ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an historical account of the development and import of the distinctions during the eighteenth century. It begins with an analysis of the Plank of Carneades case that Friedrich Gentz, a student of Immanuel Kant's, provided in 1793. Friedrich Gentz's analysis reveals a clear recognition of the difference between justification and excuse. The sources of the justification-excuse distinction lie in the natural law doctrine of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As early as 1754, Joachim Georg Daries, a philosopher and authority on natural law, distinguished several different cases of necessity, thereby connecting each of these cases to a separate type of defense to a criminal charge. Kant's own analysis of the Plank of Carneades case in 1797 is based on these distinctions. It indicates that, from a logical point of view, justifications and excuses cannot belong to the same class of rules within a legal system.
