selecting from
among the available forms those most suited to reach the proper result.
The most obvious advantage of this method of government is that it permits
us to go about our daily tasks with efficiency and common sense. My adherence
to this philosophy has, however, deeper roots. I believe that it is only with the
insight this philosophy gives that we can preserve the flexibility essential if we are
to keep our actions in reasonable accord with the sentiments of those subject to
our rule. More governments have been wrecked, and more human misery
caused, by the lack of this accord between ruler and ruled than by any other
factor that can be discerned in history. Once drive a sufficient wedge between
the mass of people and those who direct their legal, political, and economic life,
and our society is ruined. Then neither Foster's law of nature nor Keen's fidelity
to written law will avail us anything.
Now when these conceptions are applied to the case before us, its decision
becomes, as I have said, perfectly easy. In order to demonstrate this I shall have
to introduce certain realities that my brothers in their coy decorum have seen fit
to pass over in silence, although they are just as acutely aware of them as I am.
The first of these is that this case has aroused an enormous public interest,
both here and abroad. Almost every newspaper and magazine has carried arti-
cles about it; columnists have shared with their readers confidential information
as to the next governmental move; hundreds of letters-to-the-editor have been
printed. One of the great newspaper chains made a poll of public opinion on
the question, "What do you think the Supreme Court should do with the
Speluncean explorers?" About ninety per cent expressed a belief that the defen-
dants should be pardoned or let off with a kind of token punishment. It is
perfectly clear, then, how the public feels about the case. We could have known
26
this without the poll, of course, on the basis of common sense, or even by
observing that on this Court there are apparently four-and-a-half men, or ninety
per cent, who share the common opinion.
This makes it obvious, not only what we should do, but what we must do if
we are to preserve between ourselves and public opinion a reasonable and
decent accord. Declaring these men innocent need not involve us in any undigni-
fied quibble or trick. No principle of statutory construction is required that is not
consistent with the past practices of this Court. Certainly no layman would think
that in letting these men off we had stretched the statute any more than our
ancestors did when they created the excuse of self-defense. If a more detailed
demonstration of the method of reconciling our decision with the statute is
required, I should be content to rest on the arguments developed in the second
and less visionary part of my brother Foster's opinion.
Now I know that my brothers will be horrified by my suggestion that this
Court should take account of public opinion. They will tell you that public
opinion is emotional and capricious, that it is based on half-truths and listens to
witnesses who are not subject to cross-examination. They will tell you that the
law surrounds the trial of a case like this with elaborate safeguards, designed to
insure that the truth will be known and that every rational consideration bearing
on the issues of the case has been taken into account. They will warn you that all
of these safeguards go for naught if a mass opinion formed outside this frame-
work is allowed to have any influence on our decision.
But let us look candidly at some of the realities of the administration of our
criminal law. When a man is accused of crime, there are, speaking generally, four
ways in which he may escape punishment. One of these is a determination by a
judge that under the applicable law he has committed no crime. This is, of
course, a determination that takes place in a rather formal and abstract atmo-
sphere. But look at the other three ways in which he may escape punishment.
These are: (I) a decision by the Prosecutor not to ask for an indictment; (2) an
acquittal by the jury; (3) a pardon or commutation of sentence by the executive.
Can anyone pretend that these decisions are held within a rigid and formal
framework of rules that prevents factual error, excludes emotional and personal
factors, and guarantees that all the forms of the law will be observed?
In the case of the jury we do, to be sure, attempt to cabin their deliberations
within the area of the legally relevant, but there is no need to deceive ourselves
into believing that this attempt is really successful. In the normal course of
events the case now before us would have gone on all of its issues directly to the
jury. Had this occurred we can be confident that there would have been an
acquittal or at least a division that would have prevented a conviction. If the jury
had been instructed that the men's hunger and their agreement were no defense
to the charge of murder, their verdict would in all likelihood have ignored this
instruction and would have involved a good deal more twisting of the letter of
the law than any that is likely to tempt us. Of course the only reason that didn't
occur in this case was the fortuitous circumstance that the foreman of the jury
27
happened to be a lawyer. His learning enabled him to devise a form of words

that would allow the jury to dodge its usual responsibilities.
My brother Tatting expresses annoyance that the Prosecutor did not, in effect,
decide the case for him by not asking for an indictment. Strict as he is himself in
complying with the demands of legal theory, he is quite content to have the fate
of these men decided out of court by the Prosecutor on the basis of common
sense. The Chief Justice, on the other hand, wants the application of common
sense postponed to the very end, though, like Tatting, he wants no personal part
in it.
This brings me to the concluding portion of my remarks, which has to do
with executive clemency. Before discussing that topic directly, I want to make a
related observation about the poll of public opinion. As I have said, ninety per
cent of the people wanted the Supreme Court to let the men off entirely or with
a more or less nominal punishment. The ten per cent constituted a very oddly
assorted group, with the most curious and divergent opinions. One of our
university experts has made a study of this group and has found that its
members fall into certain patterns. A substantial portion of them are subscribers
to "crank" newspapers of limited circulation that gave their readers a distorted
version of the facts of the case. Some thought that "Speluncean" means
"cannibal" and that anthropophagy is a tenet of the Society. But the point I
want to make, however, is this: although almost every conceivable variety and
shade of opinion was represented in this group, there was, so far as I know, not
one of them, nor a single member of the majority of ninety per cent, who said,
"I think it would be a fine thing to have the courts sentence these men to be
hanged, and then to have another branch of the government come along and
pardon them." Yet this is a solution that has more or less dominated our discus-
sions and which our Chief Justice proposes as a way by which we can avoid
doing an injustice and at the same time preserve respect for law. He can be
assured that if he is preserving anybody's morale, it is his own, and not the
public's, which knows nothing of his distinctions. I mention this matter because I
wish to emphasize once more the danger that we may get lost in the patterns of
our own thought and forget that these patterns often cast not the slightest
shadow on the outside world.
I come now to the most crucial fact in this case, a fact known to all of us on
this Court, though one that my brothers have seen fit to keep under the cover of
their judicial robes. This is the frightening likelihood that if the issue is left to
him, the Chief Executive will refuse to pardon these men or commute their
sentence. As we all know, our Chief Executive is a man now well advanced in
years, of very stiff notions. Public clamor usually operates on him with the
reverse of the effect intended. As I have told my brothers, it happens that my
wife's niece is an intimate friend of his secretary. I have learned in this indirect,
but, I think, wholly reliable way, that he is firmly determined not to commute the
sentence if these men are found to have violated the law.
No one regrets more than I the necessity for relying in so important a matter
28
on information that could be characterized as gossip. If I had my way this would

not happen, for I would adopt the sensible course of sitting down with the
Executive, going over the case with him, finding out what his views are, and
perhaps working out with him a common program for handling the situation.
But of course my brothers would never hear of such a thing.
Their scruple about acquiring accurate information directly does not prevent
them from being very perturbed about what they have learned indirectly. Their
acquaintance with the facts I have just related explains why the Chief Justice,
ordinarily a model of decorum, saw fit in his opinion to flap his judicial robes in
the face of the Executive and threaten him with excommunication if he failed to
commute the sentence. It explains, I suspect, my brother Foster's feat of levita-
tion by which a whole library of law books was lifted from the shoulders of these
defendants. It explains also why even my legalistic brother Keen emulated Pooh-
Bah in the ancient comedy by stepping to the other side of the stage to address a
few remarks to the Executive "in my capacity as a private citizen." (I may
remark, incidentally, that the advice of Private Citizen Keen will appear in the
reports of this Court printed at taxpayers' expense.)
I must confess that as I grow older I become more and more perplexed at
men's refusal to apply their common sense to problems of law and government,
and this truly tragic case has deepened my sense of discouragement and dismay.
I only wish that I could convince my brothers of the wisdom of the principles I
have applied to the judicial office since I first assumed it. As a matter of fact, by
a kind of sad rounding of the circle, I encountered issues like those involved here
in the very first case I tried as Judge of the Court of General Instances in
Fanleigh County.
A religious sect had unfrocked a minister who, they said, had gone over to the
views and practices of a rival sect. The minister circulated a handbill making
charges against the authorities who had expelled him. Certain lay members of
the church announced a public meeting at which they proposed to explain the
position of the church. The minister attended this meeting. Some said he slipped
in unobserved in a disguise; his own testimony was that he had walked in openly
as a member of the public. At any rate, when the speeches began he interrupted
with certain questions about the affairs of the church and made some statements
in defense of his own views. He was set upon by members of the audience and
given a pretty thorough pommeling, receiving among other injuries a broken jaw.
He brought a suit for damages against the association that sponsored the
meeting and against ten named individuals who he alleged were his assailants.
When we came to the trial, the case at first seemed very complicated to me.
The attorneys raised a host of legal issues. There were nice questions on the
admissibility of evidence, and, in connection with the suit against the associa-
tion, some difficult problems turning on the question whether the minister was a
trespasser or a licensee. As a novice on the bench I was eager to apply my law
school learning and I began studying these questions closely, reading all the
authorities and preparing well-documented rulings. As I studied the case I
29
became more and more involved in its legal intricacies and I began to get into a
state approaching that of my brother Tatting in this case. Suddenly, however, it
dawned on me that all these perplexing issues really had nothing to do with the
case, and I began examining it in the light of common sense. The case at once
gained a new perspective, and I saw that the only thing for me to do was to
direct a verdict for the defendants for lack of evidence.
I was led to this conclusion by the following considerations. The melee in
which the plaintiff was ~ured had been a very confused affair, with some people
trying to get to the center of the disturbance, while others were trying to get
away from it; some striking at the plaintiff, while others were apparendy trying to
protect him. It would have taken weeks to fmd out the truth of the matter. I
decided that nobody's broken jaw was worth that much to the Commonwealth.
(fhe minister's injuries, incidentally, had meanwhile healed without disfigure-
ment and without any impairment of normal faculties.) Furthermore, I felt very
strongly that the plaintiff had to a large extent brought the thing on himself He
knew how inflamed passions were about the affair, and could easily have found
another forum for the expression of his views. My decision was widely approved
by the press and public opinion, neither of which could tolerate the views and
practices that the expelled minister was attempting to defend.
Now, thirty years later, thanks to an ambitious Prosecutor and a legalistic jury
foreman, I am faced with a case that raises issues which are at bottom much like
those involved in that case. The world does not seem to change much, except
that this time it is not a question of a judgment for five or six hundred frelars,
but of the life or death of four men who have already suffered more torment and
humiliation than most of us would endure in a thousand years. I conclude that
the defendants are innocent of the crime charged, and that the conviction and
sentence should be set aside.
30
I have been asked by the Chief Justice whether, after listening to the two opin-
ions just rendered, I desire to re-examine the position previously taken by me. I
wish to state that after hearing these opinions I am greatly strengthened in my
conviction that I ought not to participate in the decision of this case.
The Supreme Court being evenly divided, the conviction and sentence of the
Court of General Instances is qffirmed. It is ordered that the execution of the
sentence shall occur at 6 a.m., Friday, April 2, 4300, at which time the Public
Executioner is directed to proceed with all convenient dispatch to hang each of
the defendants by the neck until he is dead.
31
POSTSCRIPT
Now that the court has spoken its judgment, the reader puzzled by the choice of
date may wish to be reminded that the centuries which separate us from the year
4300 are roughly equal to those that have passed since the Age of Pericles. There
is probably no need to observe that the Speluncean Case itself is intended neither as
a work of satire nor as a prediction in any ordinary sense of the term. As for the
judges who make up Chief Justice Truepenny's court, they are, of course, as
mythical as the facts and precedents with which they deal. The reader who
refuses to accept this view, and who seeks to trace out contemporary resem-
blances where none is intended or contemplated, should be warned that he is
engaged in a frolic of his own, which may possibly lead him to miss whatever
modest truths are contained in the opinions delivered by the Supreme Court of
Newgarth. The case was constructed for the sole purpose of bringing into a
common focus certain divergent philosophies of law and government. These
philosophies presented men with live questions of choice in the days of Plato
and Aristotle. Perhaps they will continue to do so when our era has had its
say about them. If there is any element of prediction in the case, it does not
go beyond a suggestion that the questions involved are among the permanent
problems of the human race.
Lon L. Fuller
32
Part II
NINE NEW OPINIONS

In the Supreme Court of Newgarth, 4350
OPINION OF CHIEF JUSTICE
BURNHAM
The world was taken by surprise late last year when an elderly man living alone
in our western wilderness was arrested by provincial police and charged with a
fifty-year-old murder. He did not deny that he and four friends had once killed a
man, but he did deny that their action amounted to murder. He confessed to
being the sixth member of the party of speluncean explorers trapped in a land-
slide fifty years earlier and forced by starvation, as it seemed to them, to kill and
eat one of their companions. Of the five survivors of that tragic adventure, four
were captured, tried, and convicted of murder. They gave no hint at trial that a
living, fifth survivor was then at large or had ever been in the cave with them.
This Court reviewed their conviction, Commonwealth v. Spelunkers (hereafter,
Spelunkers f). An evenly divided Court let the jury conviction stand. The four
defendants were duly executed.
The present defendant has admitted to all the facts established in the trial of
his four comrades. These are ably summarized by Chief Justice Truepenny in
Spelunkers f (at pp. 7f, above). The defendant has refused to elaborate where that
factual record is silent, for example on the mathematical details discussed when
planning the lottery, or the exact method of killing. The only new facts he has
provided pertain to his escape. Interesting as these are, they do not bear on the
question whether he is guilty of murder. Because he absconded from the rescue
camp before he was arrested, he was not charged with escaping custody.
The western provincial prosecutor charged him only with murder and a jury
convicted him.
The murder statute in Newgarth today is identical to the murder statute fifty
years ago: "Whoever shall willfully take the life of another shall be punished by
death," N.C.S.A. (N.S.) §12-A. Indeed, Spelunkers f inspired at least two proposals
to amend this statute, the first to elaborate on what shall count as willfulness and
the second to give judges some discretion to select a fitting punishment. But both
proposals were defeated. Legislators defended the current, and venerable,
murder statute for its stark simplicity. This simplicity, they argued, gives little
support to hair-splitting, and makes it easy for citizens to understand the law and
35
NINE NEW OPINIONS
to apply it to their own conduct. For all these reasons, the statute remains
unmodified. Hence the present defendant was convicted under the same stan-
dard as his comrades, for the same act as his comrades.
He appealed his conviction to the Western Circuit Court of Appeals, which
decided against him, citing Spelunkers I as precedent. He now appeals to us. We
find ourselves, therefore, in the unusual position of ruling on a case factually and
legally identical to one long since closed. The prior case was fully litigated on the
merits, and all appeals were exhausted. These would be good reasons to deny
review in the present case and let the appellate decision stand. But the Court of
Appeals misunderstood the nature and force of the precedent. Spelunkers I is not a
decision upholding the jury conviction; it is a non-decision with no majority and
no two judges in agreement. It did not affirm the guilt of the four defendants; it
failed to find a majority willing to affirm or deny that guilt, with the procedural
effect of leaving the jury verdict undisturbed. The Court of Appeals was
tempted, as we were, to avoid rehearing a case whose disposition has both legal
and historical finality. But by taking Spelunkers I for a decision on the merits with
the force of precedent, the Court of Appeals erred. We took the present case in
part to rectifY that error. We also felt that these important facts deserve a more
authoritative resolution than they received half a century ago. With hope that
contemporary legal theory equips us for such a resolution, better than the
schools of thought responsible for the judicial impasse fifty years ago, we
accepted review. With that hope dashed, we issue our opinions today.
II
Justice Handy concluded Spelunkers I by appeal to public opinion and newspaper

editorials. At that time, ninety per cent of the public wanted the four defendants
acquitted (see p. 26, above). This figure is uncannily like the support enjoyed by
the present defendant today. The public seems to believe that, morally, this is a
simple case; I agree. The five surviving spelunkers did nothing that most good
people would not have done in the same circumstances, but for the fact that most
good people lack the courage and resolution of these five men. Even if the men
did act immorally, it is hard to fmd a moral justification for executing them. If
we condemn them for killing one man to save five, how can we justifY killing ten
workmen to bring them to trial in order only to kill them as well? The life of the
fIfth, before us today, is no easier to take than those of his companions.
But the public can be forgiven for thinking only of the morality of the case;
we cannot. We must discover what the law requires.
Writing in Spelunkers I, Justices Truepenny and Keen argued that, legally, this
is a simple case; I agree with this position as well. The spelunkers killed
Whetmore willfully. There is no way to read the facts of this case and come to
any other conclusion. The killing was premeditated. The method of selecting the
victim was the object of a lengthy discussion. Every step was intentional. If at
36
OPINION OF CHIEF JUSTICE BURNHAM
the last moment before his killers-to-be could crush his skull, Whetmore had
stumbled, pitching head-first into a rock, and so had died, then surely the
surviving spelunkers would have said so at trial. They could have said so anyway.
The claim would have been suspicious but irrefutable. But, on the contrary, they
introduced no evidence whatsoever to negate the conclusion that they voluntarily
and intentionally killed Roger Whetmore.
So the case is an easy one morally and legally. Unfortunately, the morally easy
verdict is acquittal and the legally easy verdict is conviction. This contradiction
explains all the agony my colleagues display in their lengthy opinions.
But there is no need for agony or even length. We are justices of the Supreme
Court who have taken oaths to interpret, apply, and uphold the laws of the
Commonwealth of Newgarth. While the law is often unclear, the meaning of
our oath is clear. When law and morality conflict, judges in their role as judges
must follow the law. Judges in their role as citizens are free to do many other
things, such as petition the executive for clemency, lobby the legislature for
reform, criticize the prosecutor, second-guess the jury, write angry letters to the
editor, kick the cat. As judges, we must follow the law. Since legally this is an easy
case, deciding where our duty lies is equally easy. The previous defendants were
guilty of murder; the present defendant is guilty of murder.
III
In short, I agree entirely with Justice Keen. However, Keen did not answer every
objection raised by the defense at trial. The prosecutor tried, but the job can be
done more systematically.
The defendant offers many objections to the holding of willful murder. While
these objections have a legal color, they do not in my view have a legal origin. I
believe they originate in legally irrelevant feelings of sympathy and personal
views of morality.
I have above summarized the case for holding the killing of Whetmore to be
willful. This seems to me overwhelming. Indeed, I am convinced that if an
equally strong argument for willfulness appeared in another murder case where
it was unopposed by legally irrelevant feelings of sympathy or personal views of
morality, then every judge and every citizen in the land would find the defendant
guilty in an instant.
For example, imagine a killer who undoubtedly lacks evil will, but who
undoubtedly possesses intention, voluntariness, and premeditation, like these
spelunkers. Imagine such a killer for whom we have no irrelevant feelings of
personal sympathy. Imagine a rich man who learns by his car telephone about
an exciting party one mile away. He is not dressed properly and has no time to
go home or to purchase proper attire. So he cruises the street on which he finds
himself until he sees a man his own size wearing a swank blazer and really
elegant tie. He asks his chauffeur to pull over, and together they haul the man
37
NINE NEW OPINIONS
into the car, remove his coat and tie, and slice his throat with the sharp edge of
an empty caviar can from the litter basket. Would anyone doubt that this killing
is willfol? No. But if this killer possesses intention without ill-will, like the
spelunkers, then the only reason we would convict him and acquit the spelunkers
is a feeling of sympathy for the poor spelunkers, a feeling that may be common,
natural, and admirable, but that has no authority whatsoever under our law.
However irrelevant these feelings may be, they have motivated many good
lawyers to seek relevant legal objections to the otherwise conclusive case for will-
fulness. So while they are frivolous and tortured, these objections should be
answered briefly for the record.
The present defendant, like his comrades before him, appeals primarily to
what has been called the defense of necessity. He claims that necessity forced his
hand. He claims further, that if so, then his act was not willfol in the legal sense
of that term. The statute tells us, of course, that if his act was not willful, then it
was not murder. Let us examine these claims more closely.
I. If I can violate the law with impunity provided I claim that necessity forced
my hand, then I can do whatever I wish. So can everyone else. The result is the
direct and total subversion of the rule of law. If the necessity defense is to have
legal force, then it must be severely restricted. At least the defendants who
employ it must do more than claim necessity. They must do more, even, than
show their belief in necessity to have been genuine or sincere. They must show
that their belief in necessity was reasonable in the circumstances. They must
show that there was an objective basis to believe that no other options were open
to them.
I will grant that these spelunkers did believe that killing one of their friends
was necessary. It is hard to imagine why they would kill a friend in the absence of
such a belief However, this was not a reasonable belief in the circumstances.
Whetmore wanted to wait another week before killing anyone. If he thought
they could last another week, even if he was mistaken, then the men could not
have been pinched by true necessity on the day of the killing. Just as a single
hold-out on a jury saves the defendant and triggers a mistrial, perhaps showing
the existence of reasonable doubt, one starving spelunker willing to wait another
week condemns the defendant and clinches the prosecution, showing that it is
not reasonable to believe that immediate homicide is necessary for survival.
2. Even if the spelunkers did have a reasonable belief that killing one of their
party was necessary, our decision in Commonwealth v. Jiaijean overturns their argu-
ment. We have long settled the question whether starvation counts as necessity; it
does not. If a man cannot commit the relatively harmless act of stealing bread to
avert starvation, then surely we cannot tolerate intentional homicide and canni-
balism to avert starvation.
3. Even if starvation were the sort of necessity our law could recognize, and
even if the spelunkers had a reasonable belief that it was imminent, they had a
duty to mitigate. That is, they had a duty to try any expedient less grave than
killing before actually killing. They could, for example, have waited for the first
38
of them to die of starvation and eaten that one. That would have made killing
entirely unnecessary. They could even have eaten their fingers, toes, and ear
lobes, or drunk their blood. If they began by eating their smallest toes, for
example, they could easily staunch the flow of blood with a tourniquet. The
usual objection to a tourniquet - that it entails the loss of the extremity - is irrel-
evant if they would eat the extremity in any case, or if they would die without
such a recourse. Such snacks would have given the spelunkers sustenance for
several days, perhaps even to the tenth day after radio contact when the rescuers
predicted success. At least the men could have asked the medical experts by
radio whether such snacks could have helped them to live long enough to be
rescued. At least they could have lasted a few days longer, perhaps to the point of
genuine necessity.
Note that there are at least four alternatives to killing: (1) waiting for the
weakest to die of natural causes, (2) eating inessential extremities, (3) trying the
radio again, and (4) waiting a few more days. Of these, the suggestion that they
eat parts of themselves is admittedly grotesque and ghastly; but when the alter-
native is killing a man, it becomes not only sensible, but obligatory. If the
necessity defense means anything, it means that circumstances gave them no
option less evil than the one they chose. These men were in no such situation on
the day they killed Roger Whetmore.
4. Even if they had no duty to try less horrifying expedients before more
horrifying ones, the necessity defense cannot be used by those for whom the
danger or necessity arises from their own choice. These men assumed the risk of
a landslide. Why else leave instructions with their club to come looking for them
if they did not return by a certain date? Why else take a radio? They knew that
the sport of cave exploration was dangerous and they made a free choice to
expose themselves to its risks. They are to be pitied when the risks overtake them,
but they have no legal complaint. They cannot take advantage of the danger
they voluntarily faced in order to kill a man.
5. Even if they did not assume the risk of a landslide, they negligently
brought too few provisions to meet the risk of a landslide. This is proved by the
outcome. They knew the cave contained no animal or vegetable matter, yet they
carried "only scant provisions" (see p. 7, above). We cannot blame them for the
act of God that imprisoned them. But we can blame them for failing to equip
themselves sufficiently to meet the risks they knew or should have known were
inherent in their perilous sport.
6. Even if they are entitled to a full necessity defense, the victim must be
chosen fairly. In this case the method of selection was the lottery to which they
all at first consented. We do not know the mathematical details of the lottery on
which they spent so much time. But clearly the time was well spent in the sense
that they devised a method that won the consent of every member to a horri-
fYing prospect. However, before the dice were thrown, Whetmore revoked his
consent. His reason (as we noted above) was that he thought the lottery was not
yet strictly necessary. While Whetmore's reason for revoking his consent cuts
39
NINE NEW OPINIONS
against the necessity defense, his revocation itself, even if groundless or irra-
tional, undermines the fairness of the selection process. When the selection
method is unfair, then the overall d8fense collapses, even if the necessity compo-
nent stands. Imagine a case with the same necessity as the present case; would
we acquit the defendants if they had abandoned any attempt to pick a victim
fairly, fell back instead on their racial animosities, and killed the one Euro-
Newgarthian or Jew among them? Clearly not.
That is the end of the necessity defense in this case. It has not a leg to
stand on.
IV
More than one of my colleagues has tried to replace the letter of the murder
statute with its spirit, or to put the statute aside in order to fulfIll its purpose.
While our duty as judges requires us to interpret law, it does not permit us to
remake clear law that we don't like and to call that act of usurpation "interpreta-
tion."
Under Fehler, we may remake a statute to correct an obvious typographical
error. But that sound precedent cannot be stretched to acquit these spelunkers.
In Fehler, the purpose of the statute was very clear; hence it served as a good
guide to the proper reading of its corrupted language. In this case, as the
disagreement of my colleagues proves, the purpose of our murder statute is not
at all clear. It is either deterrence (Parry) or retribution (Scape) or rehabilitation
(Makeover). We cannot build the edifice of law on such quicksand. Hence, we
must live with the plain meaning of the statute and not refashion it to suit our
tastes by appeal to controversial theories about its purpose.
Justice Tatting has argued that those who act to repel an aggressor do not act
"willfully" because their response is rooted in a natural instinct (at p. 17, above).
He does not apply this analysis to the spelunkers, because they obviously acted
willfully, but he has nevertheless divined that the purpose of our murder statute
is consonant with with human instinct. Similarly, Justice Foster admits that "self-
defense cannot be reconciled with the words of the statute, but only with its
purpose" (at p. 13, above), and argues that the same purpose that supports self-
defense supports the present sort of killing. The trouble with these arguments is
that they license judges to speculate on the purposes of our laws and to draw
conclusions from their speculations. There is no quicker way to unleash judges
from the law and turn them loose to follow their personal opinions. The true
reason why self-defense is a recognized exception to the murder statute, when the
statute contains no words to recognize it, is that it was so recognized by all legis-
lators, judges, and citizens at the time the statute was framed and adopted. It was
no part of the original legislative intent to alter such an ancient and universal
rule; if it were, the legislature knew how to make its desire unmistakable.
Similarly, we need no tortured argument about willfulness to show that capital
40
punishment is compatible with our murder statute; it is compatible because, like

