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xii Preface continue with the self-­defense example above, not only do American juris- dictions disagree on each of the self-­defense issues listed above, but the pattern of states making up the majority view on each individual issue varies from issue to issue. In other words, at the end of the day the “majority rule” for self-­ defense in the United States is a rule that no jurisdiction actually adopts. It is necessarily a composite of the American “majority rule” on each of the sub-­issues.3 Unfortunately, ­ there has been ­ little work done to map the enormous diver- sity among the states, perhaps ­ because it is an extremely burdensome proj­ect, in part for the reasons just noted. ­Every ­ legal issue requires a major research proj­ect investigating the criminal codes and/or case law of all 52 American jurisdictions, and a single ­legal doctrine may have a half-­dozen sub-­issues that must each be separately resolved. Although the paucity of such diversity research is understandable, it is nonetheless regrettable, for it is the ­ matters of disagreement that often point to the most in­ter­est­ing issues for scholars. Why is it that ­there is disagreement on a par­tic­u­lar point? Why ­hasn’t a consensus formed? What are the advan- tages and disadvantages of the each of the alternative positions such that none have won the day? Or, is it that the alternative positions have been perpetu- ated simply out of an ignorance by the legislatures of the disagreements among the states? That is, does diversity exist not ­because of genuine disputes about which position is best but rather ­ because the conflicting positions are not readily known? This volume is meant to raise awareness of the enormous diversity among the states on issues across the criminal law landscape, to document this diver- sity with a host of specific illustrations on a wide range of issues, to encour- age criminal law scholars to investigate ­ these and the many other points of disagreement that exist among the states, and to encourage each legislature to look to this new diversity scholarship and to the positions taken by other states when the legislature sets out to codify or recodify its criminal law (or to encourage judges to do the same in ­those jurisdictions that continue to allow judicial criminal law making4). In each of the next 38 chapters, we examine dif­fer­ent areas of American criminal law and identify the major groupings among the states on an issue in each area. This is hardly a comprehensive list of the issues on which ­ there are disagreement it is only a representative sampling. Indeed, we know of no area of American criminal law on which ­there is not disagreement among the jurisdictions. The only American criminal law universal is its universal diversity. Nor are the points of disagreement that we map ­ here the only points of diversity within each of the issues that we examine. On the contrary, we commonly pick one par­tic­u­lar point of disagreement among the states that