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DURESS (Exigent Circumstances)

Duress is defined in three ways: 1. Strictly, it refers to the physical confinement or detention of a person or their property against their will. 2. Broadly, it refers to any wrongful threat that compels a person to act against their will or judgment, such as in an induced marriage. 3. Specifically in criminal law, it refers to the use or threatened use of unlawful force that a reasonable person cannot resist, to compel someone to commit an unlawful act, and can be a valid defense to a crime. Duress involves overcoming someone's free will through wrongful acts or threats.

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90 views1 page

DURESS (Exigent Circumstances)

Duress is defined in three ways: 1. Strictly, it refers to the physical confinement or detention of a person or their property against their will. 2. Broadly, it refers to any wrongful threat that compels a person to act against their will or judgment, such as in an induced marriage. 3. Specifically in criminal law, it refers to the use or threatened use of unlawful force that a reasonable person cannot resist, to compel someone to commit an unlawful act, and can be a valid defense to a crime. Duress involves overcoming someone's free will through wrongful acts or threats.

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DURESS (exigent circumstances) duress (d[y]uu-res).1. Strictly, the physical confinement of a person or the detention of a contracting party's property.

In the field of torts, duress is considered a species of fraud in which compulsion takes the place of deceit in causing injury. Duress consists in actual or threatened violence or imprisonment; the subject of it must be the contracting party himself, or his wife, parent, or child; and it must be inflicted or threatened by the other party to the contract, or else by one acting with his knowledge and for his advantage. William R. Anson, Principles of the Law of Contract 26162 (Arthur L. Corbin ed., 3d Am. ed. 1919). Few areas of the law of contracts have undergone such radical changes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as has the law governing duress. In Blackstone's time relief from an agreement on grounds of duress was a possibility only if it was coerced by actual (not threatened) imprisonment or fear of loss of life or limb. A fear of battery ... is no duress; neither is the fear of having one's house burned, or one's goods taken away or destroyed; he wrote, because in these cases, should the threat be performed, a man may have satisfaction by recovering equivalent damages: but no suitable atonement can be made for the loss of life, or limb. Today the general rule is that any wrongful act or threat which overcomes the free will of a party constitutes duress. This simple statement of the law conceals a number of questions, particularly as to the meaning of free will and wrongful. John D. Calamari & Joseph M. Perillo, The Law of Contracts 9-2, at 337 (3d ed. 1987). 2. Broadly, a threat of harm made to compel a person to do something against his or her will or judgment; esp., a wrongful threat made by one person to compel a manifestation of seeming assent by another person to a transaction without real volition. A marriage that is induced by duress is generally voidable. 3. The use or threatened use of unlawful force usu. that a reasonable person cannot resist to compel someone to commit an unlawful act. Duress is a recognized defense to a crime, contractual breach, or tort. See Model Penal Code 2.09. See COERCION.[In most states,] the age-old rule of duress that the doing of a prohibited act is not a crime if reasonably believed to be necessary to save from death or great bodily injury together with the equally ancient exception in the form of the inexcusable choice, are as firm today as ever except for the realization that they cover only part of the field. Rollin M. Perkins & Ronald N. Boyce, Criminal Law 1064 (3d ed. 1982). Among defenses, necessity needs to be distinguished from duress. Necessity is generally regarded as a justification, while duress is held to be an excuse. This means that the person who acts under necessity chooses to act in a way that the law ultimately approves. The person who acts under duress acts in a way that the law disapproves and seeks to discourage, but he acts under circumstances which make conviction and punishment inappropriate and unfair. This is so because to act under duress is to act under pressures that a person of reasonable firmness would not be able to resist. Thus, both the theory of necessity and the theory of duress refer to the

pressure of exigent and extraordinary situations, but they do so in different ways.


Thomas Morawetz, Necessity, in 3 Encyclopedia of Crime and Justice 957, 959 (Sanford H. Kadish ed., 1983).

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