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Exercise: Elements of a Statute
Unlike Regina v. Dudley & Stephens, today's criminal law, including defenses, are set forth in statutes. As noted in the introduction, our job is to break a statute into its elements. Indeed, even a court's holding can be broken down into its elements.
The warm-up exercise below asks you to identify particular types of elements within a statute from one of three kinds: (i) conduct, (ii) result, or (iii) attendant circumstance. A conduct element usually describes some physical act a person might take. A result element describes the result of that conduct. An attendant circumstance is some contextual fact that is true during the conduct. The exercise below clarifies these definitions.
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