self-defense, it was lawful and commonplace at the time our statute was adopted.
We have heard that the murder statute makes an exception for human
instinct, or that necessity negates willfulness. When my colleagues make asser-
tions of this kind about what our statute means, I'm sure they think they are
speaking sensibly. But I do not know how a statute can mean anything other than
what its words commonly mean to ordinary speakers of that language. If ordi-
nary speakers disagree on what certain words mean, then we might ask what the
author of those words meant by them. But we do not ask judges as if they were a
distinct and independent authority on meaning.
The plain meaning of the words in our murder statute does not support any
speculation about an exception for human instinct or the exculpatory effect of
necessity. And I am quite sure that the legislators who drafted and adopted that
statute, and the executive who signed it into law, never had such legal niceties in
their minds. Self-defense and lawful execution, by contrast, were without doubt
in the minds of them all.
The legislative branch of government deserves our respect, but not always
our admiration. All too rarely does it contain a soul with any detailed knowledge
or deep concern about the criminal law and its underlying moral questions. The
non-lawyers in the legislature surely never trouble themselves with human
instinct, necessity, or mens rea. The lawyers there are mostly practitioners of civil
and corporate law, whose fortunes have enabled them to run successfully for
office; their knowledge of criminal law is limited to the one course they were
forced to take in law school. The few with criminal law training are usually pros-
ecutors whose fame in prosecuting corrupt politicians catapulted them into the
legislature. Their professional interest in criminal law is to find strategies to put
targeted defendants behind bars, not to think deeply about the moral principles
that underlie, or ought to underlie, our methods for ascertaining criminal respon-
sibility. As prosecutors, they had no need to justify the willfulness requirement in
the murder statute or to explain its rationale; they had only to persuade a jury
that an evildoer was willful. Moreover, even those with some reflective concern
about the principles of our criminal law are asked to vote for, or against, an
omnibus crime bill of stupendous size, far too long for any but ')ailhouse
lawyers" to read in its entirety. And at least half of these votes are extracted by
party leadership, pressured by lobbyist inducements, or traded for reciprocating
votes from other legislators on other bills, and need not reflect the legislator's
own views, if indeed the legislator has views on the bill. In short, the original
intent of this statute is nothing nearly as sophisticated as my colleagues have
made out. On the contrary, the non-specialists who happened to have a vote on
legislation were probably told by the specialists on their staffs that the word
"willful" was a good idea in the statute to sort out the kinds of killers we wish to
punish from those we do not.
Moreover, of course, even if all legislators understood the language on which
they voted, and had conscientious views on its underlying policies and principles
41
NINE NEW OPINIONS
- and voted by their consciences - their divisions and disagreements prevent us

from saying that "the legislature" had any single intent. And even if it acted
unanimously, should we also consult the intent of every subsequent legislature
that had the power to revise or repeal the statute but chose not to do so?
These arguments lead us to follow the plain meaning of words like "willful"
rather than the most recent, most sophisticated theory to be found in our
academic law journals. If anyone should point out that the original intent of the
legislature and the plain meaning of its words might conflict, I will concede the
point at once. But the alternative cannot be to put legislative intent and plain
meaning aside in favor of the visions most appealing to the personal tastes or
moral opinions of a judge.
I have argued that moral principles underlie the law, but at the same time I
have argued that judges should regard law and morality as independent. If I
have been overly concise, then one qualification should make the compatibility of
these claims clear: law and morality are inseparable for the legislature, indepen-
dent for the judiciary. The legislature has moral motives when it prohibits
murder; it thinks murder is wrong and prohibits it because it is wrong. No one
doubts this or wants it any other way. Judges, however, hold no license from the
people to enforce their own moral views. Their job is to interpret the words of
the legislature, which reflect the moral views of the legislature, which reflect
something like the moral views of the people.
We interpret the words of a statute according to their plain meaning, as ordi-
nary citizens and jurors might understand them, and resolve difficulties in light
of historical practices at the time the statute was adopted, including the intent of
its authors if that is clearly known. This is the only recipe human beings have
ever found for constraining themselves to apply law, and to avoid exercising a
despotic power beyond law.
v
I remind my brethren of three excellent reasons not to overrule law in the name
of morality or to blend law and morality in the naine of interpretation. The first
is that we are appointed for life. Hence we are entirely insulated from the polit-
ical process; we are not accountable to the people. Hence we should be the last
officials in this government to make decisions based on policy or any of its
tempting surrogates, such as morality or justice. The only reason we are insu-
lated from the political process is to allow us to follow the law when that proves
politically difficult. Because the legally easy verdict in this case is politically diffi-
cult to pronounce, it could not be a clearer call to duty for us.
The second reason is that when previous justices of this Court showed an
insolent tendency to make judgments in which personal views of morality
displaced or diluted the law of the land, the people rebelled (Keen at p. 21,
above). The ensuing civil war devastated the Commonwealth by its many
42
atrocities on both sides; we will never regain our innocence. Even if the proper
role of a judge was unclear before the civil war, it should be very clear now.
The third reason is that we live in a pluralistic society. Those who ask us to
put the law aside in the name of justice evidendy assume that our private notions
of justice agree with theirs. If we made it a rule to put the law aside to enforce
our private notions of justice, then we would offend and oppress all those citizens
whose moral opinions differed from our own. There might even be some excuse
for this in a homogeneous society in which law itself differed litde from popular
morality, and those offended by judicial legislation were the same as those
offended by legislative legislation. But we live in a pluralistic society. This means
that our disagreements on moral questions are real, not merely apparent, and
are deep, not superficial. It also means that we have reached a meta-level agree-
ment that no one of these many contending views is privileged over the others
for the purposes of law and government. One of these views may temporarily
dominate our political life if its proponents become a numerical majority and
use the ballot box intelligendy. But, again, we have reached a meta-level agree-
ment that in principle every numerical minority may become a numerical
majority. So though we elect legislators by counting votes, we do not give citizens
with "morally superior" views more than one vote. To live in a pluralistic society
means that no view may for any official purpose be regarded as morally superior
to any other. But if this is so, I could only put the law aside in the name of justice
if I were willing to tyrannize over those who differed from me on the require-
ments of justice. If the people as a whole speak through the law, then to put the
law aside in the name of justice is to thwart the people in the name of the
favored sub-group that thinks like the judge. In that sense, appeals to justice
beyond law are elitist attempts to subvert democracy, and are most dangerous
when we are most tempted to agree with them. As long as we take pains to let all
views be heard in the law-making process, which we do, then the only way to
preserve peace and tranquillity, even justice, in a pluralistic society is to uphold
the law, and never to put it aside in favor of moral or political views endorsed by
only one faction, sect, or bloc.
In the absence of these three reasons, one would act well and wisely to favor
the morally compelling verdict over the legally compelling verdict when the two
differed. But these three reasons force the opposite conclusion. An old joke
among our law students has it that if you wish to study justice, you ought quit the
Law School and register in the Philosophy Department or Divinity School. This
is supposed to be funny, I suppose, or to put our profession in a bad light. I never
understood it that way. Law differs from ideal justice in many things, but one
point of difference is that law reflects the vision of ideal justice that a particular
people at a particular time has agreed shall govern them, and to secure this
agreement many compromises from each person's private ideal must be
accepted.
But to those morally impatient idealists who misunderstand the place of law
in human affairs, who seek justice above and beyond the law, and who place
43
NINE NEW OPINIONS
their own visions of justice above the compromises produced by the democratic
process, I may add, finally, that law itself contains a solution to the problem. The
purpose of executive clemency (in John Locke's words) is to mitigate the rigors of
the law. If our law is clear but unduly harsh, then judges ought to do what the
law clearly requires, because it is the law, and the executive ought to consider
clemency because the law is unduly harsh. Obviously, to say this is not at all to
shift responsibility to the executive in the way that Justice Foster criticized Justice
Truepenny for proposing (at p. lO, above). On the contrary, it is a way of taking
responsibility as a judge for a verdict that is required by law regardless of its
harshness.
I vote to uphold the conviction.
OPINION OF JUSTICE
SPRINGHAM
Nothing in the opinions of Spelunkers I surprises me except the insistence that this
case is simple. Justices Truepenny and Keen believe it obvious that the four orig-
inal defendants willfully killed Roger Whetmore. In the present case Justice
Burnham agrees as to the fifth defendant. Foster and Handy appeal to different
grounds to acquit the men but agree that acquittal is the only obvious course for
a court of law. What is obvious to me is that this is a hard case. Justice Tatting
understood that, but couldn't live up to his understanding. Hard cases have
answers, just as easy ones do, although they impose greater duties of care and
scrupulosity on judges and do not guarantee that conscientious judges will agree.
They are not excuses to appeal to one's private moral convictions, as Foster and
Handy do in the end. They are not excuses to shut one's eyes to the complexity
of law that makes one's oath of office difficult to fulfill, as Truepenny and Keen
do in the end. They are not excuses to oversimplifY the relationship between law
and morality, as Burnham does. Nor are they excuses to find a tie and give up, as
Tatting does.
Under the laws of the state of Newgarth, the spelunkers committed no
murder. Hence I vote to overturn the conviction of the defendant. I emphasize
that he is not acquitted by abstract justice, reason, common sense, natural law,
popular morality, or opinion polls, but by the positive law of Newgarth, particu-
larly the statute defining murder and the precedents interpreting it.
I detect in the opinions of my colleagues an oversimple opposition between
cases in which judgment is forced (because the law is clear) and cases in which
discretion is necessary or extra-legal considerations permissible (because the law
is not clear). However, when I say that this is above all a hard case, I do not
mean to permit appeal to discretion or extra-legal considerations.
I am encouraged that, to a person, the justices in Spelunkers I did not think
they were free to use discretion. Truepenny and Keen uphold the conviction with
regret; if they thought they had discretion, presumably they would have decided
the other way. In the present case, Burnham takes a similar stand. If Tatting
thought he had discretion, he could easily have found a personal basis for tilting
45
NINE NEW OPINIONS
the balance that he could not tilt in any other way. Foster uses two ingenious
arguments and Handy appeals to public opinion; even if they are mistaken,
these are standards rather than free uses of discretion. Because we are not free to
use our discretion, we must investigate what the law requires. Because this is a
hard case, we expect that this investigation will in turn be hard, perhaps
Herculean; hence we must be resolute in respecting the complexity of law and
sensitive to the slightest nuances of principle.
II
The defendant was convicted of murder, so we must begin with the murder
statute. It requires us to punish him if he killed willfully. He admits that he
participated with his four comrades in the killing of Roger Whetmore. The only
question, then, is whether they killed him willfully.
One reason that this is a hard case is that these facts prevent us from reaching
a stable conclusion using our customary notions of willfulness. The spelunkers
clearly planned to kill someone. They spent a good deal of time discussing the
mathematics of their lottery. The point of the lottery was to select a victim to
kill. They did not select Whetmore deliberately, but they did employ a lottery
deliberately, and they did intend to kill the person it selected. Whetmore was not
selected or killed by a bolt of lightning. His comrades killed him intentionally,
not accidentally. They killed as the result of a prior plan, not provocation or
blind impulse. They did not even attempt an insanity defense at trial. And as
Burnham points out, they did not claim that Whetmore died of natural causes or
accident before they could kill him. All this argues in favor of finding willfulness.
But they had no ill-will. While they did not kill from a blind impulse, they did
kill from the motive of self-preservation. Justice Tatting notes that killing in self-
defense is not willful in the legal sense of the term because it proceeds from an
impulse of self-preservation that is "deeply ingrained" in our nature (at p. 17,
above). If calm, open-eyed self-defense is not willful, then this act is not willful;
we can agree on this even if we do not consider this to be a case of self-defense
(and I do not). Similarly, while these men chose to kill, they could not have
chosen otherwise without choosing death for themselves. They had no reason-
able options; that is what we mean when we say they found themselves in dire or
exigent circumstances. It is what we mean when we say they killed from "neces-
sity" (which I will explore below). All this argues against finding willfulness.
Normally the intention to kill implies the existence of other more reasonable
options that the law requires one to choose instead of killing. Normally premedi-
tation implies evil will. Normally lack of impulse implies culpable clarity of
mind. But this killing upsets all these expectations. The many senses of the word
"willful" divide on these facts. These men acted from premeditation and inten-
tion; but they did not act from ill-will, and they lacked rrums rea for the same
reason that self-defenders do.
46
OPINION OF JUSTICE SPRING HAM
If the word "willful" supports and subverts both sides in this case, it does not
follow that the word "willful" is useless as a standard for our decision. Nor does it
follow that law has here come to an end like a trail of breadcrumbs in the forest,
and that we must proceed from this point without guidance from law. We cannot
decide whatever we please. We may subjectively be torn by conflicting principles
and feel deep uncertainty. But we have no grounds to believe that our subjective
uncertainty reflects an objective indeterminacy of the law, and hence no grounds
to surrender to the difficulties of this case by appeal to unfettered discretion,
"self-evident justice" or "the spirit of the law" beyond the letter.
The proper way to decide whether this killing was willful in the relevant sense is
to examine the other cases of this Court in which the word "willful" was inter-
preted. For example, if mercy killing is willful, then premeditation would seem to
count for more than lack of ill-will. If a tire manufacturer is found "willful" in
the death of a person in an automobile accident caused by a defective tire it
knowingly sold, then the availability of reasonable alternative courses of conduct
would seem to count for more than the absence of impulse. And so on. But
unfortunately, the precedents on this point are unavailable to us. *
Since we presume innocence until guilt is proved, and require guilt in a crim-
inal case to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, we should resolve all these
doubts in favor of the defendant. This unimpeachable rule of procedure requires
that we acquit the defendant. But suppose this rule never existed.
III
Another way to resolve these doubts that is more satisfactory, because it requires
us to look closely at the law of our Commonwealth, is to consider that the word
* The members of the Supreme Court were obliged to write their opinions in the present case
during the so-called "product recall" of Nomos Information Systems. Nomos publishes the
statutes and cases of our Commonwealth in electronic form, and has done so with such success
that it has driven all rivals from the field. Indeed, the Commonwealth Publishing Office stopped
publishing its own version of our laws nearly half a century ago in a short-sighted move to
reduce the costs of government. Nomos is now engaged in litigation with a group of professional
legal associations who seek to open the electronic fIles of our law to the public without charge.
Nomos claims a copyright on its version of the laws, based on its pagination scheme and the
scholarly apparatus it has mixed with the texts. To exert pressure in the long-running settlement
talks, Nomos has taken its fIles omine. While no one should believe that the Commonwealth has
accepted this impediment to justice with acquiescence, pressure from the three branches of
government has so far been unavailing. Consequently, for the time being, not even the Supreme
Court has access to most of the cases decided in the last fifty years.
In Commonwealth v. Runes, decided shortly after the recall began, we held (I) that the courts of
Newgarth, including this Court, cannot cease to decide cases during the product recall, and (2)
that it would be improper for any court, including this Court, to cite cases for which it has no
authoritative text. This dilemma will require different solutions in different cases. Runes itself, like
the other cases decided since the recall began, is available for citation because we still have the
text in hand.
47
NINE NEW OPINIONS
"willful" in the murder statute functions to express the requirement of mens rea or
"guilty mind." Without it we would punish every person who caused the death of
another, regardless of the defendant's state of mind at the time; we would never
distinguish murder from other homicides. The mens rea requirement forces us to
acquit those who lack the requisite mental state - for example, young children,
the severely retarded, the temporarily insane, and those otherwise competent
adults who are under the temporary sway of passion, provocation, or special
kinds of ignorance or mistake. If we could look at the history of Newgarth
precedents interpreting the word "willful" we would not find dictionary defini-
tions aimed at capturing the usage of the speakers of our language, or historical
excavations of our legislative proceedings aimed at capturing the intent of our
long-dead legislators, but legal definitions aimed at capturing the principle or
concept of mens rea.
In the absence of those precedents we are no worse off than we would be if
those precedents were inconsistent. And we often find ourselves in such an adju-
dicative impasse. Facing such an obstacle, adjudication returns to its roots in
moral and political philosophy. The word "willful" does not designate what our
historical legislators actually had in their minds at the time they voted on the
statute, let alone what the lay person on the streets of New York imagines the
word to mean, as Burnham suggests. Burnham shows well, though perhaps unin-
tentionally, what a morass of confusion would underlie our law if those divergent
and jumbled thoughts were to replace, or even supplement, our canons of inter-
pretation. Instead, the word "willful" designates the concept if willfolness. Our job
is to interpret that concept, acknowledging that we can do no better than to
approach it through our own individual conceptions. But there is no other way.
Even the "plain meaning" of the word invites us to meditate on that concept,
not to unearth the diaries of our ancestors or poll the citizens on the street.
Burnham's fear that this exercise frees judges from the fetters of law is so
palpably misguided that one suspects it is facetious. Our job is to interpret the
concept designated by the legislature, a strong and public constraint; our job is
not to interpret our own preferences or to replace the legislature's concept with
one we like better. This is the very opposite of license or discretion.
N ewgarth recognizes necessity as a general defense to criminal charges. This

is clear both from Staymore and the ancient, nameless precedent that first recog-
nized the exception for self-defense. Both the murder statute and the parking
ordinance in Stqymore are silent on the necessity defense, and indeed taken liter-
ally exclude this defense. We may go further: Newgarth has no statutory
necessity defense. But this fact does not imply that the necessity defense is not
recognized in our law or is incompatible with the moral principles of our civi-
lization; and it certainly has not stopped our courts from acquitting defendants
on the grounds of necessity, with the acceptance of the community. Those cases
now comprise precedents under which we must interpret the word "willful" and
the silence of the murder statute on excuses and justifications.
The legal principle embodied in the necessity defense is that people who
48
commit crimes from necessity lack mens rea or criminal intent and should not be
punished. The question of willfulness, then, reduces to the question of necessity.
If the spelunkers killed from necessity, then they lacked criminal intent, or did
not kill willfully in the relevant sense, and should be acquitted.
Moreover, the spelunkers did kill from necessity. The alternative was to die,
which is the strongest kind of necessity.
Justice Burnham has usefully compiled six objections to the claim of necessity
here (at pp. 38f, above), although he capitulates to them far too quickly. Let us
consider these six objections in order.
1. Were the spelunkers sure they would die? To put this in other terms, was
their belief in necessity a reasonable belief in the circumstances? Burnham is
right that good faith belief in necessity, without reasonableness, is not enough;
for then we would live in a crank's anarchy, at the mercy of the false, foolish, and
unfounded but still sincere beliefs in the necessity of violating criminal laws held
by every lunatic. Since the necessity defense puts us at risk of losing the rule of
law, we must examine closely the reasonableness of the belief in its existence.
The answer is fortunately clear in this case. The spelunkers had already been
imprisoned in their cave for twenty days when finally reached by radio. They
had expert opinion from the engineers supervising the rescue that they could not
be freed for at least ten more days. They had expert opinion from physicians on
the scene that there was "little possibility" that they could live ten additional days
without food (see p. 8, above). They had expert opinion from the same physicians
that they could live at least ten days longer if they ate one of their companions
(see p. 8, above). They asked for expert legal and moral opinion on the possibility
of killing a member of their party for food, and were given nothing but silence.
It is offensive to second-guess the actions of starving men trapped under the
earth. But in this case it is crystal clear that their belief in the necessity of
desperate action was reasonable in the circumstances. It was grounded not in
self-serving predictions of their longevity, clouded by weakness and panic; it was
grounded in expert opinion. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a case in which men
might be forced to kill and eat a companion on better information.
Justice Burnham points out that Whetrnore was willing to wait another week.
This is true but does not mean that Whetmore's opinion was true, that it was
more reasonable than the opinions of his killers, or even that it was reasonable at
all. His hesitation could well be explained by queasiness and fear. The spelunkers
had to choose whether to believe Whetrnore or the engineers and doctors on the
radio. Given that choice, they acted most reasonably.
2. Despite the strong case for necessity, the prosecution objects that Vaijean
means that starvation is not a legally recognized kind of necessity. We reject this
reading. In Vaijean, a man stole a loaf of bread from hunger, pleaded necessity,
and was convicted. There are many grounds for distinguishing Vaijean from the
facts of our case. First, Valjean might not have been starving. We don't know the
extremity of his hunger; therefore we don't know the extremity of his necessity.
Second, even if Valjean were starving, he did not have the same expert opinion
49
NINE NEW OPINIONS
to support his belief in necessity. The spelunkers had much better proof of these
crucial facts. Third, Valjean had several options open to him other than crime.
We will not insult his desperation by telling him he could have found a job.
However, begging is not against the laws of Newgarth. Many churches and
secular charities feed the poor. Demeaning as he might have found these reme-
dies, they were freely available to him. The spelunkers in the cave did not have
options nearly as attractive open to them. So we read Vaijean to deny the neces-
sity defense to a man with enough options available to him to negate his claim of
necessity; it does not deny the existence of the necessity defense per se or deny
that starvation could count as necessity.
3. The prosecution argues further that the spelunkers may have had fewer
attractive options than Jean Valjean, but they had more than one. As long as no
one of them was volunteering to commit suicide, they could have eaten their
own fingers and toes, for example. They could also have waited for the first of
them to die of starvation. This is clearly a painful course, but it would allow
them to avoid murder. They would all be very much weakened by the time the
first of them died, unless one were very much weaker than the others from the
start. But their inability to "dig in" or take energetic advantage of the first
natural death among them is not an argument. They had an obligation to try
everything short of killing before they tried killing, especially if they are to claim
that they killed "from necessity."
This argument is strong but it can be answered. If the spelunkers reasonably
believed that they would be rescued at any time, then they should have begun
with "snacks" and "feasted" only when their snacks ran out. But they had expert
opinion that they could not be rescued for at least ten days. It is not reasonable
to believe that an already starving man could live ten days on the nutritional
equivalent of a dessert plate of ladies' fingers. In light of their expert informa-
tion, they would have had to eat something more substantial like arms or legs.
But again, why not? Is that not better than to kill? Here we begin second-
guessing the wisdom of men whose desperate situation we can scarcely imagine.
Would it be better to die or to be tortured for a week or more by having a limb
or two gnawed off without anaesthetic? The same question applies to torture in
the form of death by starvation. Here the benefit of the doubt belongs to the
men who were left to choose their method of suffering.

