The Case of the Speluncean Explorers
Encyclopedia
The Case of the Speluncean Explorers is a famous hypothetical legal case used in the study of law, which was written by Lon Fuller in 1949 for the Harvard Law Review
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In the hypothetical case, a trapped team of five spelunkers determine via radio contact with physicians that they will have starved to death by the time they are rescued, and thus elect to eat one of their party
. Once the remaining four spelunkers are rescued, they are all indicted for the murder of their fifth member. The article proceeds to examine the case from the perspectives of five different legal principles, with widely varying conclusions as to whether or not the spelunkers are guilty, and whether or not they should be executed (as is the mandatory punishment for murder in the fictitious commonwealth where the case takes place).
Harvard Law Review
The Harvard Law Review is a journal of legal scholarship published by an independent student group at Harvard Law School.-Overview:According to the 2008 Journal Citation Reports, the Review is the most cited law review and has the second-highest impact factor in the category "law" after the...
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In the hypothetical case, a trapped team of five spelunkers determine via radio contact with physicians that they will have starved to death by the time they are rescued, and thus elect to eat one of their party
Cannibalism
Cannibalism is the act or practice of humans eating the flesh of other human beings. It is also called anthropophagy...
. Once the remaining four spelunkers are rescued, they are all indicted for the murder of their fifth member. The article proceeds to examine the case from the perspectives of five different legal principles, with widely varying conclusions as to whether or not the spelunkers are guilty, and whether or not they should be executed (as is the mandatory punishment for murder in the fictitious commonwealth where the case takes place).
See also
- Plank of CarneadesPlank of CarneadesIn ethics, the plank of Carneades is a thought experiment first proposed by Carneades of Cyrene; it explores the concept of self-defense in relation to murder....
, a thought experiment proposed by CarneadesCarneadesCarneades was an Academic skeptic born in Cyrene. By the year 159 BC, he had started to refute all previous dogmatic doctrines, especially Stoicism, and even the Epicureans whom previous skeptics had spared. As head of the Academy, he was one of three philosophers sent to Rome in 155 BC where his...
of Cyrene. - R v Dudley and StephensR v Dudley and StephensR v Dudley and Stephens [1884] 14 QBD 273 DC is a leading English criminal case that established a precedent, throughout the common law world, that necessity is no defense against a charge of murder. It concerned survival cannibalism following a shipwreck and its purported justification on the...
, an actual English criminal case from 1884 involving cannibalism at sea
External links
- Full reprint of the original article
- "The Case of the Speluncean Explorers: Nine New Opinions", a book by Peter SuberPeter SuberPeter Suber is the creator of the game Nomic and a leading voice in the open access movement. He is a senior research professor of philosophy at Earlham College, the open access project director at Public Knowledge, a senior researcher at SPARC , and a Fellow at Harvard's and...
(Routledge, 1998), containing Fuller's five original opinions on the case and Suber's nine new ones.