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Preface xiii seems particularly in­ter­est­ing or impor­tant, but it is commonly only one of many points of interstate disagreement relating to that aspect of criminal law. For the issue that we take up in each chapter, we group all the American jurisdictions according to the position they take. However, ­ there is such vari- ety in approach that even jurisdictions within the same group commonly take slightly dif­fer­ent approaches (which we often attempt to document in the Notes). Thus, even our groupings of states, usually three to seven groups on each issue, understate the extent of American criminal law diversity. Each chapter provides a map of the United States with each of the states visually coded according to its approach to the issue. ­ These maps, the reader ­ will see, often raise in­ter­est­ing hypotheses about geographic or other state ­ factors that might explain the patterns of agreement and disagreement (red states versus blue states, rural versus urban, rich versus poor, West Coast ver- sus East Coast, ­ etc.). At the end of each chapter we sometimes speculate about the reasons for disagreements, but more importantly, our hope is that the maps ­ will pique the interest of scholars in many disciplines—­political scien- tists, criminologists, criminal law scholars, and sociologists, among ­ others—to investigate alternative hypotheses about why we see the patterns of agree- ment and disagreement that we see. Notes 1. For instance, it is common to speak of the “American rule” concerning the duty to rescue and criminal liability for omissions. See, e.g., Peter M. Agulnick and Heidi V. Rivkin, Criminal Liability for Failure to Rescue: A Brief Survey of French and American Law, 8 Touro Int’l L. Rev. 93, 95 (1998) (referring to the “American rule” that ­there is no duty to rescue) Christopher H. Schroeder, Two Methods for Evaluating Duty to Rescue Proposals, Law & Contemp. Probs., Summer 1986, at 181 (same) Jay Silver, The Duty to Rescue: A Reexamination and Proposal, 26 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 423, 424 (1985) (same). Likewise, it is common to speak of an “Amer- ican rule” in the context of the duty to retreat. See, e.g., Garrett Epps, Any Which Way but Loose: Interpretive Strategies and Attitudes ­toward Vio­lence in the Evolution of the Anglo-­American “Retreat Rule,” Law & Contemp. Probs., Winter 1992, at 303, 305 (referring to the “American rule” that a person has the right to “stand [her] ground”) Jeannie Suk, The True ­ Woman: Scenes from the Law of Self-­Defense, 31 Harv. J. L. & Gender 237, 243 (2008) (same) Joseph E. Olson and David B. Kopel, All the Way Down the Slippery Slope: Gun Prohibition in ­England and Some Lessons for Civil Liberties in Amer­ i ­ ca, 22 Hamline L. Rev. 399, 465 (1999) (same). The phrase is often invoked by the courts. In the duty to retreat context, see, e.g., Cooper v. United States, 512 A.2d 1002, 1005 (D.C. 1986) (noting that jurisdictions which follow the “American rule” permit a person to “stand [her] ground”) and Gillis v. United States, 400 A.2d 311, 312 (D.C. 1979) (same).