The objection raises the problem of proportionality. We say that killing in
self-defense, for example, is killing from necessity and hence justified. But the
killing must be proportional to the harm threatened, or to the harm one reason-
ably believes to be threatened. So one may not kill a bully who kicks sand in
one's face, or a rival at checkers who is about to win. But at the edge, when it is
unclear whether death is threatened, we give the benefit of the doubt to the self-
defender, as here we must give it to the self-preserver. So, for example, one may
kill a maniac who is punching one with his fists. One may kill an unknown
person climbing into one's bedroom window at night even without waiting for
the general threat to become more specific. Much more may be reasonable to
50
the person in peril than is reasonable to the prosecutor using hindsight. Our
standard is to ask whether the defendant had a reasonable belief in the necessity.
This requires us to use his own standpoint, as vicarious as it is for us and as
unimaginative as we may be.
We admit the proportionality requirement on the necessity defense, of course.
But we deny that it requires these spelunkers to humor the prosecution with inef-
fectual snacks or to suffer torture before facing the necessity to kill. Even the
proportionality requirement in cases of self-defense gives the benefit of the
doubt to the person in peril and refuses to judge the reasonableness of his belief
by the standards of calm, well-fed, well-protected, long-thinking persons who are
secure in the warm arms of civilization and are exercising hindsight.
4. Again, the prosecution argues that the necessity defense is not available to
those for whom the necessity arises as the result of their own choice or negli-
gence. Otherwise we would have to acquit the cunning cannibal who
intentionally locks himself and a hapless captive in an abandoned bank vault
unknown to the rest of the world, waits until they are hungry, and then kills his
companion for food. These men knew that spelunking was a risky sport. They
took a radio; they told the secretary of their society where and when they
planned to emerge from the cave so that a rescue could be commenced if they
were trapped. They assumed the risk of their adventure willingly. Indeed, facing
risk is part of the exhilaration of the sport. When they lose their gamble, can
they use their misfortune to excuse their crime?
I answer that they did not choose to be buried in a landslide; nor did they
become buried through their own negligence. They did indeed pursue a risky
sport from free choice. But that does not mean the necessity of their ultimate
condition can be traced to their choice or negligence. If we thought otherwise,
we would have to deny the necessity defense to those who destroy private prop-
erty, like the windows belonging to their landlord, when escaping from a burning
house, on the ground that they "assumed the risk" of living in a wooden
building. The absurdity of such an argument shows that we may take many risks
without forfeiting a necessity defense when the predicament we risked unhappily
materializes.
But shouldn't we deny the necessity defense to tluse men whose risk was espe-
cially remote from routine risks of life and travel? This argument would be
stronger if the men knowingly entered a cave susceptible to an imminent land-
slide, or if the thrill of surviving a landslide were one of the excitements they
craved as sportsmen. But there is no evidence to support these conjectures.
5. The prosecution can shift the objection. The men could have taken extra
provisions. That does not make them negligent in becoming buried by a land-
slide, but it does make them negligent in becoming pinched by the necessity to
kill a companion for food. They were not negligent in pursuing a risky sport, but
in doing so with insufficient provisions.
This argument is attractive at first glance, but its weakness is soon apparent.
What if the men had taken ever so many provisions? It is still possible that the
51
NINE NEW OPINIONS
extent of the landslide or difficulty of the rescue could have outflanked their
foresight. No matter how careful they were, hence no matter how little they were
negligent, we can still imagine that the necessity of killing a companion for food
could arise.
Did these men bring a reasonable amount of extra food to face the risks they
freely assumed? I think so. They had enough to allow six men to survive twenty-
three days after the landslide and an unknown time before the landslide. We do
not know how long they planned to live on their provisions, but they did live on
them for twenty-three days longer than they planned to. Those who have carried
food on their backs into the wilderness know that twenty-three days' worth is
barely hoistable. In the absence of reliable facts as to their original plans, we
must find their provisions adequate to acquit them of negligence.
Here I must pause to consider an insidious tendency in Justice Burnham's
arguments. What if the spelunkers had taken six months' worth of food beyond
their planned needs, simply as insurance against a landslide? Burnham would
use that fact to argue that they had "assumed the risk" of a landslide. He used
the spelunkers' other precautions against them in just this way, inferring assump-
tion of risk from the fact that they carried a radio and arranged for the secretary
of their society to initiate a rescue if they did not return by a certain date.
Burnham cannot have it both ways. If the spelunkers had not carried a radio,
or had not arranged with the secretary of their society to be rescued, he would be
the first to accuse them of negligence, and the first to use it against them in
denying their necessity defense. But if those who take precautions assume the
risk, and those who take no precautions are negligent, then nobody deserves a
necessity defense. This is Burnham's argument in a nutshell. Nobody deserves a
necessity defense. The plain meaning of the statute excludes it, and our unso-
phisticated legislators never dreamt of it; there is no necessity defense. This
radical position underlies all his bluster about the rule of law standing in jeop-
ardy. His argument, however, is more convenient than persuasive; for as he well
knows, from Staymore, which he cites himself, the case law of our Commonwealth
does recognize a necessity defense. Moreover, cases upholding the necessity
defense in various branches of law were routinely decided at the time of the
adoption of our murder statute, to use a criterion close to Burnham's heart.

6. Even if these men were under a true necessity to kill, the objection goes,
their method of selecting Whetmore to die was unfair. Whetmore consented to
hold a lottery but then revoked his consent. He acquiesced in the fairness of his
toss of the dice, but not to the fairness of selecting anyone by lot to die. So in the
last analysis he was coerced, just like the victim of a street murder.
Or so Justice Burnham argues. But if a random lottery is a fair method to
select a victim (assuming it is necessary to select a victim), then the victim's
consent is irrelevant. This fact dispels great clouds of confusion that have
dimmed the vision of my colleagues. They worry whether the spelunkers' several
consents to the pact gave the pact legal standing. They worry that Whetmore's
revocation of consent before his dice throw might have nullified the pact. They
52
wonder whether his consent to the fairness of the dice throw made on his behalf
implies a consent to rejoin the compact and be killed if he loses the throw.
All this discussion is irrelevant because, as a matter of law, the consent of the
victim is not a defense to murder in Newgarth. Our murder statute makes the state
of mind of the killer decisive, that of the victim irrelevant. Therefore, even had all
members consented and persisted in their consent, the pact could never have justi-
fied a murder. The revocation of consent was as irrelevant as the original consent.
If the spelunkers were justified by necessity, then they do not need additional
justification, such as consent of the victim. They certainly do not need such
additional justification when it amounts to no justification at all under our laws.
So these spelunkers were justified by necessity, not by consent. The victim was
selected fairly because the method was random, not because the method was
consensual.
Whether the defendant acted from necessity, and whether his belief in neces-
sity was reasonable in the circumstances, are questions of fact. These questions
were considered by the jury at trial, and we are bound to give the jury findings
great deference. As an appellate court we review questions of law and are ill-
equipped to initiate a fresh inquiry into the facts. However, we must hold the
fmdings of the jury to the standard of proof in criminal cases. The defendant
must be proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt or else acquitted. In this case
the grounds for the necessity defense are overwhelming. Therefore we must
reverse the jury on this point. Even if the case for necessity were not over-
whelming, we must conclude that the case against it is not overwhelming, as it
would have to be to justifY conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.
This conclusion provides an easy answer to Justice Burnham's ingenious but
disingenuous example of the moneyed murderer with intent but no ill-will.
Burnham says there is no legally relevant difference between that hypothetical
killing and the present actual one. But this is simply false, for the sartorial
psychopath undoubtedly did not kill from necessity and the spelunkers undoubt-
edly did so.
In short, the defendant acted from necessity. His belief in the necessity of his
act was reasonable. Necessity negates the mens rea requirement of our criminal
law expressed in our murder statute by the word "willful." Therefore the defen-
dant did not kill willfully. Therefore he did not violate the statute under which he
was convicted. Therefore his conviction must be overturned.
IV
But suppose that all the preceding argument is mistaken. Suppose that the neces-
sity defense were not recognized in Newgarth at all, Staymore and the ancient
recognition of self-defense notwithstanding. Or suppose that our case law inter-
preting the word "willful" were suddenly available again, and shown to compel
the conclusion that the spelunkers did act willfully.
53
NINE NEW OPINIONS
We know from Fehler that the literal meaning of a statute can be overridden
by the legislative intent, at least when the latter is clear. In Fehler a typographical
error in the statute book did not stop this Court from reading the statute in light
of its intended meaning, disregarding its absurd literal meaning.
As Justice Burnham points out, the purpose of our murder statute is not as
clear as that of the misprinted statute in Fehler. Under Parry the purpose of the
murder statute is to deter future murders. Under Makeover it is to justify coercive
rehabilitation of those dangerous fellow citizens who have not learned to control
their behavior. Under Scape it is to provide an orderly outlet for the natural
human demand for retribution.
Justice Burnham infers from the plurality of these theories that we must not
look for the purpose of our murder statute. But he should have looked instead at
their content. For it does not matter which of these readings we favor; none justi-
fies us in punishing the defendant. Punishing him will not deter anyone so
unfortunate as to be trapped in the same circumstances in the future. We admit
this as soon as we acknowledge that he acted from necessity. Punishing him will
not deter and (if we are honest in drawing the lesson from the necessity defense)
ought not to deter anyone similarly situated. For the same reason, the defendant
does not require rehabilitation. He did nothing to betray a bad character
requiring correction for the safety of the public or himself On the contrary, he
and his comrades acted with exemplary restraint and reasonableness in a situa-
tion under which most of the rest of us would have folded from frailty and fright.
Even Burnham admits that most good people would do what these men did if
they possessed the same courage and found themselves in the same circum-
stances. Finally, while there is a natural demand for retribution in most killings, it
is well known that there is none in this case. To recognize that fact is not at all to
let popular opinion displace the law. It is to observe that the ancient purpose of
satisfying a deep-seated and instinctual demand for vengeance, or to prevent the
self-help likely when this demand is not satisfied, does not apply in this case.
In short, however we read the purpose of this statute, that purpose will not be
served by punishing this defendant. So even if he is guilty under the statute
(which he is not), the statute should be suspended on the ground that applying it
here serves no end of the law. To punish this defendant would put abstract form
ahead of substance.
v
These arguments are sufficient to acquit the defendant and independent of each
other, so that if one is rejected the other will do the job alone. It would distract
us from- the strength and sufficiency of these arguments to offer additional, but
weaker, arguments, simply in the spirit of multiplying arguments.
So I make no appeal to the claim of Justice Foster that the statutes of
Newgarth do not apply to the spelunkers because they existed in a state of
54
nature. However, Foster had two arguments ostensively about the state of nature
that contain a kernel of truth prematurely rejected by my colleagues.
It is true, as Foster reminds us (at p. 10, above), that cessante ratione legis, assat et
ipsa lex (where the reason for the law ceases, the law itself ceases). This is a prin-
ciple of statutory construction as well as of justice. It is by no means the
supernatural or superstitious appeal to natural law that Tatting suggests it is (at p.
16, above) or that Foster unfortunately intimates it might be (at p. 10, above).
However, this is to say that Foster's state-of-nature argument, when properly
expressed, reduces to the argument already stated, that no purpose of the law is
served by punishing these spelunkers.
Similarly, Justice Foster argued that, once trapped, the spelunkers lived in a
state of nature, therefore beyond our legal authority, even though they still lived
within our territorial boundaries. This is an unfortunate way to express an argu-
ment with a kernel of truth - unfortunate for suggesting that the jurisdiction of a
court is like a gas seeping from the courtroom, obeying physical laws, stopped in
its spread by tons of rock rather than by our human conventions and agree-
ments. The kernel of truth in Foster's argument was alluded to by Foster himself
when he recited the familiar facts that the state of Newgarth was founded upon
an explicit contract by the survivors of the holocaust during the first period
following the Great Spiral (at p. 12, above). As John Locke had said millennia
before, a local and temporary state of war may arise within a state of law when-
ever a man threatens another's life; and a local and temporary state of nature
may arise within a state of law whenever the purposes of the social contract are
locally suspended.
Foster's argument does not deny that a state of law existed before, during, and
after the landslide that trapped the spelunkers. Properly understood, it does not
assert that the thickness of the rock or the difficulty of the rescue put them
beyond our laws. Instead it reminds us that our laws are based on a contract
entered for certain purposes. When those purposes are impossible to meet
because of tragic but contingent circumstances, the obligations of the contract
are also suspended, just as my contractual promise to paint your house is
suspended when your house burns down. We recognized this in Staymore, in
which the defendant was physically unable to move his car from its parking place
because of an unforeseen political demonstration. His obligation to stay in that

parking place no more than two hours was released by the fact that the recip-
rocal obligations running to him under the social contract had been suspended
by events beyond his control.
The kernel of truth in Foster's argument, in short, is captured by the necessity
defense. He invited the misunderstanding and ridicule he received from Justice
Tatting. But my colleagues must acknowledge that, if they reject Foster's argu-
ment, and assert in its place that we have obligations that transcend our
circumstances and conventions, then they undercut the necessity defense we
recognized in Staymore, they undercut our ancient recognition of self-defense, and
they undercut as well the legitimacy of our government in a contract.
55
NINE NEW OPINIONS
VI
Finally, let us suppose that all the arguments above are mistaken. The defendant
is guilty as charged. There is still a good reason in Newgarth law to spare his life.
If the defendant is guilty as charged, then it is because the necessity of his act
was deemed irrelevant. But any statute that makes mitigating circumstances
irrelevant is prima focie a violation of the defendant's right to fundamental fair-
ness, or what we formerly called due process of law. This is especially true when
the statute stipulates a mandatory death penalty, as in the present case. When the
stakes are this high, then we must in justice consider any mitigating circum-
stances the defense may offer. Similarly, when only one punishment is allowed by
law, judges are denied the flexibility to make the punishment fit the crime. It is
certainly true that the legislature intended to deny this flexibility to the judiciary.
However, it is equally certain that the legislature, without insulation from the
political process provided to the judiciary, can be carried by passion and political
temptation far beyond the bounds of the constitution and the dictates of funda-
mental fairness.
Even if our earlier arguments were unavailing, then, we would have to nullity
that part of the murder statute that makes death the one and only penalty for all
murderers, regardless of the profound differences among them, their states of
mind, and the circumstances of their actions. Even if guilty, the defendant need
not die. Mter nullifYing that part of the murder statute, we would remand the
case to the trial court for sentencing.
I vote to overturn the conviction.
56
OPINION OF JUSTICE TALLY
We all acknowledge that killing in self-defense is not murder in Newgarth, and

that killing in self-defense is entirely justified. Like most of my colleagues, I do
not consider this to be a case of self-defense; but, unlike most of my colleagues, I
find illumination for the present case in the exercise of meditating on our vener-
able rule to acquit intentional killers when we find that they killed in self-defense.
The result of this meditation is additional support for the conclusion already
argued in detail by Justice Springham that this killing is not murder because it
was necessary. I write a separate opinion chiefly because I find that he misunder-
stood the nature of the necessity defense.
The fact we acquit those who kill in self-defense signifies that killing per se is
not the wrong we seek to punish through our murder statute. And because killing
in self-defense can be intentional, not even intentional killing per se is the wrong
we seek to punish.
When a defendant claims that he killed in self-defense, we examine the claim
to see whether some lesser exertion of force might have sufficed to protect his
life. In some circumstances we ask whether he might have retreated or fled to
avoid the conflict altogether. But if we find that retreat was impossible, unsafe, or
unnecessary, and that fatal force was the only degree that would give a reason-
able assurance of self-protection, and that the defendant was not the aggressor in
the affray that led to his fatal exercise of self-defense, then we acquit. Having
found these elements, we do not ask whether the defendant found himself in his
predicament through his own negligence, or through some foolish or sporting
risk shunned by most citizens. We do not expect him to have waited for police if
we know, but he did not know and could not reasonably have known, that he was
within minutes of a police rescue. We do not ask whether he might have haggled
or delayed to gain the consent of his victim, or blame him for proceeding
without that consent.
By accepting self-defense, we accept the killing of A to prevent the killing of
B, which might be called preventive killing. Now here is a hard question: why do we
ever tolerate preventive killing?
57
NINE NEW OPINIONS
One reason we tolerate preventive killing in the case of self-defense is that we

judge that in those unfortunate circumstances someone has to die and that it is
better for the aggressor to die than for the innocent victim of aggression to die.
This is why the present case is not one of self-defense; Whetmore was not an
aggressor or any less worthy of life than his comrades. He was as innocent as his
fellow spelunkers, and the intentional killing of an innocent cannot be justified
by self-defense. These men were truly forced to take drastic steps to live; but this
was not the fault of Whetmore. This is also why we would not accept a plea of
self-defense from a convicted murderer who managed to kill his guards and
executioner just as he was about to be executed; for in that situation, it is better
for him to die than for them to die.
Another reason why we accept preventive killing, I submit, is that we value
life. In particular, we value life in such a way that we would always prefer that
more people survive a tragic accident than fewer. My colleagues are remarkably
shy about saying what I presume they all believe, which is that killing one person
in order to save five is a bargain. It is horrible for such a step to be necessary. But
clearly it is better that one should die, enabling five to survive, than that all six
should die. Only the most radical religious fanatics dissent from this view.
I suspect that some of my colleagues assent to the argument here in principle,
but find that their intuition balks at its application to the present case. But let us
suppose instead that one man were killed in order to prevent the deaths of one
million people. This is a very significant change, at least for most people's intu-
itions. At these numbers we would undoubtedly have volunteers to sacrifice
themselves for the sake of the million in need. But again, suppose we had none
and had to resort to a fair lottery. If one million to one is an acceptable ratio,
which justifies killing a non-volunteer when no other relief is possible, then why
not five to one? The principle is the same. Are we really prepared to quibble
about the ratio? If five to one is too Iowa ratio, too poor a bargain, then when
does it become sujJicientty high? Such casuistry is demeaning to the Court, impos-
sible in practice, and unnecessary to decide this case. The principle of the
greater good means that the exact ratio is irrelevant, provided that a greater
number of people gained than lost.
On this view, the state of Newgarth is justified in demanding the death
penalty for murderers in order to prevent them from killing again. That is, the
state is justified in killing murderers when it is a "bargain" in the technical sense
to do so. Similarly, Newgarth would be justified in going to war to repel an
aggressor whenever it is justified in thinking that killing a large number of enemy
soldiers would prevent the deaths of an even greater number of other people. I
do not know whether Newgarth does execute murderers and go to war in the
name of this principle - and I agree with Justice Burnham that it is folly to spec-
ulate, for long, on the real purposes of our laws. This is only to show that the
principle, far from being cold-hearted and alien, may justify some of our most
familiar and venerable moral practices.
The ten workmen killed in the rescue were victims of regrettable accidents.
58
No one thought then, and no one thinks now, that purchasing the lives of the six
spelunkers at the cost of the ten workmen would be a bargain. The workmen
were not intentionally sacrificed as a price worth paying for some greater good.
In short, the self-defense precedent, as well as our most familiar institutions of
capital punishment and war, show that we permit preventive killing in Newgarth.
Therefore, I hold the present defendant to be not guilty of murder, on the
ground that the killing he and his comrades intentionally performed was prop-
erly preventive. Without it, all six of them would have died. This is equivalent to
saying that this killing was necessary, or that it was a bargain, or that a rational
person in the same circumstances would have acted as these spelunkers acted. It
can easily be distinguished from the case of the killed workmen, which was not a
bargain, by the absence of necessity in the latter. At least no one has produced
evidence that if the ten workmen had not died, then all sixteen (workmen plus
spelunkers) would have died. Consequendy, if the workmen had been intention-
ally killed, we would hunt down the intentional killers and prosecute them.
II
Justice Burnham made one important argument that Justice Springham did not
adequately answer. Even on the supposition that the spelunkers would have died
without eating one of their companions, only cannibalism was necessary for them
to live; homicide was not. They could have eaten the body of the first of them to
die of natural causes. If waiting for that death would permit them to avoid
killing, wouldn't that, rather than killing, be truly necessary?
Let me answer this objection direcdy. No, they need not and should not have
waited for the first of them to die of natural causes. Either the spelunkers were
roughly of equal fitness, health, and vigor, or they were not. If they were, then
by the time the first of them died of starvation, the others would be on the brink
of death themselves and unable to take advantage of that fortuitous death. If
they were not roughly equal in vigor, then waiting for the first natural death is
equivalent to targeting the weakest of their number for death - the sickest, the
skinniest, or the one most injured in the landslide. This is not at all an improve-
ment over a fair lottery.

Imagine what issues were raised during the long discussion of the mathe-
matics of the lottery. There are really no mathematical issues in their lottery that
are not fairness issues. Their discussion was inevitably about how to be fair with
each other in finding a person to kill and eat, given that no one was volunteering.
Isn't it likely that each of them dreaded the prospect of killing and eating a
companion? Isn't it likely, therefore, that they sought every alternative before
setding on that one? Isn't it likely, therefore, that they considered waiting for the
first natural death? Why would they discard that possibility? I can hear the
weakest of their number making this plea: "This is just your way of selecting me!
You know I will be the first to die. This is notfoir! If we each have an equal right
59
NINE NEW OPINIONS
to live and eat, then we must each shoulder an equal risk of being selected to
feed the rest." This logic is unanswerable to fair-minded people. Indeed, we must
commend the spelunkers for recognizing it.
I can even imagine that Whetmore proposed the lottery in the first place
precisely because he saw himself as the weakest member of the party and the
one most likely to die first unless they adopted a plan to spread the risk more
fairly among them. However, this conjecture is not supported by any evidence
and has no bearing on the verdict.
My colleagues like Justice Burnham, who believe that waiting for the first
natural death was preferable to the affirmative act of killing, stop short in their
analysis. They are right that such a course of action would have made killing
unnecessary, but they are wrong to think it would have been better than a lottery. It
would target the weakest member of the group without the slightest effort to make
the risk of sacrifice equal among them. That would resemble the savage "street
murder" much more closely than the current case, which is striking for the
restraint and level-headedness shown by the spelunkers in spite of their despera-
tion. Most importantly, it would revert to the rule of the weak by the strong, which
exists where law does not exist, and which our ancestors abolished in this territory
when they signd the second contract that established our Commonwealth.
The rest of the argument has already been given by Justice Springham. The
method of selecting the victim was fair because it was random, not because it was
consensual. Because Whetmore was chosen by a fair lottery, he was fairly chosen.
III
Now that we have shown that a fair lottery makes consent unnecessary as a
method of selecting a victim, we may address one remaining anxiety of those
who would use Whetmore's lack of consent to convict the spelunkers.
I have pointed out that killing in self-defense is excused even when the self-
defender did not have the consent of the aggressor. Furthermore, we need not
think that the aggressor assumed th£ risk of death by his aggression, and consented
in that indirect manner to his own death. Killing in self-defense is justified even if
we cannot in any way construe the aggressor to have consented; the justification
for killing in self-defense cases is self-defense itself, not consent. Moreover, as
Justice Springham has correctly pointed out, consent is not a defense to murder
many.
But some of my colleagues still wish to give weight to the fact that Whetmore
revoked his consent to join the lottery. If we agree with ,Springham that
Whetmore's consent to join the lottery would not mitigate the crime of the
defendant, if it is a crime at all, then we must also accept the converse proposi-
tion, that his revocation of consent did not aggravate the crime of the defendant,
if it is a crime at all.
Putting that issue to one side, now, we are ready to see the one sense in which
60
Whetmore's consent or lack of it might be germane to this case. If he was

unwilling to join the lottery, for whatever reason, then, the argument goes, he
should not have been conscripted into it. He might have been allowed to sit out
the lottery in a corner, equally free from the risk of being killed and the obliga-
tion to kill, on the condition that he not partake of the flesh of the chosen
victim. Why not proceed without him and let him take his chances with hunger
if that is what he wanted?
Here is a direct answer to that question. If Whetmore is dropped from the
lottery - if his revocation of consent is respected - then each of those remaining
would notice, or ought to notice, that his own chance of being selected for death
rises from one-sixth to one-fifth. This observation would only tend to increase
the chances that another member would withdraw from the pact. If a second
spelunker did withdraw, then the chance of losing the lottery would rise again, to
one-fourth, making further desertions even more likely. At the limit, the lottery
plan would be discarded and there would be nothing left but to wait for starva-
tion or rescue.
What does this prove? It proves that Whetmore's revocation of consent was
not a good reason to drop him from the lottery. Dropping him would increase the
pressure on others to drop out, and therefore increase the chance of destroying
the entire lottery plan. But that is to increase the chance of targeting their
weakest member for death rather than spreading the risk equally among them-
selves. In short, if justice required spreading that risk equally, then it required
them to ignore Whetmore's revocation of consent. Or to put this in different
terms, the spelunkers were justified in conscripting Whetmore into the lottery,
even after his revocation of consent, because they were justified in preferring a
lottery to a death-watch for their weakest companion.
IV
My colleagues enjoy repeating the obvious and uncontested fact that all six men
in the cave were innocent or, in the alternative, that they enjoyed an equal right
to live. They say this in order to distinguish the present killing from a killing in
self-defense. But, as I have argued, even though this is not a cas.e of self-defense,
it is instructive to meditate on self-defense in order to understand the issues of
this case. In true self-defense we have one aggressor and one innocent person in
a struggle for life; the aggressor's aggression means that one must die; we decide
on policy grounds that the death of the aggressor is either a good or the lesser of
two evils. In short, the two do not enjoy an equal right to live. Deciding who has
the greater right to live is the hard part, doctrinally, so wedded are we to the view
that all lives are equal in the eyes of the law. Now when we shift to the present
facts where all parties are admittedly equal in worth and rights, we see that the
doctrinal difficulty of self-defense does not arise. If two of these spelunkers were
locked in a struggle for life, when neither could be called the aggressor, then we
61
NINE NEW OPINIONS
would have no basis to prefer one to the other. But that is not the hard case we
face. Instead we face the much easier case in which one innocent life is sacrificed
to save five. The number five is not magical; it could be any number greater than
one. Because each life is equal, we have no trouble deciding where public policy
places its preference. The law has no basis to prefer one innocent person to
another, but it has excellent reasons to prefer five innocent persons to one when
circumstances make that choice necessary. This is not profound; all we need is
the ability to count.
v
I have argued that this killing was necessary, and to that extent I endorse the
analysis of Justice Springham. However, I cannot accept Springham's characteri-
zation of the doctrine of necessity. He argues that necessity negates mens rea or
criminal intent. But this is to make necessity an excuse when it is properly a justi-
fication. An excuse exculpates by showing that the defendant is blameless, or
lacks criminal intent, even if the defendant's act is harmful and just the one
prohibited by the legislature. A justification exculpates by showing that the defen-
dant's act was either good or the lesser evil, even if the defendant's decision to
perform that act was free and intentional.
If negating mens rea were the proper function of the necessity defense, then
the spelunkers would win their defense if they had a good faith belief in the
necessity of their homicidal expedient; they would not need to prove that their
belief was reasonable in the circumstances. For good faith belief is enough to
prove that one lacks criminal intent or willfulness. And clearly, these men did
have such a good faith belief But as Burnham and Springham both show, mere
good faith belief in necessity cannot suffice to acquit a person of murder; else we
are at the mercy of crackpots whose good faith beliefs exceed the limits of
reasonableness. It follows that necessity is not an excuse that negates criminal
intent.
Necessity is a justification, not an excuse. If we are dealing with a justifica-
tion, then we ask whether the act was the lesser evil. Was this killing the lesser
evil faced by thy spelunkers? To frame the question is to answer it. We know
that this killing was the lesser evil just as firmly as we know that one death is
less than six.
To see necessity as a justification, not an excuse, is to admit that the
spelunkers had, or may as well have had, the criminal intent of murderers. This
fact immediately frees us from the hair-splitting we have seen on this bench. We
may admit at least for the sake of argument that this killing was willful. It is justi-
fied not because willfulness was absent, but because public policy supports any
person in choosing the lesser evil over the greater evil, even if they make that
choice with intent, deliberation, or willfulness. Necessity is a general defense that
need not be mentioned in a specific criminal statute to have validity and effect.
62
So though the murder statute makes willfulness the test of culpability, a sound
necessity defense can acquit even those defendants who acted willfully.
Justices Truepenny and Burnham note that executive clemency is our chosen
method for mitigating the rigors of the law. It is one method, to be sure. But the
defense of necessity is another and superior method. It is superior to clemency
for three reasons. First, the necessity defense is within the reach of judges and
juries, not just the executive. So if we find it applicable, we may apply it without
bureaucratic or demeaning importunities to another branch of government, sent
through the front door or back. Second, the necessity defense is just, not merely
merciful. Citizens who believe that the spelunkers should not be punished, even
if they violated the letter of our law, are not demanding mercy; they are
demanding justice. Third, the necessity defense is law; the people and parties
rightfully expect us to follow it; a defendant might deserve to be acquitted under
its terms; it has public and justiciable criteria; it is argued in open court and
adjudicated on the merits. Clemency is none of these things; it is discretionary
and may be granted or withheld capriciously; its criteria are subjective to the
executive; it is a form of leniency that is always a gift beyond desert; it cannot be
deserved. If the executive pardons the defendant or commutes his sentence, then
she will have spared one living defendant from foreseeable injustice, which is so
far to the good; but we will not have eliminated the injustice from the rules of
law that convicted him in the first place. To acquit him because his act was
necessary, or because he acted with legal justification, is truly to mitigate the
rigors of the law, and to do so with articulation and accountability; to pardon
him because the law is too harsh is no more than gratuitous mercy.
For all the reasons preceding, I vote to overturn the conviction of the trial
court, and to acquit the defendant.
63
OPINION OF JUSTICE HELLEN
When a rapist puts a knife blade to a woman's throat and says, submit or die, he is
giving her a choice. So when she submits, she chooses. Can he therefore claim
that she consented? I doubt that anyone thinks so abstractly about consent and
choice. Certainly our law does not. If choosing submission over death is a choice
that implies consent, then rape would not exist; any woman who survived forced
sex would have consented. If our law took this view, then women would be
unrapable - the term used in centuries past when a wife or prostitute's consent was
irrebuttably presumed.
But according to our law, a woman who chooses submission over death or
injury does not consent; or, as courts often put it, any consent forced by threat of
death or injury is invalid. I remind us of this familiar fact because my colleagues
seem to have forgotten it; at least they refuse to draw the lesson from it for the
issues of necessity, choice, intent, and willfulness in the present case, illustrating
how they systematically avert their eyes from the archetypal crime of violence
against women.
A woman who submits to sexual intercourse, when the alternative is death or
injury, is being forced, coerced, compelled: she faces "necessity." Necessity
explains why her decision to submit does not amount to consent; for the same
reasons, it also explains why the spelunkers' decision to kill is not willful. She
may act on this necessity in a panic and confusion or with a clear head and full
intent; either way, she does not consent. She does not lose her complaint just
because she may knowingly and deliberately prefer life to death. The necessity
defense, similarly, belongs just as much to the clear-headed as to the confused, to
the intentional as much as to the impulsive.
Rape proves that we can intend an act (submission to a rapist) against our will
(without willfulness). This is obvious in the case of rape; but once noticed, we
begin to see the same distinction everywhere. For example, the robber who
demands, your money or your lift, offers the victims a choice. Those who choose to
give their money rather than die are not thereby making gifts. If they were, there
would be no robbery; people would be unrobbable.
64
Similarly, killing in self-defense is not always instinctual or impulsive, imme-

diate and unreflective. Often it has this character because the would-be killer
gives the would-be victim no time to reflect. But our courts have often acquitted
defendants who did have time to reflect, and who decided in that time intention-
ally, knowingly, and voluntarily to save their own lives by killing their attackers.
These killings are still excused as self-defense. Hence even a killing can be inten-
tional but not willful.
Extortion proves the point from yet another angle. Aristotle gives the example
of a tyrant who coerces a good man into performing a wicked deed by threat-
ening to kill his father if he does not comply. Hearing the quandary stated is all
we need to feel the man's pain and anger. But in what do this pain and anger
consist, or the pain and anger of a rape victim? They consist largely in the
lucidity one retains; they consist in the fact that one has been forced to intend an
act that is against one's will.
It is just so with the five spelunkers. They killed with knowledge and delibera-
tion, with intent. But that does not at all mean that they killed willfully. On the
contrary, they clearly killed without willfulness; they would rather have taken any
other course if only it would have helped them to survive. When they decided
that survival required them to kill, they were clear-headed about the necessity of
it and spent good time discussing the mathematical issues of a fair lottery. There
is no need to punish these men for keeping their heads in a difficult situation,
and acting with deliberation and knowledge, any more than a clear-headed
woman must be unrapable or a clear-headed traveler unrobbable. Clear-headed
deliberation indicates intent, not willfulness. Let us acknowledge that the prefer-
ence for life over death may be lucid rather than instinctual, and that the actions
we undertake to evade death may be intentional rather than impulsive. And let
us acknowledge that even a lucid intention to act may be channeled by the
limited array of our options, may be forced by the prospect of death, and may
be against one's will. To deny this is to forget the obvious lessons of rape,
robbery, and extortion, crimes whose essence is to extract a choice from an
unwilling victim, a choice that cannot, therefore, be considered willful.
II
My colleagues who are so sure that this isn't a case of self-defense have not been
paying attention to the recent evolution of self-defense law, perhaps because
women are at center stage in that evolution. The so-called "battered woman's
defense" is a recent variation on the theme of self-defense. This variation waives
the ancient requirement that the self-defender face "imminent" death or serious
bodily injury. A pre-emptive killing may now, in principle, count as self-defense if
the defendant can show a history of physical abuse in the aggressor that renders
future life-threatening abuse highly probable.
This variation is so recent, in fact, that the four defendants in Spelunkers I
65
NINE NEW OPINIONS
could not have appealed to it. But that is no reason to close our eyes to its impli-
cations for the present defendant or, indeed, for the original four.
I am not arguing that the spelunkers killed in pre-emptive self-defense or that
their act falls under the battered woman's defense. I do claim that, if we waive
the imminence requirement for battered women, then we may do so for the
spelunkers and thereby stop quibbling about whether they waited until the very
last moment before facing the necessity to kill - as if they, or we, would know what
the very last moment was. I also claim that the creative and progressive change
of law is not restricted to ancient times, when the exception for self-defense was
carved out of our murder statute. Springham was right that, if we accept self-
defense as a justification for killing, then we should also accept the analogous
defense of self-preservation. This may be an innovation in what we explicitly
accept, but it follows directly from what we have already accepted. In short, if
the battered woman's defense is a justification for killing, then we are only a
small and negligible step away from recognizing a general defense that protects
threatened life even when the threat is not immediate.
Here is another invitation to exercise our imagination along similar lines.
Imagine that Whetmore had a private stash of food in his backpack but refused
to share it. We could stand on abstract property rights, and let him keep it to
himself even if that meant that the others would starve. Or we could hold, as we
do in every area of law where it comes up, that one may not take a human life in
order to protect mere property. On this line of thinking, the law might well
require Whetmore to share his provisions. A selfish assertion of his property
rights, unless overridden by force or persuasion, would kill his companions. If
they had to kill him to share in his stash, I can imagine a responsible court inter-
preting that act as self-defense. * Obviously we need not decide that case today.
The lesson is not that hoarding can be homicide, but that law changes and self-
defense law changes. The fact that historical models of self-defense are
unavailable to the spelunkers is a fact of only historical interest.
Several colleagues argue that this is not a case of self-defense because
Whetmore was not an aggressor. But no one has ever denied Whetmore's inno-
cence. Why are my colleagues fighting without an antagonist? Self-defense is a
species of necessity; and while the innocence of the victim is usually material in
self-defense cases, it is never material in necessity cases. If we shift the label from
"self-defense" to "necessity," then Whetmore's innocence becomes irrelevant.
Springham uses the good example of the tenant breaking the landlord's windows
to escape from a fire. This destruction of private property is justified by necessity.
The landlord may be entirely innocent. It is the fire, not the landlord, that makes
the tenant's act necessary. Similarly, Whetmore was blameless; it was extreme
* Similar life v. property issues were earlier raised by Professor Wun, a member of the Special
Commission established by the executive after Sptlunlcns I to decide whether to recommend
clemency. D'Arnato, op. cit. at p. 472.
66
hunger, not any fault of Whetmore's, that made killing a human being necessary.
Whetmore was the victim because he had the bad luck to lose the dice throw, not
because of any fault of his own. We cannot blame the spelunkers for picking one
of their number at random to kill, once we acknowledge the necessity to kill
someone, any more than we can blame the tenant in the burning building for
breaking this window, rather than that one, in order to escape.
Finally, it has long been the law in our Commonwealth that the right of self-
defense includes the right to kill an innocent person in some circumstances. If A
attacks B with fatal force, and B defends with fatal force, accidentally shooting
bystander C instead of aggressor A, then B is still entitled to acquittal on the
ground of self-defense. Again, I am not arguing that the spelunkers killed
Whetmore accidentally, while aiming at the true aggressor responsible for their
predicament. Let us admit that Whetmore was innocent, but stop citing his inno-
cence as if it ruled out an argument from self-defense or necessity.
In short, the defendant killed from necessity and must be acquitted of the
charge of murder. Whether we call the necessity under which he acted "self-
defense" is not legally significant. Self-defense is one kind of necessity; there are
other kinds, without names, that are arbitrarily close to self-defense in their
moral and political rationale. It also happens that the law of self-defense has
expanded and mutated in recent years under the influence of woman-responsive
jurisprudence. To assert that the defendant's homicide was justified by self-
defense fits recent developments, or legitimately extends them, and should not be
denied merely because such an outcome would have been novel when most of
my "brothers" were in law school.
III
Does the case of Commonwealth v. Vaijean negate the spelunkers' necessity defense?
If Valjean could not argue necessity to justifY the theft of bread, then how can
the spelunkers argue necessity to justify homicide? I admire Justice Springham's
detailed attempt to distinguish Vaijean from the present case (at p. 49, above); I
cannot imagine anyone doing a better job. However, it is unnecessary to distin-
guish a case that is no longer valid law. Justice Tatting was right that arguments
to acquit the spelunkers on the ground of necessity entail that we overturn
Vaijean (see p.18, above). So let us take the direct and effective course of over-
turning Vaijean once and for all. Vaijean reflects the class biases of a Court,
indeed, an entire system of criminal justice, for which desperate poverty and
chronic homeless ness are abstract fictions. True, some homeless people can beg,
and others can obtain food from charities, but for a government to demand these
expedients from the desperate poor when its police shoo beggars out of sight and
its legislature bars the public support of religious charities is cynical and morally
evasive. Moreover, it assumes that private charities will always suffice to keep the
poor from desperate acts such as Valjean's. This is an empirical question that is
67
NINE NEW OPINIONS
not settled by the serene confidence of the Supreme Court. Sometimes this
assumption is true, and, when it is true, we have private generosity to thank, not
the Commonwealth. But sometimes it is false, and, when it is false, justice
requires the Commonwealth to take notice. Vaijean was wrongly decided.
Starvation is a paramount form of necessity; when it cannot be alleviated within
the law, then alleviating it outside the law does not carry the culpable criminal
intent which alone we must punish. Instead, like other cases of bonafide necessity,
it carries the peremptory will to live that precedes all law.
IV
The necessity defense is one way that we acknowledge and respond to the falli-
bility of legislators. By permitting a necessity defense at all, we are admitting that
to follow the letter of the law can occasionally work an injury or injustice. The
necessity defense is designed for defendants who violate the law in order to avoid
just such injuries or injustices. They took a legal risk to do what we can agree is
right; they ought to be spared punishment. It is a mistake, therefore, to make the
necessity defense into another technical doctrine with a "letter of the law" all its
own, as both Burnham and Springham do from their respective sides. Because
judges are fallible too, if we codifY the necessity defense in black-letter law, then
to follow the letter of that law might also, in unforeseen circumstances, work an
injury or injustice.
The proper test of necessity, then, is not to look for a precisely formulated
rule from our cases, or to formulate our own, but to assess with courage and
candor the injustice the defendant tried to avoid by his unlawful act. We ought to
take the measure of that injustice using the common sense and norms of the
general community, since it is the general community's policy to avoid injustice
that we are trying to enforce here. The community governs through the web of
legal rules, and only a near-sighted focus on the rules can obscure that fact. By
this test, the defendant is clearly not guilty, even if his act was willful. The evil he
sought to avoid was his own death, which our community norms ~ and our case
law too ~ declare to be more than sufficient to justify the use of fatal force.
If all my arguments above are flawed, and the defendant is guilty of a technical
violation of our murder statute, then what good would be achieved by punishing
him? Surely retribution is inappropriate for a defendant without evil will; and
even law-and-order retributivists, like Burnham, are not willing to say that any of
the spelunkers had evil will. Nor must society protect itself from citizens like
these spelunkers. If they have shown themselves willing to kill, it is only after
68
several weeks trapped under the earth with no food; they are not a threat to
society.
Finally, I would like to point out the absurdity of supposing that a guilty
verdict in this case would deter others similarly situated. The impossibility of
deterring acts of this kind is evident in our very recognition that this act was
forced by necessity or occurred without willfulness. Even the most virtuous
spelunker will have to eat, and eventually will be pushed by starvation to the
point of necessity at which he will kill in spite of the considerations that deter
less desperate people. When a person is pushed to that point, deterrence is
impossible, killing is necessary, and killing is excusable under the law; these are
all ways of saying the same thing.
The execution of the four defendants from Spelunkers I was controversial and
widely discussed. Let us assume that the verdict in that case, and the punish-
ment, are universally known among Newgarthian spelunkers, as major events of
speluncean interest. Any Newgarthian spelunkers who might be inside a cave on
this very day, will know, then, that killing a companion for food is regarded as
murder, even when the extremity of starvation is conceded.
Can we say that the previous verdicts and executions will exert any deterrent
effect on present and future Newgarthian spelunkers who are genuinely pushed
to the extremity of starvation and necessity? Clearly not. What it means to be
pushed to the extremity of necessity is that one would then kill another to save
onesel(
Even if Spelunkers Ihad an insignificant deterrent effect, perhaps it had a slight
effect in the direction of deterrence. Would we amplifY its deterrent effect if we
upheld the jury's conviction of the present defendant? Again, clearly not. We
would merely clarify, or perhaps only reiterate, that trapped and starving
spelunkers face death: for they will die either by starvation or by execution. But if
these are one's only options, then it becomes rational, even necessary, to kill to
avoid starvation and take one's chances at beating execution, say, with a novel
defense. The disagreements on this Court, if not the exigencies of starvation,
give hope to this strategy.
Yet if punishing the defendant would not serve the ends of retribution, self-
protection, or deterrence, then it would not serve the purposes of punishment.
And to punish when the ends of punishment are not served is to make a fetish of
rule-following and to forget the reason for the rules. My colleagues describe the
horror of this case of desperation, homicide, and cannibalism, but in the end it
has still not sunk in; they act much more like little boys playing a game who
become so carried away by their dispute about the rules that they forget why
they are playing.
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NINE NEW OPINIONS
VI
I have two questions to ask my colleagues who believe that the defendant is guilty
beyond a reasonable doubt.
First, do we know beyond a reasonable doubt that a person at the point of
death by starvation possesses the mental capacity to commit willful murder? Did
this defendant? His physical deterioration, with the faintness caused by extreme
hunger, augmented by natural fear and anxiety, easily surpasses the threshold we
require in other cases for an exculpatory diminution of mental capacity.
Against this view one may cite the lengthy discussion of the mathematics of
the lottery. But this is far from conclusive evidence. If the mathematical discus-
sion was clear-headed and competent, then it no more suggests willfulness than
the lucidity of the woman who sees the knife, draws the inference, and intention-
ally but unwillingly submits to the rapist. But if the mathematical discussion was
not clear-headed or competent, then it suggests that the mental faculties of the
spelunkers were clouded by incapacity, hunger, and panic. Mter all, the mathe-
matics of a fair lottery are relatively simple, especially if dice are present as in
this case. We will never have sufficient evidence to assess the mental state of the
men in the cave at the time of the killing, but we do have sufficient evidence to
create reasonable doubt of willfulness.
We might even conclude from these considerations that a guilty verdict will
have the opposite effect of deterrence. The lesson to a starving spelunker who
has managed to retain a glimmer of sense is to crouch in a corner of the cave,
engage in no mathematical discussions and no lottery, wait until starvation is
unendurable, and then leap up screaming and stab a companion 114 times. This
would establish a defense of insanity or diminished capacity and eliminate all the
confusion caused by the spelunkers' supposed lack of confusion.
Second, are my colleagues too caught up in their quarrel over guilt and inno-
cence to see that the quarrel itself has a decisive implication for the case?
Can a divided Supreme Court foir(y rule that there is no reasonable doubt of
someone's guilt? Under the rules, yes. In what law students call "real life," clearly
not. In real life, an appellate court divided on the question whether there is
reasonable doubt of someone's guilt proves the existence of reasonable doubt.
Technically, a divided jury does not acquit, but it does prevent conviction
through a mistrial. A divided Supreme Court should be at least as favorable to
the defendant. When we divide on the very question whether a doubt is reason-
able, then we know that at least one Supreme Court justice believes there is
reasonable doubt of guilt. If this does not of itself establish the existence of
reasonable doubt, then it should at least prevent conviction through an analogue
to mistrial that we may call misappeal. The only alternative is to suppose that the
doubts of an average Supreme Court justice are less reasonable than those of an
average juror. (Of course, if we really believed this, we would not permit
appeals.)
How can educated people fall into such a trap? The trap is to mistake law for
70
a system of rules. On this view, law is abstract, not concrete; timeless, not histor-
ical; a deposit of rationality, not a continuing struggle of multi-dimensional
human beings; a bloodless structure of logic, not the raw and refined material of
life itself; an artificial game, not a social reality. On this view, law is like a
computer program, and it is entirely regrettable that it must be executed by slow,
fallible, interested, and emotional human judges rather than by fast, infallible,
disinterested, and unemotional machines. But also on this view, ironically,
reasonable doubt cannot be established by the reasoned arguments of Supreme
Court justices, only by the votes of jurors, which may well be entirely emotional.
Our policy would be a comical self-deception if its consequences were not so
often tragic.
Is it too much to hope that the highly educated members of this Court will
see what is obvious, if that means looking through the web of rules to the reality
beyond? Four Supreme Court justices who think there is reasonable doubt of
guilt prove that there is reasonable doubt of guilt, even if they are not a majority.
Therefore, we must acquit.
VII
Justice Burnham argues that judges should follow the law, not their own private
notions of justice, because iQ a pluralistic society the people may agree on the
laws and disagree on the requirements of justice (see pp. 43ff, above). He has
strong words for anyone, or at least any judge, who would appeal to justice
beyond law. I have made several appeals to justice as reasons to revise or extend
our law; hence I ought to face Burnham's argument and answer it squarely.
Actually, Burnham makes a strong argument that I would embrace if we lived in
the good, pluralistic society where he imagines us to live. His only mistake is to
claim that we really live in his fantasy-world of civil rationality. He admits (at p.
43, above) that his argument only works "as long as we take pains to let all views
be heard in the law-making process." His argument fails to the extent that
Newgarthian society has failed to live up to this participatory ideal; and this
failure is distressingly large and long-standing.
The weakness of Burnham's argument may come clear with an analogy. A

commonplace of our political rhetoric holds that civil disobedience is not justi-
fied in a democracy, for protesters with a grievance may petition the legislature
and the public for relief If their reasons are good ones, and their numbers large,
then they will prevail without violating the law; but if their reasons are not good
ones, or their numbers small, then they do not deserve to prevail. This argument
is attractive because it, or something very much like it, is true of the ideal society
in which we hope to live. Good reasons and real numbers ought to matter, but it
does not follow that they do matter where we do live. Burnham's argument
assumes that the legislature properly reflects the entire population, but this
assumption founders on what we know of the disproportionate influence of
71
NINE NEW OPINIONS
wealth and privilege on real elections and real legislation. We can only tell
activists who would perform civil disobedience to leave the streets, go home, and
write letters to their legislators, if the system is already just. Similarly, Burnham
can dismiss appeals to justice beyond law with his characteristic air of righteous-
ness only if the law is already just. But if the law is shaped by interest, wealth,
and power, not by pluralistic voices in proportion to their numbers and reason-
ableness, then Burnham's argument functions as a rationale for ignoring these
pleas for change; hence it functions as a rationale for entrenching injustice. If
law institutionalizes privilege, then it cannot "let all views be heard in the law-
making process." We do not live in Burnham's pluralistic society, where groups
with different views and interests have reached a "meta-level agreement" on the
rightness of law; we live in a pluralistic society where some views and interests
simply dominate over others. As long as that is the case, appeals to justice beyond
law are our only hope of bringing justice and law into alignment.
I vote to overturn the conviction and acquit the defendant.
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OPINION OF JUSTICE
TRUMPET
My colleagues seem to agree that the chief question in this case is the defense of
necessity. Hence, they pile up argument after argument on the question whether
the spelunkers killed from necessity. But they have entirely misunderstood the
case. Necessity cannot justifY or excuse the killing of a human being, as I will
show shortly. Hence we need not even reach the question whether the spelunkers
killed from necessity; all the labor that Burnham and Springham and the others
have spent in this cause is labor lost.
Springham admits what is obvious, that this is not a case of self-defense.
But he says it is a case of "self-preservation" instead (at p. 46, above), as if
the new phrase brought its own illumination. Hellen thinks the case is some
yet-unnamed variation of self-defense (at pp. 65f, above), as if the association
with so ancient a justification as self-defense lent validity to her claim
without more ado. But this case is not about necessity or self-preservation or
self-defense. It is about equality. Or if it is about some right of self-preserva-
tion, then it is about the unequal recognition of that right inside the cave.
The surviving spelunkers placed a higher value on their own lives than they
placed on the life of Roger Whetmore. This Court cannot pretend that the
state of Newgarth and its laws support this violent and self-serving
inequality.
Each life is supremely and infinitely valuable in the eyes of the law. This fact
makes them of equal value. None takes priority over others. Any sacrifice must
be voluntary or else violate the equality and sanctity of life recognized by our
laws. When there is no volunteer, there is no right to kill non-volunteers. Each
person has a duty to die before killing another in violation of this highest moral
and legal obligation.
Springham and Tally attempt to show that the lottery put the equal rights of
the spelunkers on an equal footing (at pp. 52 and 59ff, above). While this is true
as far as it goes, it overlooks the fact that the purpose of the lottery was to kill the
loser for the benefit of the winners. The purpose was to enforce the ultimate
inequality. The unequal outcome cannot be defended on the ground that each
73
NINE NEW OPINIONS
spelunker had an equal chance of suffering it, for the simple reason that equality
cannot be twisted to justifY inequality.
The relevant principle here is that first articulated by Socrates (in the Corgias),
that it is better to suffer injustice than to do injustice. Or it is that later articu-
lated by Jesus (in Luke), that if one strikes you on the cheek, you should offer the
other one. These are the "religious fanatics" (see p. 58, above) who dissent from
Tally's repulsive view that killing can be a bargain.
On these grounds, we may cut through the confusion surrounding the ancient
precedent on self-defense. My colleagues wonder why our early judges recog-
nized self-defense as an exception to the murder statute when our early
legislators refused to do so. My colleagues speculate that killing in self-defense is
excused because it is not willful, because it is deeply ingrained in our nature,
because punishing self-defenders will not deter, because self-defense is preventive
killing, or because self-defense is not covered by the purpose of our murder
statute. But all this is speculation.
Killing in self-defense violates the principle to suffer injustice before commit-
ting it. This is a principle of natural law. Repeated violations do not amend it.
For colleagues who have lost their way, and cannot discern an eternal law when
it conflicts with human interest, the same conclusion follows from human law.
Killing in self-defense violates the plain and literal meaning of our murder
statute, which would punish all willful killings. A nation devoted to "the principle
of the supremacy of the legislature" Gustice Keen at p. 21, above) cannot
tolerate judicial qualifications to unqualified legislative language.
Self-defense was excluded by the murder statute for the best of reasons: the
framers did not want self-defense to excuse killing. They believed that one should
turn the other cheek. Let me be explicit: the ancient precedent exempting self-
defense from the murder statute was wrongly decided and should be overturned.
I know that I lack the votes to overturn it, however, and I do not expect to have
the votes in my lifetime. Moreover, respect for precedent may require that I
acquiesce in the judicial invention, at least after this long a time. But I must press
the principle that repudiates self-defense because it is still part of our law and it
bears directly on the case of these unfortunate spelunkers.
Mr Staymore was prevented by physical force from obeying a parking ordi-
nance; compliance was impossible. The spelunkers were not prevented from
obeying the law at all; they were tempted to disobey, and they found that they were
too weak to resist the temptation. They found disobedience a more attractive
option than obedience. Obedience was far from impossible because their crime
was far from necessary. Obedience was possible but horrible to contemplate.
Have men a right to avoid the horrible? Even if we accept the view that they do,
we cannot accept it in defense of killing a man, for that act is at least as horrible
as starving to death, the act from which they were fleeing.
Justice Springham accuses Justice Burnham of disliking the necessity defense
(at p. 52, above), just as Keen accuses Foster of disliking statutes (at p. 22, above).
But because we have a necessity defense and statutes, we are supposed to
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OPINION OF JUSTICE TRUMPET
conclude that Burnham and Foster are simply at odds with the laws they are
sworn to uphold. This would be damaging if true. But the fact is that, while we
do have statutes, we do not have a necessity defense in Newgarth. More precisely,
we have a necessity defense for overparking, as proved by Staymore, which has
never been questioned. But I ask Justice Springham where in our case law he
finds authority for the chilling claim that we have a necessity defense for homi-
cide. 0/Ve have no necessity defense for cannibalism because, as Justice Tatting
pointed out, at p. 19 above, we have no statute criminalizing cannibalism.)Justice
Burnham dislikes the necessity defense because it justifies violating the law and
carries an inherent risk of anarchy. Springham's reply admits the risk and offers
in exchange to read the defense narrowly, requiring reasonable belief, rather
than merely good faith belief, in the necessity (at p. 49, above). Springham's posi-
tion is essentially that Burnham prefers order to justice, while justice requires a
necessity defense regardless of its consequences for order.
But Springham is wrong. Justice never requires us to kill, even when necessary
to prevent our own deaths. Justice requires that we should die before we kill. I
wish to be spared the wailing of intentional killers who claim that justice
required them to kill; the odor offends. I say to the defendant that he should
voluntarily have starved to death. This is a hard saying, which I do not make
lightly or flippantly. But when the alternative is to kill a human being, it is clearly
the course required by justice. More shameful than the spehmkers surviving their
accident is Springham's claim that ')ustice" permits the killing of Roger
Whetmore. It would be better to argue that justice should be put to one side than
that justice supports their decision to kill.
Springham says the method of selecting the victim was fair because it was
random, not because it was consensual (at p. 52, above). This follows, he says,
from our rule of law that consent of the victim is not a defense to murder. What
Springham does not say is that according to his principles this killing would be
equally fair if the victim selected at random had gone to his death kicking and
screaming. If consent is irrelevant, and random selection is all we demand for
fairness, then I invite my colleagues to imagine with particularity the scene in
which a vigorously resisting victim is grabbed, held down, and killed. This is ft.ir?
Moreover, while we do not know the method of killing, we do know that
Whetmore did not consent. We may presume, therefore, that he did resist, to the
limit of his strength. We do not know how strong he was on the day of his death,
but his resistance must have put his killers to a some effort to secure him and end
his life. Can the spelunkers admit to exerting this effort and energy and still
maintain that they were on the very brink of death by starvation and unable to
wait even one more day?
Springham says the men killed in "self-preservation" and admits that
Whetmore does not meet the test of an aggressor for the purposes of self-
defense. But if these ordinary, unlucky mortals can kill a person not specifically
threatening them, because they would die without the nourishment of that
person's flesh, then why can't a citizen with kidney disease kill the hapless owner
75
NINE NEW OPINIONS
of a kidney of matching tissue-type, and take one of the victim's kidneys for
transplantation?* Or if there is more than one potential donor of matching
tissue-type, why not pick one of them by a fair lottery, kill the loser, and take a
kidney? The healthy kidney owner is no more, and no less, innocent than Roger
Whetmore, and the citizen with kidney disease is no more, and no less, moved by
necessity than these spelunkers. We do not believe that anyone deserves to die of
kidney failure, any more than to die in a landslide. When it happens, we mourn
for the victims and their families. Yet when there are no voluntary donors, we tell
people with kidney disease that they must die rather than create an involuntary
donor through murder. We must say the same to these spelunkers.
They are guilty of murder. No examination of the morality of their act can
cut against this conclusion, for they are as guilty morally as they are legally.
Indeed, the principle of the sanctity of life is a moral principle first and a legal
principle second. Attempts to find this killing morally justified, for example
through necessity or variations on self-defense, or to separate the law and
morality of murder, violate both the morals and the laws of Newgarth.
II
Justice Tally is simply wrong (at p. 58, above) that all his colleagues secretly
believe that killing one person to save five is a bargain. I am one who thinks it is
barbaric. But because the argument from numbers is on many minds, and func-
tions as a sticking point even for clear thinkers, it deserves an answer. Could we
kill one to save a hundred? A million? Is there a point at which the "gain" from
killing exceeds the "loss" and we can begin to speak of a "bargain"?
Tally would kill one to save five, and one to save a million. But would he kill
four to save five? How about 999,999 to save 1,OOO,OOO? I imagine that even his
callous intuition would begin to balk at these numbers, although according to his
bloodless arithmetic the "bargain" is as obvious in each case.
If all lives are of infinite worth, then one life is as valuable as two. One is as
valuable as a million. In fact, one is as valuable as an infmite number. There is
never a bargain in preventive killing; there are only survivors with blood on their
hands.
I concede that it may often be "necessary" to kill some to save others. By this
I mean that, if those others are to be saved, then some must be killed. I even
concede that the spelunkers found themselves in such a situation. But in such
situations the killing is only hypothetically necessary: it is necessary only if some
others are to live. Hypothetical necessities do not suffice here. It is hypothetically
necessary for you to be killed if I am to wear your scalp or decorate my desk with
your skull. Do I then kill you on the ground of necessity? Obviously not. I
* Professor Wun raises a more complex transplantation analogy in D'Amato, op. cit. at p. 469.
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OPINION OF JUSTICE TRUMPET
concede the hypothetical necessity but resign myself to a life in which I do not
wear your scalp or decorate my desk with· your skull. If some must really be
killed to save others, then the others must resign themselves to a much shorter
life, rather than a longer one at the expense of their congeners.
Tally's doctrine works only when the units he is counting are of finite worth,
for then the value of five always exceeds the value of one. But a life is not such a
unit. He will say that the damages we award in wrongful death cases show that
we put a finite price on a human life. But if he were right, then we would also
allow rich people to buy poor people, and turn anyone into chattel against his
will if only the price is paid. It is much easier to explain why we value life
infinitely and yet award finite damages for wrongful death than for Tally to
explain why his view of human worth is not grounds for the commodification of
humanity.
But even if we grant him the view that human lives are of finite worth under
the law, his logic does not work in the case of these speluncean explorers. For if
we take Tally's logic seriously, then the five lottery winners inside the cave were
justified in killing the lottery loser, the sixth spelunker. If at that point an unex-
pected landslide prolonged the rescue another few weeks, and if the men were
given the bad news by radio, then it would only be a matter of time before four
of the five survivors would be justified in killing the fifth. If we repeat the land-
slide and radio communication, then soon three of the four survivors would be
justified in killing the fourth, and then two of the three in killing the third. If we
repeat one more time, then, finally, one would be justified in killing the other, in
the limiting case of preventive killing. By Tally's logic, each of the killings was a
bargain; but in the end, one is alive and five are dead and eaten. If we justify
killing one to save five, then in the end we justify killing five to save one. Even by
Tally's arithmetic, is that a bargain?
III
Justice Hellen is simply wrong that "virtuous" spelunkers will have to eat, even if
they have to kill a human being to do so (at p. 69, above). This is the presump-
tuous statement of a woman who has either never met a virtuous person or
failed to take the proper lesson from the encounter. A virtuous person would
voluntarily starve to death before killing. This, not killing, is what is necessary in
such a dreadful and harrowing situation. Fasting unto death is not easy to under-
take, but is its moral necessity really that hard to grasp? The discipline to refrain
from murder even at the cost of one's own life is part of what we mean by virtue.
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NINE NEW OPINIONS
IV
Finally, I have not failed to notice that there is a contradiction between the prin-
ciple of the sanctity of life, which underlies our murder statute, and the
mandatory death penalty contained in that statute. The statute is in conflict with
itself This is a very firm ground for nullifYing the part of the statute supported
by the weaker principle. By "firm" I mean as compared to other grounds often
cited by judges for nullifYing statutes, such as abstract justice or common sense.
The mandatory death penalty may be supported by such principles as self-
protection, deterrence (Parry), or retribution (Scape); but none of these principles
has the weight, or the deep roots in our jurisprudence, of the principle of the
sanctity of life. Moreover, each of the principles that supports the death penalty
may be served to some degree by life imprisonment; hence, the purpose of the
statute cannot require the death penalty, regardless of our theory of the purpose
of the statute. This shows that the principles supporting the death penalty are
less essential to the foundations of Newgarthian law than the principle of the
sanctity of life. Hence I would nullifY the provision of the murder statute
prescribing a mandatory death penalty.
It is too late to save the first four spelunkers from execution, but not too late to
recognize the true principle and treat the present defendant, murderer though he
be, as a creature of infinite worth, and thereby demonstrate that we do not share
his moral principles.
I vote to uphold the conviction, but to remand the case to the Court of
General Instances for re-sentencing.
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OPINION OF JUSTICE GOAD
When the first woman was appointed a Justice of the Supreme Court of
Newgarth, nearly one hundred years ago now, most men and very likely a large
number of women imagined that she would "speak for women." Indeed, it is not
too cynical to suppose that that is precisely why she was appointed. It wasn't
until the sixth woman was appointed that Newgarth had two women justices
simultaneously. It was only then that most men, and very likely some women,
learned that not all women think alike. This was a beneficial turn of events, if it
meant that women were becoming a complex reality rather than an empty
abstraction. But at the same time it was a calamity, for if not all women think
alike, then who would speak for women?
My brothers are tired of being reminded that Justice Hellen and I do not
necessarily think alike, any more than (say) Justices Keen and Foster think alike.
Justice Hellen herself is probably tired of this fact too, for her written opinions
suggest that she is trying to speak for women and assumes that all women think,
or ought to think, alike. But I will be tiresome and remind us all of our differ-
ences one more time.
There are several reasons why the defendant is guilty of murder. One is that
the spelunkers must take some responsibility for the excruciating dilemma in
which they found themselves. Another is that Roger Whetmore had a right to
defend himself, which is incompatible with the defense theory of necessity.

Another, to be succinct, is that no means no.
To take the third of these first: Justice Hellen analogizes the survIVmg
spelunkers (at p. 64, above) to rape victims because they were forced to commit
an act intentionally but against their will. (Is every case really about rape?)
However, even on her terms, she has the situation perfectly reversed. The
surviving spelunkers are much more like rapists than rape victims, for they
reduced Roger Whetmore to an object (not a sexual object, but a nutritional
object), violently subordinated him to their will, and made him serve their inter-
ests. His consent or dissent was disregarded, ignored, overridden, written out of
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NINE NEW OPINIONS
the equation. When brutality of this description takes the form of sexual inter-
course, it is rape; when it takes the form of intentional killing, it is murder.
Whetmore proposed the lottery and at first undoubtedly consented to its
terms. But before the dice were thrown, he just as unmistakably revoked his
consent. Did this stop the spelunkers? How many times have we heard that a
woman who goes to a man's apartment, or even to dinner with him, has already
by her conduct consented to sexual relations? Not all the behaviors that men
believe manifest consent do manifest consent. And even a bona fide consent is
revocable. If this were not so, women would be raised apart from men, wear
long black robes and veils, and avert their eyes from every man's gaze. But life is
very different because, in fact and in law, no means no.
So we start from the principle that consents are revocable. Roger Whetmore
revoked his consent to join the lottery. When the spelunkers threw the dice for
him, he did not think the dice were loaded or the throw rigged, and he said so,
but this was assent to the fairness of the throw, not consent to rejoin the
compact. This had no effect on his companions, who killed him as if he had
consented.
Some news commentators speculate that Whetmore proposed the lottery
intending from the start to withdraw from it at the last moment and then to find
a clever way (perhaps by pathetic whimpering) to join the meal that the others
purchased through murder. * Of course there is no evidence for this contention.
But in any case, it is easily answered by the analysis I have offered above. Even if
the speculation were entirely true, it remains a fact that Whetmore did revoke his
consent. A woman who willingly shares a dinner with a man is entitled to say no
after dessert and have it respected. (Does this really require repetition?) The
alternative is to say that a woman whose revocation of consent frustrates a man
deserves to be raped.
Why did the spelunkers spend so much time discussing the mathematics of
the lottery if it was not to obtain the consent of every member of their party?
Even if consent is not a defense to murder, as Springham correctly observes,
consent was clearly important to the spelunkers. But if so, what excuse do they
have for overriding Whetmore's dissent? Whetmore's lack of consent is relevant
to this case, not because consent is a defense to murder, but because the
spelunkers cannot claim necessity unless they come to court with clean hands.
Our sympathy for them depends critically on the cleanliness of their hands, and
the justice of acquitting them depends in large part on that sympathy.
I will return to the consent issues in a moment. But first I must point out that
when Justice Hellen analogizes the spelunkers to rape victims (at p. 64, above),
she is implicitly analogizing Roger Whetmore to a rapist. But this is past absur-
* Professor Thri even contends that Whetmore would have a legally compelling argument to take
part in the eating, even if he did not take part in the killing. D'Amato, op. cit. at p. 484. To deny
Whetmore any nutrition at that point could well be construed as murder.
80
dity. Whetmore did nothing to threaten, harm, or endanger the other spelunkers
that each of them did not likewise do to the rest. Each man was alive, hence
needy; each man had a body that might serve as food. But in this they were
equals; Whetmore was not specifically threatening. This is the same reason why
we cannot classifY the killing as self-defense. Whetmore was not an aggressor. He
is not guilty of anything. If anyone must die, there is no reason why it should be
Whetmore and not one of the others. He can only play the role of a rapist, or of
an aggressor for a theory of self-defense, even for the novel new women-respon-
sive variations on self-defense, if he threatens the others in a way in which they
do not threaten each other.
Let me remind the Court of an appalling chapter in the history of our
jurisprudence. Before the state can convict a person of a crime, it must prove a
so-called "mental element" or "criminal intent," sometimes simply called mens
rea. If the defendant lacks mens rea, then no crime was committed; if the state fails
to prove mens rea, then it loses. Once upon a time our predecessors on this Court
held that mens rea in the crime of rape is for a man to know at the time of sexual
intercourse that the woman is not consenting. Hence, if he sincerely believed
that the woman did consent, then he lacked mens rea and was no rapist. He
needed only good faith belief, or sincerity, because this was a question about his
state of mind. His belief did not have to be true, or reasonable in the circum-
stances, or based on a shred of evidence; it only had to be psychologically actual.
A man might have a sincere but unreasonable belief in a woman's consent
because she gave ambiguous signs or because he was drunk or stupid. He might
also be talented in believing what he wants to believe. But as long as he is
excused by his state of mind, regardless of the state of mind of his victim, then
even women who give unambiguous signs of refusal are at the mercy of such
men. All this followed inevitably from received wisdom about the mens rea
requirement for every crime. This doctrine had the effect of converting a
woman's consent into a man's belief about a woman's consent. This result was
too transparently oppressive to remain law for long, although we often forget that
it took twenty-four years to correct the situation with definitive legislation.
Because Newgarth was founded upon an explicit social contract by the
survivors of the ancient holocaust in the first period following the Great Spiral
(Foster at p. 12, above), many writers have drawn an analogy between our exper-
iment with rape law and our notion of a social contract. We have on record the
express consent of the founding generation to the social contract. But for all
their descendants down to the present day we have, at best, only tacit consent.
Nowadays our consent is inferred from our conduct, for example, in accepting
government benefits and services. For what purpose is our consent inferred?
Chiefly, in order to hold us bound to the laws. We still believe that our obligation
to obey the laws is grounded, not on a mysterious moral duty, and certainly not
on some divine right of our sovereign body, but on our consent to obey them,
tacit though it may be. Who infers our consent? The state does, when it must
hold us accountable for violating its laws. This is like the appalling rule of "good
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NINE NEW OPINIONS
faith rape," for it has the effect of converting our consent to be governed into the
government's belief about our consent. Is this too an oppression to be corrected?
Or is it a misreading of the way consent is manifested and ascertained in
Newgarth today?
Many writers have answered this grave charge against our form of govern-
ment, arguing for example that the state plays no essential role in establishing
our tacit consent to be governed, since the job could as well be performed by
any independent or non-governmental entity, such as a Martian observer,
Newgarthian jury, or non-partisan academic sociologist. I need not pass on the
effectiveness of these rebuttals to point out that most Newgarthians see that they
have an interest in their success. For if the charge is not answered, then our form
of government is illegitimate for resting on a spurious form of consent, or a
conclusory fiction that constructs consent out of what may as well be dissent.
All this is a roundabout way of pointing out that we have long since repudi-
ated the "good faith rape" rule and try at every opportunity to rebut the charge
that our form of government is similarly perverse. But if we really think we have
learned our lesson, then we must live up to the lesson we think we have learned.
If a woman's consent is not just a man's belief, then we must look for it in the
woman. In short, no means no. If consent was the basis of the lottery, then Roger
Whetmore's consent cannot be inferred or constructed by his killers; it must be
looked for in Roger Whetmore. But it is not there to be found, for he revoked his
consent and never consented again, as all parties agree.
II
Springham, Tally, and Hellen would argue, I am sure, that killing Whetmore
without his consent would not matter, or would be excusable, if the spelunkers
acted under necessity. I would like to put the question in a slighdy different way:
not whether the spelunkers acted under necessity, but what difference it would
make if they did. If a man "must" rape a woman in order to be admitted into a
gang, we do not let this "necessity" acquit him of the rape. But what if his
refusal to commit the rape would cause the gang to kill him, and he knows this?
Our lower courts have heard such cases. That new refinement tightens the
analogy to the present case. Surely, we do what we must do to avoid death, and
this fact lessens or eliminates our mens rea for injuries we cause along the way. But
in that case, why do we lack sympathy for the would-be gang member caught in
this dilemma? Wouldn't we ask how he found himself in the predicament in
which he must either rape or die? Does he bear any responsibility for walking up
to that choice-point, and hence, for the rape he performs "in order to" escape
death? A similar series of questions leads us to deny a necessity defense to the
fleeing criminal who fmds himself under police fire and grabs an innocent
bystander as a hostage or shield. Yes, the criminal's life is threatened, and yes,
this recourse will protect him, but no, his responsibility for his quandary bars
82
him from saving his life at the expense of another.

