No Duty to RetreatrnAmerican Self-Defensernby Richard Maxwell BrownrnOne of the most significant but little noted transitionsrnfrom English to American society was in the CommonrnLaw of homicide and self-defense. As far back as the 13th century,rnEnglish Common Law dealt harshly with the act of homicide.rnThe “right to kill in self-defense was slowly established,rnand is a doctrine of modern rather than medieval law” said anrnearly 20th-century article in the Harvard Law Review. In hisrn18th-century Commentaries, Blackstone favored the centurieslongrnbias of the Common Law against killing in self-defensernout of his concern that the right to defend might be mistakenrnfor the right to kill. Crucial to the English Common Law ofrnhomicide was the notion of retreat. Actually, the first obligationrnof an individual under attack in a personal dispute—evenrna person without fault in the quarrel—was to flee from thernscene. With one of the two parties gone, a homicide could notrnpossibly occur. Should it be impossible, however, to get away,rnthe Common Law required the individual to retreat as far asrnpossible—”to the wall” was the legal phrase—before resisting,rnand perhaps killing, in an act of lawful self-defense.rnThus, in English society of the medieval and early modernrnperiods, the state through its courts attempted to reduce thernnumber of homicides by shifting personal imbroglios fromrnRichard Maxwell Brown is author of Strain of Violence:rnHistorical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantismrn(1975) and No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values inrnAmerican History and Society (1991), upon which his articlernis based. He is Beekman Professor Emeritus of Northwest andrnPacific History at the University of Oregon, but is no relationrnto the Robert Brown whom he mentions in his piece.rnfield and street to the judicial chamber. At its nub, the legalrnduty to retreat was a command to individuals to forsake physicalrncombat. There were, of course, few situations in whichrnflight from the scene was entirely blocked, but even in such arncase an individual could not stand his ground and defendrnhimself but was legally obliged to retreat “to the wall” beforernfighting for his life.rnThe decisive arena for the Americanization of this approachrnto homicide and self-defense was the appellate decisions ofrnstate supreme courts, which determined the doctrine of homicidernand self-defense for each state. Following the movementrnof the population west of the Appalachians in the 19th century,rnthe highest court in state after state repudiated the EnglishrnCommon Law duty to retreat in favor of the American right tornstand one’s ground. The traditional duty-to-retreat stipulationrnwould shrink to a remnant of states, found mainly in thernNortheast but also in South Carolina, Florida, and Alabama.rnThese vestigial duty-to-retreat jurisdictions in the eastern tierrnof states were too few to form a critical mass in restraint of therngeneral social and legal trend toward the no-duty-to-retreatrnconcept. In writing their opinions, state supreme court judgesrnnot only discussed the classic doctrine of the English CommonrnLaw and the new American legal textbooks that, in contrast,rnopposed the duty to retreat, but also bolstered their ownrnantiretreat rulings by citing and quoting like-minded highcourtrncolleagues in other states.rnTwo crucial state decisions affirming the American theme ofrnno duty to retreat came in 1876-77. The first was Erwin v. Statern(1876), in which the supreme court of Ohio held that a “truernman” (the assumption being that there was, or should be, norn20/CHRONICLESrnrnrn