Criminal Law
The links below will take you to study aids and practice exams for the Criminal Law course.
The study aids have been carefully selected and recommended for each course. The practice exams have not
been. They are just a collection of exams
I or others have found around the web. I tried to grab relatively recent exams
and tried to pick only one or two from each professor.
Crim is, in some ways, a difficult course to study for. Each state has its own set of criminal laws. If your professor specified that the exam will assume that the Model Penal Code applies, that simplifies things, but often they expect you to answer on the basis of some strange Frankenstein set of laws that do not exist in the real world, based on what you studied. For example, maybe they said that "most states" do X on one point and on another point, you only have one case, so they expect that you will apply that rule. It can be kind of confusing. The good news is, the people who make the study aids do a pretty good job of preparing you for that.
On the flip side, the ambiguity can work in your favor in some ways. If you learned two or three different ways, from different states, to tackle a particular question and your professor doesn't specify what law applies, you can run up your score by analyzing the issue in those two or three different ways. Criminal law questions also often do not have a clear-cut right answer, so you can get pretty far making some pretty abstract arguments if you aren't really sure what the professor is looking for.
Criminal Law Study Aids
| 1. | Mandatory: Examples & Explanations: Criminal Law |
| 2. | Optional: Loewy's Criminal Law in a Nutshell, 5th |
| 3. | Optional: Questions and Answers: Criminal Law |
| 4. | Hornbook: Understanding Criminal Law |
Criminal Law Practice Tests
Crim is, in some ways, a difficult course to study for. Each state has its own set of criminal laws. If your professor specified that the exam will assume that the Model Penal Code applies, that simplifies things, but often they expect you to answer on the basis of some strange Frankenstein set of laws that do not exist in the real world, based on what you studied. For example, maybe they said that "most states" do X on one point and on another point, you only have one case, so they expect that you will apply that rule. It can be kind of confusing. The good news is, the people who make the study aids do a pretty good job of preparing you for that.
On the flip side, the ambiguity can work in your favor in some ways. If you learned two or three different ways, from different states, to tackle a particular question and your professor doesn't specify what law applies, you can run up your score by analyzing the issue in those two or three different ways. Criminal law questions also often do not have a clear-cut right answer, so you can get pretty far making some pretty abstract arguments if you aren't really sure what the professor is looking for.
Updated November 2019