In the present pair of cases, the defendant spelunkers bear a large responsi-
bility. They did not cause the avalanche; nor did they seek out the risk of
avalanche for sport. But they voluntarily walked into a hostile natural environ-
ment where their range of choices in case of disaster was foreseeably narrow.
Why did they do it? Not to avoid death, not to put food on the table, but for
enjoyment. We must conclude, then, that their own voluntary acts are largely to
blame for the fact that they found themselves in a situation where killing was
"necessary" to avoid their own deaths. This fact drains the necessity of their
desperate act of its exculpatory power. Moreover, when the final hour came, they
chose to save themselves by taking the life of one who was the moral equivalent
of an innocent bystander and making him their body shield against hunger.
Why am I not very sympathetic to the spelunkers? First, because they acted as
if consent mattered and then they ignored their victim's dissent. Second, because
the necessity under which they acted was a product of their voluntary acts. Here
I focus on the second of these reasons. I would be much more sympathetic to a
group of grocers, dry cleaners, and typists who found themselves trapped in a
collapsed building by an earthquake or terrorist bomb. If they eventually killed a
member of their group after the same radio communications, the same degree of
starvation, the same lottery, and even the same revocation of consent by the
lottery loser, then their necessity defense would be much stronger than the one
offered by these spelunkers. There might still be good reason to deny it to them,
but they would not forfeit it because of their own responsibility for courting or
creating the necessity that oppressed them.
Why do we acquit defendants who were involuntarily intoxicated at the time
of their criminal acts, but not those who were voluntarily intoxicated? Our
theory of criminal intent or mens rea seems to require that we acquit them both;
they lack the requisite state of mind in exactly the same way and may as well
lack it to exactly the same degree. The short answer is that we are much less
sympathetic to those who cause harm while voluntarily drunk than to those who
cause harm while involuntarily drunk. The reason is clearly that voluntary
drunks bear some responsibility both for their intoxicated state and for any harm
they cause while in that state. We can say that we are unsympathetic to voluntary
drunks because they bear this responsibility for their own loss of mental capacity.
Or we can say that bearing this responsibility makes a legal difference because it
causes us to lose sympathy for them. It doesn't matter to me whether we justify
the legal doctrine through the emotion or through the same facts that justify the
emotion, and I have never read an opinion in which it did matter.
The scenario of the gang-member is a true story and true more than once in
our recent urban history. It is relevant because it teaches us the limits of the
necessity defense. No one pleads necessity to the charge of rape; or if they do,
we will not accept their defense. While there is never a true necessity to rape,
there can be, as the law of self-defense shows, a true necessity to kill. We learn
from the rape analogy when a necessity defense must be rejected on the grounds
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NINE NEW OPINIONS
of the defendant's willing complicity in the causal origin of his dilemma. But the
rape analogy is unnecessary to make this point. We learn the same lesson from
the now-venerable distinction between the culpability of voluntary drunks and
the lack of culpability in involuntary drunks. This lesson clearly works against
the spelunkers.
III
I would now like to argue directly against the notion that this killing, or any
killing not done in self-defense, can be justified by necessity. Tally rightly corrects
Springham on the elementary distinction between an excuse and a justification
(at p. 60, above). An excuse is a defense, such as insanity, provocation, or dimin-
ished capacity, that releases one from responsibility but does not make one's
action praiseworthy. If one kills from insanity, one is not guilty of murder, but we
still deplore the killing. A sane person helping the insane defendant in the killing
would be guilty of murder and deserve punishment. A passer-by who stopped
the killing would deserve our praise.
By contrast, a justification is a defense, such as self-defense, that releases one
from responsibility in such a way as to make one's action praiseworthy. If the
defendant received help, the accomplice would also be acquitted. A passer-by
who prevented the killing would incur our censure and might even be guilty of a
crime. As our law students learn to repeat in their sleep, it is a crime to assist an
excused violation of law, and no crime to prevent one, but it is a crime to prevent
a justified violation of law, and no crime to assist one.
As Tally has shown, necessity is a justification, not an excuse (at p. 60, above).
If it is really possible to kill from necessity, then the killers (as Springham
correctly but inconsistently noted at p. 54, above) deserve our praise and respect.
Moreover, anyone who might have hindered the killers would deserve our
censure and might even be guilty of a crime. But here we see the limit on Tally's
argument: necessity does not apply to this case, or indeed to any killing of a
person not in self-defense. If the spelunkers killed Whetmore from necessity, then
it would have been wrongJor Whetmore to deJend himself. But this is absurd, as Tatting
seemed to be arguing in Spelunkers I (at p. 16, above). Therefore, the spelunkers

are not entitled to a necessity defense.
This, incidentally, is one sufficient reason why Justice Hellen is wrong to say
(at p. 68, above) that general community notions of justice support this use of
the necessity defense. Community notions of justice would undoubtedly allow
Whetmore to defend himsel£
84
IV
The case against a general necessity defense for killing does not require the
radical nonsense of Justice Trumpet. I do not believe that a Supreme Court
Justice in this or any other nation has ever argued that the self-defense exception
to the prohibition of murder ought to be overturned. If Justice Trumpet did not
already exist, then a parody that invented him would be dismissed as unbeliev-
able. Someone should tell him that Socrates and Jesus were not legislators of
N ewgarth. Someone should tell him that there are many moral principles that,
for good reason, are not incorporated into our criminal law, such as the prohibi-
tions of covetousness, lust, and gluttony. Just as not every vice is or ought to be a
crime, not every virtue ought to be a legal obligation. Some virtues are
supererogatory, such as volunteering to die so that others may live. No one has a
legal duty to die. The law can only demand that we abstain from a certain crit-
ical set of harmful behaviors, not that we be saintly. Justice Trumpet is guilty of
wishful thinking in the way peculiar to moral fanatics. If he is quite sure that the
law ought to be a certain way, then he is quite sure that it already is that way, and
that those who disagree with him are ipso focto mistaken. Justice Trumpet is so
determined to carry his dogma to the end that he concludes that all Newgarth
judges, in all our courts, for tens of centuries, have been mistaken on the legal
status of self-defense. The very claim proves that he is talking about natural law,
divine morality, or moral logic, but not the human-made laws of our
Commonwealth, which alone he has authority to enforce. Another form of the
same delusion, common in our academic journals, is to believe that because law
ought to be consistent, then it is consistent. Like the professors who write such
articles,Justice Trumpet lectures on a principle that he was taught as a child as if
he were teaching children. But actual law is no more ideal law (to quote Jeremy
Bentham) than hunger is bread. Bentham's analogy is particularly apt here, for if
the spelunkers had the same gift of wishful thinking that Justice Trumpet has,
they would never have grown hungry.
V
Would holding the spelunkers guilty deter future spelunkers who found them-
selves in a similar situation? Justice Hellen argued that it would not (at p. 69,
above). Here is one reason why she is wrong. We may fairly presume that these
spelunkers were friends who cared for one another, not random partners on an
expedition. Whetmore was the friend of the surviving spelunkers, and they were
his friends. These spelunkers were not at all hardened criminals to whom cold-
blooded killing comes easily. The prospect of killing their friend in cold blood
must have been infinitely horrible. Yet something overcame their extreme reluc-
tance. What was it? They tell us it was their strong desire to live and their
perception that this horrible act was necessary for them to live. I grant their
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NINE NEW OPINIONS
claim. But granting it entails that their only reason for killing their friend would
have been neutralized if they had known with good certainty that the killing
would lead to their own execution. For then they would know that to kill their
friend would not save their lives, but seal their deaths. I propose that it does not
take much to deter friends from killing and eating friends.
I do not claim that the deterrent effect of a guilty verdict is, in itself, a good
reason to render a guilty verdict. But because I find the defendant guilty on inde-
pendent grounds, I think it important to clarify that punishing him would serve a
more useful end than mere retribution.
Now what if this analysis is incorrect and executing these spelunkers will have
no deterrent effect whatsoever? If believing deterrence to be unlikely is even one
factor that leads us to acquit the present defendant, then we will face a paradox.
For the next time spelunkers find themselves similarly situated, the legal prece-
dent that will influence their conduct (under our hypothesis) will be our
acquittal, and that fact can only make killings of this kind more likely. In this
sense, belief that punishing one defendant will deter others is like the belief that
we can leap across a three-meter chasm. Casting our vote that it is so will not
make it so. But casting our vote that it is not so, will make it not so. (If law
displays these self-fulfilling effects, we have yet another reason to see it as an
enterprise of human choices full of risk and passion, not just as a system of
rules.)
VI
Having found the defendant guilty of murder, I append a final reflection on

Burnham's insistence that we not bend to the feelings of sympathy that he feared
lay behind the various arguments for acquittal. First, he draws a false dichotomy
between feelings and reasons, and undermines his own consistency in elabo-
rating it, as we will show below. Second, sympathy is not monolithic. We can be
sympathetic to starving spelunkers, but we can also be sympathetic to the murder
defendants past and future who share important mitigating factors with these
spelunkers but who are condemned to death just the same.
To take the second first: We have much data on how our murder statute,
while neutral on its face, has been applied disproportionately against racial
minorities and the poor, even after correcting for the increased rate of crime in
these groups. This discriminatory impact is compatible with the statute's consti-
tutionality, but it raises legitimate constitutional suspicions and forces us to
interpret the statute's words in light of this social context, and with an eye
toward correcting the imbalance in its historical application. To read the statute
abstractly or outside the real social and historical setting in which it operates will
only tempt us to disregard the equal protection of the laws and perpetuate the
injustice.
This is a privileged defendant; spelunking is a sport of the affiuent. His
86
comrades were equally privileged; their execution was a small exception against
the background of acquitting the privileged and convicting the underprivileged.
It is important for us, then, to hold firm to the principle that the murder statute
applies to defendants of this class. Murder defendants who offer defenses of
necessity, duress, and diminished capacity based on the exigencies of poverty and
disadvantage uniformly lose in our courts. To recognize a necessity defense for
this affluent spelunker would only aggravate the discriminatory impact of the
law and show this Court's indifference to its burdens.
Obviously this argument would be monstrous in the absence of sound, inde-
pendent legal reasons to deny the defendant a necessity defense and convict him
of murder. But conversely, it would be monstrous to ignore this argument when
buttressed by sound, independent legal reasons for the defendant's guilt.
Now, as to the first: Is there really a qualitative difference, and no overlap,
between our feelings of sympathy for the defendant and our legal reasoning
about his guilt or innocence? Does Burnham believe that his reasoning about
law has an immaculate conception? He talks at length, even with some feeling,
about the diversity and disagreement in our society, what he calls its "pluralism"
(at p. 43, above). He even insists that these plural views are of equal validity in
the eyes of the law. But does he not see that this conclusion is at odds with his
belief in a Legal Reason that is beyond faction, beyond ideology, beyond feeling,
beyond nature and history? He tells us in effect that there is never one right
answer in the eyes of the law, and then he tells us what the one right answer is in
this case. He acknowledges that people have different backgrounds and experi-
ences, and that these shape different legal and political philosophies; but then he
hopes to transcend this swamp of difference with his "meta-level" pronounce-
ments about what the law requires. Does he not see that what the law requires is
itself a question on which different people legitimately have different views? We
reason about statutes and cases, but we learn to reason from teachers and exam-
ples that are fully situated in history and embody interests and background
assumptions that we will never fully disclose to ourselves and disentangle. We
inflect this learning with our understanding of what is at stake, our feeling that it
matters, and our passion to do what is right.
No one reasons outside a context, and the context always influences the
purpose and content of one's reasoning. The context includes the community
that shaped one's thinking, the history that shaped the community, the feelings
of the body that struggle for words, the language that channels the words
available to us, the problem that demands solution, and the interests that
constrain acceptable solutions. To adapt one of Pascal's remarks about reason
in religion: law without reason would be absurd and abhorrent; law limited to
reason would be unjust and abhorrent. Reason without feeling can build
death camps; feeling without reason cannot fmd effective means to resist. In
healthy and constructive thought, even in law, even in mathematics, reason
and feeling collaborate; they are no more separable than melody and tempo.
To separate them is to oversimplifY life, which we usually do for some definite
87
NINE NEW OPINIONS
purpose or other. This simplification is not motivated by understanding and

rigor, but by fundamentalism and fear of complexity. Law is easier if it is just
rules of conduct related by rules of inference; but unfortunately, law is as
nuanced as life.
Reason does not come from God and feeling from DNA; both are artifacts of
culture, like law itself Law cannot rise above culture and the full human context,
and always becomes distorted and one-sided when it tries. Of course the defen-
dant is to be convicted or acquitted by the law, and the law alone. But it does not
follow that he is to be convicted or acquitted by reason alone, as if that were a
requirement of law - or even possible. Our sympathy for the defendant, or lack
of it, is one of the motive forces of legal reasoning; we cannot abstract from it
and we would dehumanize ourselves and our law if we tried.
88
OPINION OF JUSTICE FRANK
I would have joined the lottery. If I were a winner, then I would have helped to
kill the loser and I would have eaten my share of him. I cannot condemn, let
alone execute, any man for doing what I would have done. When a judge finds
himself punishing people no worse than himself, he should step down. When the
only judges to be found who would punish certain defendants are those willing to
punish those no worse than themselves, then the law is shamefully exposed. This
is my reason for voting to acquit.
I am not sure that I can distinguish what I would have done from what I hope
I would have done. I hope I would have waited until the very last moment before
accepting the necessity to kill anybody. But then I hope I would have urged that
we use a lottery to select the victim and share the risk equally. I hope I would
have had the courage to exert my share of energy, and implicate myself fully, in
the act of killing. Finally, I hope I would still have had an appetite to save my life.
Perhaps I would have withered from weakness; I will not pretend to be sure. But
if I cannot condemn men for doing what I would have done, then a fortiori I
cannot condemn them for doing what I hope I would have done.
I hear all my brothers and sisters ask: Where are my authorities? Where are
my arguments? I hear them object: I ofTer no legal argument, but only speak
about what I would have done myself and the scruple that prevents me from
condemning men no worse than myself.
I reply that surely I could dress up my objection in legal garb, but another
scruple prevents me from taking such an evasion. The length of Springham's

opinion shows that dressing up my objection in legal garb is not a simple matter.
Essentially, I endorse Springham's position, but I do not join his opinion. It is
important to me not to use legal garb to cover my stake-taking passion in this
case. Look at the controversy between Justices Hellen and Goad. Hellen is essen-
tially saying that she would have killed Whetmore, and Goad is saying that she
would not. But they dress up these autobiographical reports in the legal language
of deterrence. We do not know whether punishing these spelunkers will deter
other unfortunate people similarly situated in the future, but we now know that it
would deter Goad and would not deter Hellen - or so they say.
We can speculate on whether the executions of four, maybe five, spelunkers
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NINE NEW OPINIONS
would deter us. I am not criticizing this exercise of imagination. On the contrary,
I think the exercise of imagining what we ourselves would do in a hypothetical
situation is an essential part of the ethical life, and underlies such virtues as kind-
ness, friendship, sympathy, compassion, toleration, and even-handedness. My
point is that this exercise of imagination, or this autobiographical report, is as
relevant to a judge's legitimate task when it is avowed as it is when it is disguised
as a discussion of deterrence.
In this sense, the present case is not at all "hard." I know what I hope I would
have done in that cave, and I know that I cannot in conscience punish men who
did what I hope to have done. But in another sense, the hardness of this case is
so acute and uncommon that this is the first in my career as a judge in which I
have felt impelled to throw off the mask of judicial objectivity and rest on naked
autobiography.
I vote to acquit.
90
OPINION OF JUSTICE RECKON
Justice Trumpet correctly concluded that necessity is irrelevant to this case, and
the spelunkers guilty; but he came to this conclusion for the wrong reasons. He
argued that a necessity defense for murder is incompatible with the sanctity of
life; but even if true, this argument belongs in a pulpit, not a court of law. The
true reason why necessity is irrelevant to this case is that, even if the present
killing was necessary in the strongest sense, it would still be rational for Newgarth
to punish those who did the deed.
Justice Springham correctly described one legal function of necessity: it
negates mens rea or criminal intent. That makes it an excuse. For my purposes
here, it may also be a justification, signifying that the defendant chose the lesser
evil. Necessity can be both. Debating which one it is, as if it could be only one, is
futile and beside the point.
Insofar as it negates criminal intent, we may call necessity a "mental defense"
or "volitional defense." When present, it establishes that the defendant lacked
the state of mind that the legislature wished to punish. But necessity is also an
affirmative defense. Hence, when pleading necessity, the defendant concedes that
he committed the act that the legislature wished to prohibit.
Now if a defendant committed a prohibited act, but without the punishable
state of mind, then should we convict or acquit? The conventional answer to this
question is that we should acquit. But the conventional answer is deeply flawed,
as judged by moral, legal, and political criteria with deep roots in our society.
The present case gives us a welcome opportunity to overturn the conventional
rule and live up to our common criteria more faithfully.
If we recognize no mental or volitional excuses, and punish all those who
commit prohibited acts, then we accomplish three ends of significant social
importance. First, we will remove dangerous people from our streets. Second, we
will shorten trials and make punishment more swift and certain. Third, we will
strongly deter others from committing the same acts. For study after study has
shown that criminals are deterred much less by the severity of punishment than
by the swiftness and certainty of punishment.
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NINE NEW OPINIONS
If the primary social function of the criminal law is to protect citizens from
the special kinds of harm caused by criminals, then the continued recognition of
the mental excuses aggravates the problem; it does not contribute to the solution.
If "excuses have excuses," then they derive from secondary social policies
outweighed by the policy to protect the public from criminal wrongdoing.
Our reluctance to punish those who lack the requisite state of mind is based
on the theory that threats of punishment will not deter children, the insane, the
intoxicated, or those moved to act by ignorance, mistake, duress, or necessity.
That is true but irrelevant. To punish them anyway, for their proved harmful
acts, would protect us from them in the future and deter others. If citizens knew
that no excuses would be heard in criminal trials, and that guilt would turn solely
on the performance of the prohibited act, then we may be quite sure that many
more people than presently would take pains to err on the side of compliance
with the law.
Conversely, if citizens knew that certain mental or volitional excuses would be
available to them, then not only would many of them be less frightened of crim-
inal penalties, but many who did not deserve to be excused would win acquittals
through cunning and sophistical trial tactics. Most of the mental or volitional
excuses are states of mind that even experts cannot defme with precision or
prove to be present ~ or absent ~ with solid evidence. So to make these excuses
available will call into being an entire industry of jury-consulting, poll-taking,
expert-witnessing, syndrome-documenting, charge-caviling, blame-shifting,
responsibility-denying, counter-indicting defense lawyering to take advantage of
these excuses, much as we have seen in this Commonwealth in recent years.
If we are inclined toward the doctrine that abolishes mental or volitional
excuses, then we need not say that punishing children or the insane is in itself a
good thing. We need only say that the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs. It
may be regrettable, like all punishment, but nevertheless justified. When a defen-
dant commits a prohibited act but can prove insanity or necessity, then we clearly
face a conflict of values, and we need not pretend that the case is easy. The
doctrine that abolishes excuses does not deny the reality of this conflict; it merely
solves it in one way rather than the other. Most citizens will agree, however, that
reducing crime is a weightier social policy than releasing wrongdoers from
punishment simply because they lack the vague and indefinite state of mind we
call criminal intent.
Similarly, to support this doctrine we need not say that deterrence is the only,
or even the chief, rationale for punishment. All we need say is that it is one
genuine rationale for punishment. That is enough to start the deterrence pan of
the scale moving downward under the weight of the arguments adduced here
and elsewhere for this doctrine. Other rationales for punishment, which may
intrinsically recognize excuses and justifications, must sit in the other pan and
prove their weight in a detailed comparison of social advantage.
This argument applies just as strongly to justifications as to excuses. Whether
a defendant chose the lesser evil is just as subject to controversy, and therefore
92
just as inviting to sophistry, hair-splitting, and expert disagreement, and therefore

just as costly and arbitrary to resolve, as whether the defendant had or lacked a
loosely described state of mind.
Crime is terribly expensive, in lost and damaged property, in prevention and
detection technology, in insurance premiums, in police salaries, in attorneys' fees,
in prison and court costs, in trauma, in lost opportunities, and in the many ways
that life is cramped and compromised by the need to live with the measures and
institutions we have so dearly purchased. To make a significant reduction in crime
would be as large a contribution to social wealth and happiness as making a signif-
icant reduction in disease or war. Some criminals would be less happy, of course,
but even they would choose to reduce crime and live in the vastly improved society
that would result if they had to make the choice as disinterested framers of a
constitution, without regard for the misfortunes, pressures, and interests that in the
present order of things might lead them to a life of crime. Eliminating the mental
and volitional excuses, then, compared to retaining them, would be morally more
beneficial, materially more conducive to production and the efficient allocation of
resources, and politically more acceptable (grounded in a wider base of consent).
A fault system might meet these criteria best in the civil law, but a no-fault system
meets these criteria best on the criminal side.
The doctrine I am proposing would make strict liability for criminal acts the
norm rather than the exception. But I find that the phrase "strict liability" preju-
dices the conventional legal mind without illuminating it. So I would prefer to
see the case for this doctrine argued on the compelling ground of crime reduc-
tion and maximizing social satisfaction, without the use of inflammatory labels.
II
But this Court has again refused to endorse the proposal to abolish excuses and
justifications for criminal behavior. For the time being, then, we must conclude
that necessity, if proved, would suffice to acquit the defendant. Consequently I
join the opinions of Justices Burnham and Goad that the defendant did not kill
from necessity.
III
Several of my colleagues wonder whether punishing the defendant will "serve

