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Homicide is the killing of a human being. For obvious reasons, it is one of the most important topics in
criminal law.
Not all homicides are unlawful. Some killings are purely accidental, resulting from neither ill-will nor
negligence. Other killings are justified for reasons of self-defense, or excused for reasons of insanity, for
example. We will study those topics in more detail when we cover affirmative defenses. In this unit, we
will focus on unlawful killings, and particularly on the different types of homicide.
Courts divided homicide into two categories: