Model Penal Code

The Model Penal Code is a model statute drafted by the American Law Institute to help United States state legislatures update and standardize their criminal law. Its chief architect was Herbert Wechsler, working with contributors including Sanford Kadish and a range of criminal law scholars, prosecutors and defense attorneys over roughly a decade of work before its publication in 1962. It was written to address the inconsistency among the individual states' penal codes, since criminal law in the United States is chiefly a state responsibility, by offering a single template legislatures could draw from. The Model Penal Code has no legal force of its own, but more than half of the states have enacted criminal codes that draw heavily on it since 1962, with New Jersey, New York and Oregon adopting nearly all of its provisions, and courts in states that never formally adopted it still cite it when interpreting doctrines of criminal liability.