the purpose" of the murder statute or even the purpose of punishment. Justice
Burnham does not answer this question, and Justice Goad, although correct in
her analysis, does not say enough about deterrence to satisfy, e.g.,Justice Frank. I
have a few words to say on the subject of deterrence, although not nearly
enough, I am sure, to persuade one like Frank, who has so far abdicated his
reason that he is willing to admit it.
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NINE NEW OPINIONS
The most rational basis for punishment is to prevent criminals from taking
advantage of non-criminals. Good citizens who obey the law are peaceable and
non-violent. This is both a cause and effect of their willingness to obey the law,
for the law prohibits violence. But the non-violence of a large sector of society
creates opportunities for less scrupulous citizens. Non-violent people make easy
targets. In this sense, good law and good people create a bed of temptation and
opportunity in which crime grows. There is no natural deterrent to this kind of
crime. The reason is simply that this kind of crime is rational; criminals may
gain more than they lose by engaging in it. (Without a special deterrent, we
could not avoid this sort of crime even if everyone were saintly, unless saints were
irrational; but in any case, making everyone saintly is not a "natural" solution to
the problem.) The only deterrent is the unnatural, human contrivance of
punishment.
It is true but paradoxical to say that good people incite crime. But it is not at
all paradoxical to draw the consequence, which is that only punishment can give
the criminal a reason to think twice. But for punishment, crime would pay, and
cost-benefit calculators would be attracted to it.
Impulsive actors cannot be deterred by any provision of law. But rational
actors can be deterred by any penalty whose gravity, discounted by its proba-
bility, exceeds the gain expected from a crime. Moreover, almost miraculously,
punishment tends to convert impulsive actors into rational actors who can then
be deterred. (This conversion, however, is slow and haphazard because the
impulsive are not rational enough to be converted quickly by rational considera-
tions; the conversion shows over a large population and a long time, not for
individuals. )
People who obey the law give each other the great gift of peace and freedom,
the highest goods of civic life. At the same time, they give criminals the gift of
easy pickings - as well as the gift of peace and freedom. If this double gain were
the whole story, then it would induce all rational actors to become criminals, at
least initially. But rational actors would have to reflect that, if they all turned to
crime, then no one would any longer have either the gift of peace and freedom
or the gift of easy pickings.
This is a non-technical way of saying that the question whether to obey the
criminal law is a prisoner's dilemma. The term comes from the situation of two
prisoners in police custody who have committed a crime together. Suppose that
the police have only enough evidence to charge them with a lesser crime unless
one of them can be made to give state's evidence. If interrogated separately,
each must decide whether to betray the other in order save himself, or whether
to tell an exculpatory lie and hope that his partner does the same. If each
supports each other by lying to the police (if they cooperate, as scholars on this
subject like to say), then they are both charged only with a lesser crime and serve
light sentences, say, of one year. If they betray each other (if they both difect),
then each accuses the other of a serious crime and is willing to testify, so they are
both convicted; say they each get three years in prison. If one betrays the other,
94
but not vice versa, then the betrayer wins immunity from prosecution and is
released, while the hapless partner is caught lying and given the full sentence for
the serious crime, say, five years. The table or payqff matrix embodying the
assumptions we just made appears in Figure 1.
Obviously the particular numbers need not be those chosen for this illustra-
tion; but their relative sizes must be as illustrated here. Defectors who betray
cooperators must be better off than mutual cooperators, who must be better off
than mutual defectors, who must be better off than betrayed cooperators. The
betrayed cooperator is the kind of person we are most concerned about; let us
give such people the shorter name, chumps.
Obeying the criminal law is a prisoner's dilemma because the highest gain
goes to criminals who take advantage of, or betray, law-abiding citizens; they
enjoy both their booty and the peace and freedom created by the obedient. The
next highest gain goes to the obedient, or cooperators, who give each other
peace and freedom but no criminal booty. Next are criminals who victimize each
other; they have the booty they take, but not the booty taken from them, and of
course they lack the peace and freedom created by the obedient. At the bottom
Prisoner B
Cooperates Defects
A gets 1 year A gets 5 years
Cooperates
B gets 1 year B gets 0 years
Prisoner A
A gets 0 years A gets 3 years
Defects
B gets 5 years B gets 3 years
Figure 1
95
NINE NEW OPINIONS
are the chumps, law-abiding citizens who are victims of crime without the fruits
of crime to compensate them.
Now the reason to bring the technicalities of the prisoner's dilemma into our
discussion is that it is the most succinct and elegant way to establish (1) that it is
rational to cooperate only with other cooperators, (2) that it is rational to defect
against defectors, (3) that law-abiding citizens can be chumps, and (4) that when
defection is rational, there is no deterrent to it except punishment of an offset-
ting magnitude.
If we accept the argument that the defendant acted from necessity, must we
acquit him? Or might we still have a good reason to punish him? If this was the
sort of crime in which law-abiding cooperators were made chumps by rational
defectors, then punishment is justified in order to make defection more costly
than cooperation and to deter future rational defectors who find themselves in
the same situation.
Now we can assume that the spelunkers are rational cost-benefit calculators.
One piece of evidence is their lengthy discussion of the mathematics of the
lottery. Another is the tendency of even unreflective people to seek their own
advantage and to find it. If the spelunkers were rational criminals, therefore,
the question becomes whether they were the sort who need punishment, that is,
the sort to take advantage of the scruples of the law-abiding. Is that the case
here?
The answer is yes. The spelunkers showed that they were willing to kill a
person who was unwilling to kill a person. They were willing to defect against a
cooperator. They were willing to make a chump out of a law-abiding citizen.
When Whetmore backed out of the lottery and expressed his desire to wait a
week, he was saying in effect that he wished to obey the law against murder. This
made the others safe from Whetmore for at least a week. But how did they use
their safety and liberty? They took advantage of it at the expense of the man
who made it possible, and killed him.
This is a classic case of defectors exploiting a chump. Hence it is the
classic case in which punishment is justified to increase the loss naturally
arising from defection until it always surpasses the price of cooperation, even
for chumps. Then and only then can we expect a rational actor to choose
cooperation. Only punishment can make rational actors in this situation obey
the law.
Citizens deciding whether to obey the law feel the pressures we have just
described, just as partners in crime, separately interrogated, feel the pressures of
the prisoner's dilemma. But of course we need not claim that citizens and pris-
oners consciously work out the details of their payoff matrix. We claim only that
history shows that laws that would inspire compliance from hypothetical,
rational, cost-benefit calculators tend over time to inspire compliance from real
human beings with the full panoply of desires, interests, evasions, delusions, and
temptations that prevents them thinking rationally.
96
IV
Before closing I would like to reply to Justice Hellen's attempt to strengthen her
argument for the necessity defense by overturning Commonwealth and Vaijean (at p.
67, above). She declares that Vaijean was wrongly decided because it reflects the
"class bias" of the Court and system of criminal justice. She wishes to replace it
with a legal doctrine recognizing the state's responsibility to ameliorate poverty
when private charities are insufficient to the task, and exculpating the "desperate
poor" who commit crimes because the state has not met its obligations.
Does she object to Vaijean because it was based on ideology rather than law?
Or does she object because it was based on bad ideology rather than good
ideology? Her notion that the state should ameliorate poverty and condone
crime caused by poverty it did not ameliorate is, let us say delicately, not written
into our constitution. It is not law but a political proposal. It is a political
ideology. Consequently, if she objects to Vaijean because it was ideological, then
she must apply the same objection to her own alternative. If she objects to Vaijean
because it was bad ideology, then she confesses that her alternative is merely
another ideology. Either way she undercuts her proposal.
All this is most ironic, for she is aware of Justice Burnham's objections to judi-
cial legislation and judicial appeals to justice beyond law, and she has tried to
answer his objections explicitly. But her answer to Burnham is limited to the
claim that judges should implement the better political ideology when they can,
for this will tend to nudge the law closer to ideal justice. This is to say that judges
should behave like legislators, which it was precisely Burnham's purpose to deny.
Hellen has not only begged the question of the limited and proper role of judges
in our legal structure; she has tried to set a precedent that would work against
her own vision of justice. For if her favored ideology were ever embodied in
legislation, she would want the judiciary to apply it with loyalty, consistency, and
restraint, not to subvert, second-guess, or supplant it. For the same reason, she
has tried to set a precedent that would work against every person's hope that
justice can be embodied in legislation.
To citizens of Justice Hellen's persuasion, it would not matter that her posi-
tion violates the judicial oath and the spirit of democracy if it took a real step
toward a more just system of law. Unfortunately, while I believe that her position
fails to take such a step, I cannot show that here without imitating her in using a
judicial opinion to air personal political views. This I will not do. But I can make
the logical observation that her argument is a perfect specimen of special
pleading. She shows that there are reasons to oppose the Vaijean rule and to favor
an alternative, as if this were not true of every legal doctrine ever enunciated by
a human being. Does she ever consider the reasons to favor the Vaijean rule or to
oppose her alternative? Not once. Does she ever compare welfare to markets, or
regulation to efficiency, as means of showing compassion and improving the lives
of the poor? Not once. She has offered a preference but not an argument; she is
a partisan but not an inquirer; despite her talk of diversity and pluralism, she
97
NINE NEW OPINIONS
does not take disagreement seriously. History teaches us that demagoguery of

this kind is very unlikely to have social good on its side. If it were, then the
refined experience of generations would have taught us to let isolated geniuses,
like herself, rather than the refined experience of generations, design our polit-
ical institutions.
v
Finally, I must reply to Justice Frank's peculiar argument that he cannot punish
men for doing what he would have done himself in the same circumstances.
Judges would have to be angels for this view to be compatible with the effective
administration of justice. But, on the contrary, the first premise of law is that
judges are human; that single fact explains virtually everything that is difficult,
interesting, and important about law. Judges need not possess the virtues that
criminals lack. They need only the virtue of knowing the law with clarity and
precision, and the virtue of applying it with courage and consistency. If they
possess these virtues, then their other vices, no matter how numerous or anti-
social, will not interfere with their judging. I can easily imagine punishing a
defendant for a vice I share. Suppose I smoke hemp-weed on weekends. I might
regret this vice in myself and wish to suppress it in my own case. Or I may join
the legislature in wishing to use the criminal law to suppress it in myself and
others. I may even be proud of my proclivities, and zealously advocate a change
in the laws, but nevertheless find my duty as a judge to lie in deference to the
decisions of the legislature when it acts within its constitutional authority. For
any of these reasons I might find a defendant guilty of violating our laws against
the illicit use of controlled substances. This would not make me a hypocrite; it
would make me a good judge who rose above his personal weaknesses to make the
right decision on the law and facts of the case. Justice Frank's scruples would
undermine all the reasons why we wish to have a government of laws and not
men. In addition, he implies that in all the cases he has hitherto decided against
criminal defendants, he has been in a position "to throw the first stone" - a claim
that is as unnecessary as it is incredible.
98
OPINION OF JUSTICE BOND
I must recuse myself from this case. When I was in private practice forty-five
years ago, a partner in my firm argued unsuccessfully against the validity of a
patent on a voltage meter used in the manufacture of the kind of batteries used
in the radio by these spelunkers. A private investigator hired in part with my own
funds confirms that batteries of the kind used by the spelunkers 50 years ago in
their radio are routinely tested by the type of meter that was the subject of the
patent controversy.
I would stop here and rest in silence, but more than one colleague has
privately objected to my decision. They cite two grounds: first, that my connec-
tion to the patent litigation is too remote to warrant recusal, and second, that the
batteries are not relevant to this case. I make no comment on the first ground. In
our Commonwealth, judges may properly recuse themselves if in conscience
they sense a real or apparent conflict of interest, even if other sensitive and
informed people do not perceive it. The dictates of one man's conscience need
not be shared by another; if it were otherwise, exemptions on grounds of
conscience would not play the role in our law that they do.
On the second ground, however, I take the unusual step of explaining my
reasons for recusal in some detail. In a case of this legal significance, followed
with such close attention by the media, it is imperative to satisfY the parties and
the public that I am not simply retreating from a difficult decision. I will limit
these comments to those strictly necessary to show the relevancy of the batteries,
so that I may avoid abusing my recusal by abstaining from the decision while
offering an opinion at the same time. Unfortunately, however, the only way I
know to explain the relevancy of the batteries is, while compelling, not brief
II
My colleagues to a person are either sure that this killing was willful or sure that
it was not willful. The warmth of this disagreement ought itself be a clue that
99
NINE NEW OPINIONS
perhaps they are arguing about policy, not words. The term "willful" as applied
to killings has a certain canonical, standard meaning. The core of the settled,
standard meaning of the term refers to premeditation, intent, and voluntariness.
But like every other adjective, such as "bald" or "tall," this term has an indeter-
minately large area of open texture where we cannot be sure that it does, or does
not, properly apply. If a man's hairline has receded just so jar, then we may call
him "bald" or "not bald," at our pleasure, and not expect to hear anyone accuse
us of misusing the language.
This case falls into the open texture of the term "willful." We may call this
killing "willful" or "not willful" without misusing the term. The disagreement of
learned judges, all native speakers of the language, establishes this immediately.
(How plain can the plain meaning of the word be if Burnham and Goad think
"willful" accurately describes this killing and Springham and Hellen do noel But
if the killing may be called "willful" or "not willful" with equal fidelity to the
language, then this shows that we may no longer expect guidance in our decision
from the word "willful."
But if we can expect no further guidance from the term "willful," then we can
expect no guidance from the murder statute, for it convicts or acquits defendants
solely through the concept of willfulness (when, as here, the taking of life is
conceded). This is a case, then, in which our laws are uncharacteristically silent
and unhelpful. This, then, is a perfect example of what is often called a hard case.
The only way to decide a hard case, where the relevant laws are vague or
inconsistent or silent, is to find a standard external to the law. This is not a
cynical or incendiary statement; it simply spells out the consequences of hardness
in the present sense. Hard cases mean that the law is unhelpful, and the unhelp-
fulness of the law means that discretion is unavoidable, and discretion means
that extra-legal standards must come into play. Resort to a standard external to
the law, however, frightens colleagues of a certain political bent, for it opens the
door to judicial legislation - a professional sin in most nations, but also a cause of
past revolution, bloodshed, and misery in our own (see Justice Keen at p. 21,
above).
But every hard case unavoidably opens this door. It is opened by the nature of
things, for human legislators cannot capture the complexity of life in a net of
rules. Even if legislators were not limited in their wisdom, they would be limited
by their language. Legislators must express their rules in words, and words by
their nature have settled meanings at the core and open texture at the periphery;
and inevitably scenarios of life will arise that fall within the open texture. In this
case the legislature failed to elaborate to a sufficiently fine level of detail the state
of mind that the Commonwealth must prove before it convicts a defendant of
murder. In other hard cases the insufficiency of articulation shows up at other
points. But no conceivable finite addendum to our criminal code would suffice to
cover without vagueness or open texture all the cases that actually arise in life.
My colleagues who fear judicial discretion, therefore, are like people who fear
death. They fear the inevitable. The remedy is not to rail against the inevitable, a
100
patently infantile response, but to quiet our fears, acknowledge the unavoidable
role for discretion, and take pains to avoid abusing our discretion. Discretion
does indeed contain the risk of judicial usurpation or abuse, but when exercised
responsibly it need not rise to usurpation itself
Justice Reckon's opinion neatly but inadvertently embodies my thesis. He
fears judicial discretion, under the name of judicial legislation, and criticizes
Justice Hellen for turning to it. But he proves that it is unavoidable by turning to
it himself For if Hellen's conclusions about poverty, social justice, and the
responsibility of the state reflect her political ideology more than current law,
then what shall we say of Reckon's proposal to abolish mental excuses, his pref-
erence for an exceptionless rule of strict liability, and even the priority he gives to
the social goal of crime reduction?
For Burnham and Reckon, discretion is objectionable because it does not tie a
judge's hands; on the contrary, it leaves judges free. But if Burnham and Reckon
could have their way, and magically prevent judges from using any methods that
left reasonable people free to disagree, then they would bring the administration
of justice to a standstill, even if they could first replace all judges they regard as
usurpers with judges more to their liking. In that regime, judges could only apply
those laws that could be applied mechanically. But can anybody produce even
one example of such a law? Judges could not apply any statute in which even
one word required interpretation, and certainly could not adjudicate hard cases.
Can this forced retirement be the "proper role" of judges they speak so much
of? (See Burnham at p. 43, and Reckon at p. 97, above.)
Justice Springham argues that statutory interpretation, while not mechanical,
is guided by standards, and that because the law already contains all the relevant
standards, we need not resort to discretion or extra-legal norms in order to adju-
dicate even hard cases. This is to say that the law is never vague, silent, or
inconsistent, but exceedingly vast and complex. But we are on the verge of quib-
bling about words. For if, on the one hand, the standards- already in the law do
not force a single decision mechanically, then the judge is free in a way that is well
captured by the word "discretion." And if, on the other hand, the standards
already in the law do force a decision, entirely without the aid of any extra-legal
norms, then the process is really mechanical. The process may not be mechan-
ical in practice because [mite human judges lack the time, capacity, erudition,
and resources to bring together, and hold together, all the factors from the vast-
ness of law whose vector is the one correct outcome. But if so, then it is pointless
to insist that the law already contains all the relevant standards, even if true; for
finite human judges will be unable to ascertain them all and must still creatively
develop applicable standards as if the law were vague, silent, or inconsistent.
And this creative development of standards is, also, well captured by the word
"discretion. "
Although I have distinguished discretion from usurpation in order to console
those who fear discretion, I believe it is more constructive to replace this fear
with hope and hard work than to console it. I do not fear discretion at all, but
101
NINE NEW OPINIONS
welcome it. Discretion, and discretion alone, gives us a chance to find where
justice lies in hard cases where (again, by definition) the law is vague, silent, or
inconsistent. If a hard case is one that the legislature did not foresee or decide by
its legislative language, then the hardness of the case means that judges will
examine for the first time the issues the case raises, if anybody is to examine them.
This makes discretion a precious opportunity to find justice, not a distressing risk
of usurpation. Discretion allows us to face squarely the features that make a case
difficult and to craft a resolution that fits those unique and difficult facts.
Someone might argue that this case was not entirely unforeseen by the legisla-
ture. In the wake of Spelunkers I, several proposals to amend the murder statute
were raised in the legislature. In defeating them, the legislature was saying, in
effect, that the present murder statute is adequate to deal with such unusual
circumstances. By contrast, there was no basis to make this claim of legislative
intent in Spelunkers I. While this position has a factual basis in legislative
consciousness of the speluncean dilemma, it does not establish what the legisla-
tive intent is with the specificity required to make discretion unnecessary. Did the
legislature intend that spelunkers in this situation be convicted of murder and be
executed? We cannot say. It appears that a legislative majority was satisfied with
the outcome of Spelunkers I. But the legislature's non-action could be due to the
fact that the bloc wishing to amend the statute to insure guilty verdicts in cases of
this kind was offset and neutralized by the bloc wishing to insure not-guilty
verdicts. Moreover, the legislature knew that the language of the statute
supported several reasonable theories of acquittal. Hence, even a clear majority
satisfied with the outcome of Spelunkers I had a good reason to amend the statute
to make its intention unmistakable in the future. Therefore, the legislature's non-
amendment of the statute either raises doubt about the majority's position, or it
throws us back to the uncertainty faced by our colleagues in Spelunkers I. Either
way, we must ignore the complexity introduced by explicit non-amendment and
deliberate as if the legislature had no intention for this case capable of guiding us.
If we try to minimize discretion, we end up relying on tenuous clues to the
legislature's intent, belabored and over-interpreted, or rules intended for other
branches of law, refracted by analogy, all to support our wishful thinking that the
legislature did in fact have an intention for cases of this kind. But what we know
about the present case, once we know that it is hard, is that the actual historical
legislature never dreamed of this case, never examined the issues raised by this
case, and never decided that the defendants in such cases were, or were not,
to be punished as murderers. Therefore in hard cases legislative intent is non-
existent and judicial examination of the facts and issues is the only possible path
to justice.
This view of discretion has the virtue of answering an objection raised by
Justice Keen. He believed that the statute requires us to convict the spelunkers,
even if we have moral reservations about doing so. While he admitted to these
moral reservations himself (at p. 24, above), he took a certain delight in finding
the four defendants in Spelunkers I guilty. He even insisted that for judges to
102
enforce the bad consequences of bad law has "a certain moral value by bringing
home to the people their own responsibilities toward the law that is ultimately
their creation, and by reminding them that there is no principle of personal
grace that can relieve the mistakes of their representatives" (p. 24, above). In
short, judges ought to lend their weight to the injustice of unjust legislation, for
then the people will wake up and pressure the legislature to change the laws; this
is better, he argued, than for the judges to change the laws themselves, as if these
were the only alternatives.
The merit of discretion, however, is that it does not "change" the law so much
as render its indeterminate fringes determinate. How the law applies to one kind
of unforeseen case is then settled rather than still unsettled. This is a proper job
for the judiciary, because it requires the application of general norms to partic-
ular cases. If the legislature did reform the law, it would leave new areas of open
texture, requiring future exercises of judicial discretion. Keen tried to live up to
his abstract principle by executing four defendants. That did indeed wake up the
public, which called for a change of law, although without success. But surely in
a Commonwealth civilized enough to settle its disputes in a court of law, we do
not bring about legal change through human sacrifice.
III
Having found discretion unavoidable, and welcome, even if dangerous, I would

then have undertaken a thorough investigation of the relevant moral and polit-
ical principles that might inform the discretion of a good judge facing the
present case. But to stick to those needed to show the relevancy of the radio
batteries, I must detail only one small part of that investigation.
As more than one colleague has already found relevant to this case, the
government of our Commonwealth was founded upon an explicit contract made
by the survivors of the holocaust in the first period following the Great Spiral
(see, e.g., pp. 12, 55, 81, above). But, as all contract philosophers observe, a
government cannot originate in a social contract unless the original parties to
that contract can withdraw from the nation or sovereign that previously held
them, dissolving the bands of one government in order to forge new ones. But if
our ancestors could withdraw from their former nation or sovereign, then
modern Newgarthians may do likewise, for another principle of the contract
view of law holds that the members of the founding generation shall not enjoy
more liberty than their descendants.
This leads me to pick up a theme first aired by Justice Foster, that these
spelunkers drew up for themselves, in their cave, "as it were, a new charter of
government" (at p. 11, above). But I will be more direct and explicit: these
spelunkers withdrew from the sovereignty of Newgarth and formed a new social
contract inside the cave. A nation with a different history might scoff at our will-
ingness to entertain such a theory. But to Newgarthians, the spectacle of men
103
NINE NEW OPINIONS
seceding from one nation to start another is not just a story of surpassing patri-
otic and mythopoeic power, but our most fundamental method of explaining to
one another our obligation to obey the law through principles of consent and
contract. For us, the obligation to obey is not eternal, deriving from reason or
heaven. It turns on material events that arose at one point in our history, and
might arise again. It is the rhythm of secession and establishment, renunciation
and reunion, revolution and restoration, that explains law and nationhood for us,
and that we see in microcosm in the present case.
In short, the spelunkers performed a peaceful revolution inside the cave. Now
in deciding what to make of this fact, I must be cautious not to exceed my
mandate and give a full opinion, for example, asserting that their peaceful revo-
lution means that they were no longer subject to Newgarth's criminal law.
Before the men made the pact that I am calling a new social contract, they
asked by radio for a legal ruling on their lottery plan (see p. 8, above). This indi-
cates a willingness, even an eagerness, to follow Newgarthian law. But the silence
of the Commonwealth in response to their query rings like a bell. In response to
the silence of the state, the men turned off their radio and decided for them-
selves whether to adopt a new covenant with one another different from the
covenant under which they had previously lived in Newgarth. Three days after
they voluntarily turned off their radio, they killed Roger Whetmore (see p. 8,
above). During those three days, I contend, the men solemnized their secession
from the laws of Newgarth and their establishment of an alternative code under
which to live and die.
I can imagine three objections to this account.
I. The men could not have intended to secede and form a new nation if they
sought by radio to know and obey the laws of Newgarth.
This objection ignores the order of events. Yes, the men did initially seek to
follow our laws. But when they received no help from us in doing so, they
made a new and different decision, and they never again showed any curiosity
about the requirements of our laws. Not only was their initial willingness
reversed by later events, the events that led them to change their minds are
manifestly the responsibility of the Commonwealth. Speaking broadly for the
judges and officials of our state, we must accept responsibility for turning these
men away from the doors of our law. Our clergy are equally guilty of failing to
respond to the spelunkers' question (see p. 8, above). These two failures
together left the spelunkers with no norms of church or state to guide their
decisions, leaving them to rely on norms of their own devising - a new social
contract.
2. The cost of the rescue was underwritten in part by a legislative grant of
hundreds of thousands of frelars (see p. 7, above). This shows the Commonwealth
taking responsibility for the men as if they still belonged to our society.
This objection is easily answered. At best it shows the attitude of the
Commonwealth, not that of the men. The spelunkers might have made their
revolution effective and complete without the consent of Newgarth; indeed,
104
Newgarth's consent would make revolution unnecessary. Second, the

