The law of self-defense has rarely produced as much academic or

popular heat as it has in the past two decades. Widely publicized trials,

such as the Goetz and Menendez cases,2 have generated deep-seated

fears of a law unmoored from principle. Those fears have generated a

standard public critique-that the criminal law has become too soft

and subjective, too wedded to syndrome science and prone to weakkneed affection for defendants. The criminal law has lost its "objectivity," so the arg...