Commonwealth funds were apparently not expended until the private funds of
the Speluncean Society were exhausted (see p. 7, above), showing our legislature
anxious to avoid spending public moneys on the rescue until absolutely neces-
sary. Third, the Commonwealth might well spend public moneys to rescue
foreign citizens trapped inside a cave in our Central Plateau without conscripting
the unlucky explorers to Newgarthian citizenship.
3. Finally, it might be objected that a Newgarthian judge on the scene might
not have been able to condense our law into a sentence suitable for transmitting
as the answer to the spelunkers' radio question. The spelunkers asked whether it
would be advisable to throw dice in order to select a member of their party to
kill and eat (at p. 8, above). My own view of open texture and discretion, as well
as our several disagreements, suggest that Newgarthian law has no easy or
obvious answer to the spelunkers' question. So a judge on the scene could not
have answered their question without misleading them on the state of our law.
Hence, the objection would go, we cannot blame Newgarth for its radio silence,
which might have been more helpful and comforting than the disputatious
disquisitions of nine Supreme Court justices.
This objection, while apparently strong, is beside the point and easily
answered. First, no official of our government even tried to answer the
spelunkers' question. We would have a very different case if an official had
offered advice that the men followed but that the members of this Court found
contrary to the actual dictates of our law, or if an official had given correct
advice but the spelunkers had not followed it. In fact, however, no attempt was
made. Second, the issue here is not whether it would have been easy to give an
accurate answer to the men's question; it is whether the men had a reason to
turn from Newgarthian law to laws of their own creation inside the cave. The
state's radio silence, even if somehow justified or superior to the alternative,
operated as just such a reason, throwing the men onto their own resources for
coping with their situation.
Justice Tatting attempted to reduce Justice Foster's incipient version of this
thesis to absurdity by asking (at p. 15, above), "If these men passed from the
jurisdiction of our law ... ,at what moment did this occur? Was it when the
entrance to the cave was blocked, or when the threat of starvation reached a
certain undefined degree of intensity, or when the agreement for the throwing of
the dice was made?" Foster might have had difficulty answering this question, for
in fact he wavered inconsistently between the views that this killing occurred in
the state of nature (at p. 11, above) and that it occurred under a new charter of
government (at p. II, above). But as refined here, this theory provides a most
clear and compelling answer: the men passed from the jurisdiction of our law
when they agreed to throw the dice, for that was the moment they adopted the
pact that formed their new and superseding social contract. Similarly, Tatting
facetiously wondered (at p. 15, above) whether the men were beyond our juris-
diction "because of the thickness of the rock that imprisoned them, or because
105
NINE NEW OPINIONS
they were hungry, or because they had set up a 'new charter of government' by
which the usual rules of law were to be supplanted by a throw of the dice."
Again the answer is clearly the third on Tatting's list. If Foster had lived up to the
theory implicit in his phrase, "new charter of government," instead of confusing
that sort of revolution with a return to a state of nature, or if Tatting had
remembered the sufficiency of contract to establish a sovereign state, which all
good Newgarthians learn in elementary school, then Tatting would not have
thought his weak rhetorical questions amounted to a reductio ad absurdum.
When the starving men could not learn what Newgarth law required of them,
they decided what to require of themselves. This reading of the case shifts the
focus from the spelunkers' rights - for example, Springham's right of self-
preservation or Trumpet's right of equality - to their responsibility to create a
code of conduct and live loyally and consistently up to its terms. It is a needed
corrective to the one-sided view that rights trump all other considerations,
including responsibilities. It shows that rights and responsibilities are so
intimately reciprocal that they can be established in the same act of consent, and
reflected in the same throw of dice.
I need not reach many auxiliary questions here, such as whether their new
code of conduct derived properly from the consent of those to be governed by it.
If I were writing a full opinion, and not merely the fragment needed to show the
relevancy of the batteries, I would fully explore the question whether Whetmore
revoked his consent to the new pact; whether, if so, the spelunkers killed a citizen
of Newgarth, thereby bringing their act within the jurisdiction of our laws;
whether the very idea of revoking consent to a social contract evokes too much
of the old individualism to be reconciled with the idea of a social contract itself
(as if individuals constituted, rather than were constituted by, their societies);
whether the spelunkers' acceptance of Newgarthian government services while
in the cave - the subsidized portion of the rescue - establishes their tacit consent
to Newgarthian laws; and whether the rationality that drove them toward their
new state of law is Justice Reckon's pitifully shrunken and technical sort, Goad's
sentimental hybrid, or the more full-bodied kind exercised by our ancestors when
they formed the contract that underlies our Commonwealth.
IV
This argument turns critically on the change of mind that we infer must have
taken place in the spelunkers after the Commonwealth met their radio question
with silence. If there was no change of mind, then the spelunkers' initial willing-
ness to know and obey Newgarthian law persisted and we would have little
reason to suppose that the men turned from our law to form a new social
contract.
Now we know that after the state refused to answer the spelunkers' question,
the trapped men made no further radio broadcasts (Truepenny at p. 8, above).
106
Those in the rescue camp believed the radio batteries inside the cave must have
gone dead, but this proved to be incorrect (p. 8, above). If the batteries had truly
died, then we would not know what to infer from their radio silence; it could
signifY a change of mind or a failure of equipment. The men might have
asserted at trial that they changed their minds inside the cave, and created a new
state, but we could always suspect that they were fabricating for the sake of
tactical advantage. But because we know the batteries still held their charge, we
know that the spelunkers' radio silence was deliberate and voluntary. This fact
supports our view that they turned their backs on Newgarthian law, after it
turned its back on them, and drew up their own code of conduct to deal with
their plight. It supports the view that the men effected a peaceful revolution.
This reading of the case puts uppermost our historic principle of deriving law
from consent and contract, and yet depends essentially on the batteries in the
spelunkers' radio. If the batteries had expired, our reading would be compatible
with the known facts but entirely conjectural. Now I am careful not to say that
this reading is the true one, and draw the consequence for the defendant's guilt
or innocence. For I have waived my right to rule on the facts of the case. I
conclude only that the capacity of these batteries to hold their charge is relevant
to the outcome of the case, and hence that my entanglement with past litigation
concerning equipment to test and monitor that capacity forces me to recuse
myself
I regretfully abstain.
The Supreme Court, being evenly divided, the conviction and sentence of the
Court of General Instances is qfjirmed. It is ordered that the execution of the
sentence shall occur at 6 a.m., Friday, April 3, 4350, at which time the Public
Executioner is directed to proceed with all convenient dispatch to hang the
defendant by the neck until he is dead.
107
INDEX
abstraction 25,26,27,28,45,54,64,66, Commonwealth v. Parry 17,23,40,54, 78

67,71,78,79,86,87,88,102 Commonwealth v. Runes 47 n.
adjudication x, xii, 42, 43, 48, 99, 100; Commonwealth v. Scape 17, 40, 54, 78
mechanical 100; see also judiciary Commonwealth v. Staymore 13, 48, 52, 53, 55,
affIrmative defenses 91 74, 75
aggravating circumstances 60 Commonwealth v. Vaijean 17, 18,38,49,50,
analogy 17,66,70,71,79,80,81,82,84, 67-8,97
85, 101 conscience 42, 45, 90, 98
Aristotle 32, 65 constraints ix-x
assumption of risk 39, 51, 52, 60, 83 Coombs, Mary xi
cost-benefit analysis 12,58,59, 76-7, 92,
balance of powers within government 14, 94-6
20,21,22,25,28,40,42,48,56,63,
74,97,98,100,101,102 D'Amato, Anthony ix n., xi, 76n., 80n.
Baldwin, Henry 2 death penalty 3, 5, 9,12,19,31,40,41,
benefit of the doubt 47, 50 56,58,59,69,78,85,86,89,102,106;
Bentham,Jeremy 85 see also punishment
black-letter law 68 democracy 43, 44, 71, 97
Bond,Justice 98-106 deterrence 14, 16, 17, 18,22,23,40,53,
Brooks, Edwin 2 54,69,70,74,78,86,89,90,91,92,
Burnham,Justice 35-44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 93-6
52,53,54,58,59,60,62,63,68,71-2, dice throw, fairness of 3, 8-9, 53, 80; see
73,74,86-7,93,97,99,100 also lottery
diminished capacity 46,48, 70,83,84,87;
Cahn, Naomi xi see also insanity
Caimore,John xi disagreement: among experts 92, 93;

cannibalism 1,2,3,23,28,38,49,50,59, among precedents 17, 18-19, 40, 53;
69, 75 within a jury 27, 38, 70; within the
civil disobedience 72 legislature 42, 101; within society 4,43,
civil war 3, 21, 42, 99; see also revolution, 69,71,72,87,97-8; within the
war Supreme Court xi, xii, 3, 4, 25, 36, 40,
class 67,71,87,97,100 45,69,70-1,79,89,97,99,100,104,
clean hands 80 106; also see pluralism
clemency 2,3,9,20,26,27,28,37,44,63, discretion: executive (in the pardoning
66n.; see also executive branch, mercy decision) 63; judicial 9, 26, 35, 45, 46,
common sense 10,26,27,28,29,30,45, 47,48,99-102, 104; prosecutorial2,
68, 78 19,27,28,30,35,37
Commonwealth v. Makeover 17, 40, 54 Dudley, Thomas 2
108
INDEX
emotion xii, 15,25,27,37,38,48,56,71, 100, 101; see also disagreement among

83,86-8,89 precedents
equality 59-60,61,62, 73-4, 77,81,87, insanity 46, 47, 70,84,92; see also
89,105 diminished capacity
Eskridge, William N.,jr. ix n. instinct 17,40,41,54,65,68, 74
excuses x, 16,48,51,62,84,91,92,93, instructions to the jury 2, 27
100 interests xii, 71, 72, 74, 79,82,87,93,96,
executive branch 2, 3, 9, 10,20,21,27,28, 98
29,37,41,44,63, 66n.; see also balance
of powers jesus 74, 85
extortion 65 judiciary 14, 20, 21, 22, 25, 42, 47n., 56,
extra-legal standards 45, 68, 84, 99, 100, 63; judicial legislation 3,13,21,22,23,
103 25,40,42,43,48,66,74,97,99,100,
102;judicialoath 15,37,45,97;
facts of this case 7-9, 35-6 judicial review 56, 77-8; see also
fairness 9, 11,39,40,52,55,56,59,60, adjudication, balance of powers,
65,70,75,90 discretion, statutory interpretation
fallibility of lawmakers 13, 14, 24, 27, 36, jurisdiction 3, II, 15, 16,54,55, 103, 104,
40,44,63,68,71,74,98,99 105
Fehler v. Neegas 13, 40, 54 justice x, 9, 10, II, 21, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47,
fictions 12, 20, 67, 71, 82, 10 I 55,61,63,67,68,71,72,73,74,75,
flag burning 4 78,80,84,86,87,97,100,101,102
Foster,justice 10-14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19,20, justifications x, 48, 62, 63, 84, 91, 92, 93
21,22,23,24,26,27,29,40,44,45,
46,54,55, 74, 79,81, 102, 104, 105 Katz, Leo 3
Frank,justice 89-90, 93, 98 Keen,justice 20-4, 26, 29, 36, 37, 42, 45,
Fuller, Lon ix-x, xi-xii, 1,3-4, 5n., 32 74, 79,99, 101, 102
games 26, 69, 70 lawlessness, risk of xii, 9, 38, 48, 52, 75,
gender64,65,67,69,79,81 100
Goad,justice xii, 79-88, 89, 93, 99, 105 legislature 14,21,25,37,40,41,42, 47n.,
Great Spiral 12, 23, 55, 81, 102 48,56,62,67,71-2,91,99,101,102,
Greene, Dwight xi 103; legislative intent 14, 22, 23, 40, 41,
42,47,48,52,53,56, 74, 99, 101;
Handy,justice 25-30, 36, 45, 46 legislative supremacy 14,21,22,74,98;
Harcourt, William 2 when the legislature is unrepresentative
hard cases 4, 24, 45, 46, 62, 90, 99, 100, 21, 71, 72; see also balance of powers
101 legitimacy of government 12, 55, 81, 82

Hart, H.L.A. 4 letter v. spirit of laws 9, 13, 21, 27, 40, 47,
Hellen,justice 64--72,73, 77, 79,80,82, 63,68
84,85,89,97-8,99,100 life: sanctity of 12, 13,73-4,76-7,78,91;
homicide x, 48, 69, 75; see also value of 12, 13,58,61,66,73
manslaughter, murder Llcke,john 44, 55
Hume, David xii lottery 2,3,8, 18, 35, 39, 46, 52, 58, 59,
60,61,65,70,73,76,77,80,83,89,
ideal law 43, 71, 85, 97 103; see also dice throw; mathematical
ideology xii, 87, 97, 100 discussion; Whetmore, his consent or
imagination 37, 40, 50, 51, 59, 60, 66,71, dissent
75,90,98
inconsistency of law 13, 48, 77, 85, 99, manslaughter I
109
INDEX
mathematical discussion 8, 17, 35, 36, 39, one right answer 87, 100
46, 59, 65, 70, 80, 96; see also lottery open texture of words 99, 102, 104; see also
mens rea (or criminal intent) 41, 46, 48, 49, statutory interpretation
52,53,56,62,69,81,82,83,91; see
also excuses, willfulness Parker, Richard 2
mercy 63; see also clemency Pascal, Blaise 87
Miller, Geoffrey xi Paul, Jeremy xi
mistrial 27, 38, 70 people, the: as sovereign 24, 42, 43, 102;
mitigating circumstances 55, 60, 86 their will 25, 26, 42, 43, 71; see also
morality: of the case 20, 36, 37, 76,83; public opinion, social contract
personal views of 20, 21, 37,42,43,44, Pericles 32
45, 71; relation to law 4, II, 12,20,21, plain meaning 21, 40, 41, 42, 48, 52, 74,
37,41,42,43,44,45,48,67,76,78, 99; see also statutory interpretation
81,85,90,91,93, 101, 102 Plato 32
murder: consent of the victim is no defense pluralism 43,71-2,87,97; see also
27,53,57,60,75,80; method of disagreement
selecting victim 18,36, 39,40,46,52, politics, its relation to law xi, 3, 26, 42, 47,
60, 61, 75, 89, 104; see also murder 56,67,86-7,91,93,97-8,99,100,102
statute, willfulness positivism 4
murder statute 37, 62, 99; attempts to precedents 3, 47, 48, 74; missing 48,53;
amend 24, 35, 37,101,102; its overturning 18,67, 74, 84, 91, 97; see
applicability to this case 10, II, 13, 14, also disagreement among precedents
preventive killing 57-9, 74, 76-7
15, 103, 104; its constitutionality 56,
prisoner's dilemma 94-6
78,86; its discriminatory impact 87; its
privilege 2, 43,71,86-7
mandatory death penalty 3, 9, 35, 55,
property rights 66
56,78; its meaning 13, 14,40,41,42,
public opinion 3, 4, 24, 26, 27, 28, 30, 36,
48,52, 74, 78, 86, 99; its purpose 10,
45, 46, 48, 54, 92; see also the people
13, 14, 16,21,22,23,25,40,42,53-4,
punishment: consequences of 53-4, 69,
57, 74, 78,93; its silence on excuses 89, 91, 92, 94; constitutionality of 55,
and justifications 9, 13, 40, 41, 48, 62, 56, 78; rationale of 53--4, 68, 69, 78,
74; its simplicity 35; its wording 9, 13, 91,92,93,94-6; should fit the crime
20, 35; see also statutory interpretation, 35,55-6,68; without fault 91, 92-3; see
willfulness also death penalty
natural law 4, 10, II, 16,25,26,45,55, Queen Victoria 2

74,85
necessity 1-2,3,46,48,53,62-3,64,66, race 40, 86
67,68, 73,80,82,89; arguments radio 3, 7, 8, 39, 49, 51, 52, 77, 83, 98,
against 38--40,59,74-7,79,82-3, 103, 104, 105, 106; batteries 8, 98, 102,
84-5,86,91,92-3; arguments for 105, 106
48-53,55,57-9,63,65,66,67,68,69, rape 64, 65,70,79,80,81,82,83-4
91; arising from poverty 67,87,97; rationality xii, 45, 59, 69,70,71,87-8,91,
arising from starvation 17-18,35,38, 93, 94, 96, 102, 105; see also reasoning
49,67,69; as ajustification 62-3, 84, reasonable doubt 38, 47, 53, 70-1
91; as an excuse 62, 84, 91; good faith reasoning ix, xii, 18,70,71,86,87-8,97;
belief in 38, 48, 62, 75; reasonable see also rationality
belief in 38, 48, 49, 50, 53, 57, 62, 75; Reckon,Justice 91-8, 100, 105
hypothetical necessity 76-7; not for Regina v. Dudlry & Stephens I, 2-3
homicide 73, 74, 75,84; not for rape 83 rehabilitation 17, 40, 54
negligence 39, 50, 51, 52, 57 remand 56, 78
110
INDEX
rescue 3, 7, 8, 9, 12, 39, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55, suicide: assisted 4; no volunteers 50, 59,
57,61,77,103,104,105,106 73, 76,85, 158
responsibility 24, 41, 44, 63, 79, 82-3, 84, supererogatory acts 85
89,92,97, 100, 102, 103, 105 sympathy 2,3,9, 15,37,38,80,82,83,86,
retribution 17,40,54,68,69, 78,85 87,88,90,97
revolution, peaceful 103, 104, 105, 106
robbery 64, 65 Tally,justice 57-63, 73, 74, 76, 77,82,84
rules 26, 27, 68, 69, 70, 71, 86, 87, 99
Tatting,justice 15-19, 20, 22, 23, 28, 30,
31,40,45,.46,55,67, 75,84, 104, 105
saintliness 85, 94 tradition 3, 10, 11, 17,22,40,58, 106
self-defense 13,23,40,41,51,55,57-9, Truepenny,justice 7-9,10,20,28,29,31,
60,65,66,67,84,85; arguments that it 32,35,36,44,45,63,105
does not apply to this case 23, 46, 58, Trumpet,justice 73-8,85,91, 105
61,66, 73, 75,80; arguments that it
Tyler,john 2
may apply to this case 40, 46, 50, 65-7;
tyranny 42,43,65,81
battered woman's defense 65, 66, 81;
imminence requirement 65, 66; a
judicial invention 3,13,14,16,24,27, US. v. Holmes 1-2, 3
40,66,67, 74; not a defense for the usurpation 14,40,100,101
aggressor 23,57,58,61,66;
proportionality requirement 50,57 verdict, special 2, 3, 9, 28
self-fulflliing predictions 86 virtue 68, 77, 85, 90, 98
self-help 22, 54
self-preservation 46, 50, 66, 73, 75, 105 war 58, 59, 93; see alSo civil war, revolution
self-protection 22, 57, 68, 69,78,91,92 weakness: physical weakness 2, 18,39,49,
Simpson, A.W Brian 3 50,59-60,61, 70, 75, 89; weakest
social contract 3, 11-12, 55, 60, 81-2, 102, member of the party 2, 39, 59-60, 61;
103, 104, 105 weakness of will 74, 89, 98
social-historical context of law 25, 42, 43, Whetmore, Roger 7-9, 66, 73, 75, 80-1,
67,68,70,71,72,86,87,102,103,105
85, 89, 103; had a right to defend
Socrates 74, 85
himself 16, 79,84; his consent or
sodomy 4
dissent 3, 8-9, 16, 18,39,40,52,60,
Spelunkers 135, 36, 45, 65, 66n., 69, 84, 10 1
61, 75, 79,80,82, 105; not an
spelunking: a risky sport 39, 51, 52; a sport
of the affluent 86-7 aggressor 23, 58, 61, 62, 66, 67,75,76,
Springham,justice 45-56, 57, 59, 60, 62, 80, 81; proposed the lottery 8, II, 60,
66,67,68,73,74,75,80,82,84,89, 80; unwilling to kill 8, 38,61,96;
91,99, 100, 105 willing to wait 8, 38, 49, 96
standard of review 9, 53, 70 willfulness 17,35,40,46,47,48,62,64,
state of nature 11, 15, 16, 54, 55, 104, 105 74,79,98-9; arguments against 40,41,
statutory interpretation 13, 14,21,22,23, 46,48,53,64,65,68,69,70;
24,40,41,42,47,48,53,74,78,86, arguments for 17,36,37,38,46,53;
99, 100, 101; see alSO adjudication, irrelevant to this case 62-3, 68; self-
discretion, judiciary, legislature, murder defense not willful 17,23,40,46; see alSO
statute, open texture, plain meaning mens rea, murder statute
Stein, Laura xi workmen, killed in rescue 3, 7, 12, 19, 36,
Stephens, Edwin 2 58-9
strict liability 91, 92, 93, 100 wrongful death 77
III

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Copyright © 1998. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

London and New York

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 10: 0-415-18546-7 (pbk)

ISBN 13: 978-0-415-18546-2 (pbk)

Opinion of Chief Justice Truepenny 7

Opinion of Justice Foster 10

Opinion of Justice Tatting 15

Opinion of Justice Keen 20

Opinion of Justice Handy 25

Opinion of Justice Tatting 31

Opinion of Chief Justice Burnham 35

Opinion of Justice Springham 45

Opinion of Justice Tally 57

Opinion of Justice Hellen 64

Opinion of Justice Trumpet 73

Opinion of Justice Goad 79

Opinion of Justice Frank 89

Opinion of Justice Reckon 91

Opinion of Justice Bond 99

ways of deviating from one-to-one correspondence are present here. Blending

patibility of these legal philosophies it itself a clue to the nature of adjudication.

authentically emerge from important moral, legal, political, or philosophical

Lon Fuller (1902-78) was a Texan, educated at Stanford, who taught at

independent variable or an afterthought.

LON FULLER'S CASE OF THE

The four defendants are members of the Speluncean Society, an organization of

I am shocked that the Chief Justice, in an effort to escape the embarrassments of

a crime to kill another is to be found in the following line of reasoning. One of

In the discharge of my duties as a justice of this Court, I am usually able to

administer the laws of that Commonwealth. By what authority do we resolve

brother's interpretation of the rationale of the excuse of self-defense is in fact

to set off one explanation, incorporated in a virtually unknown precedent of this

sion of the case is counterbalanced by an opposing consideration leading in the

and ignore the long-run implications of an assumption by the judiciary of a

I have listened with amazement to the tortured ratiocinations to which this

happened to be a lawyer. His learning enabled him to devise a form of words

on information that could be characterized as gossip. If I had my way this would

NINE NEW OPINIONS

Justice Handy concluded Spelunkers I by appeal to public opinion and newspaper

punishment is compatible with our murder statute; it is compatible because, like

- and voted by their consciences - their divisions and disagreements prevent us

N ewgarth recognizes necessity as a general defense to criminal charges. This

men who were left to choose their method of suffering.

adoption of our murder statute, to use a criterion close to Burnham's heart.

because of an unforeseen political demonstration. His obligation to stay in that

We all acknowledge that killing in self-defense is not murder in Newgarth, and

One reason we tolerate preventive killing in the case of self-defense is that we

ment over a fair lottery.

Whetmore's consent or lack of it might be germane to this case. If he was

Similarly, killing in self-defense is not always instinctual or impulsive, imme-

The weakness of Burnham's argument may come clear with an analogy. A

defend himself, which is incompatible with the defense theory of necessity.

him from saving his life at the expense of another.

seemed to be arguing in Spelunkers I (at p. 16, above). Therefore, the spelunkers

Having found the defendant guilty of murder, I append a final reflection on

purpose or other. This simplification is not motivated by understanding and

scruple prevents me from taking such an evasion. The length of Springham's

just as inviting to sophistry, hair-splitting, and expert disagreement, and therefore

Several of my colleagues wonder whether punishing the defendant will "serve