Dictionary:
ne·ces·si·ty (nə-sĕs'ĭ-tē)  |
of necessity
[Middle English necessite, from Old French, from Latin necessitās, from necesse, necessary. See necessary.]
| Thesaurus: necessity |
noun
| Idioms: necessity |
Idioms beginning with necessity:
necessity is the mother of invention
In addition to the idiom beginning with necessity, also see make a virtue of necessity; of necessity.
| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: necessity |
For more information on necessity, visit Britannica.com.
| Philosophy Dictionary: necessity |
A proposition is necessary if it could not have been false. We can contemplate various possibilities describing how things might have been but are not; if in all these possibilities a proposition is true, then it is true in all possible worlds or true of necessity. See also necessary/contingent truths, modality, modal logic.
The fundamental explanation of the necessity of a proposition is controversial, and some have doubted whether the category is a useful aid to thought (see Quine). A relatively clear class of necessary propositions would be those that are analytic (see analytic/synthetic) since they seem ‘trivially’ true. More substantive problems arise with apparently synthetic necessary truths: classical examples include the proposition that every number has a successor, or nothing can appear red and green all over at the same time. The possibility of synthetic a priori truth is the basic problem faced by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason. conventionalist theories suggest that we deem certain propositions to be necessary by linguistic convention (‘invention is the mother of necessity’). Other theories stress the imaginative block we encounter when we try to imagine the possibility of such propositions being true, although if this block is a contingent aspect of our psychologies, the explanation seems to undermine the idea of necessity rather than to explain it. A category of particular interest recently has been that of propositions which are ‘metaphysically necessary’, yet not in any sense a priori: the proposition that heat in a gas is motion of molecules, or that water is H2O, for example.
A rather different set of philosophical problems also arises with the idea of the necessary unfolding of events in time; in many philosophies the march of events has been seen as inexorable, or pre-ordained, and this is held to have consequences for how we react to problems of choice, or how we think of what has already happened. See also free will, laws of nature. The cluster of considerations focusing on the cosmological argument seek to show that if anything exists contingently, then something must exist of necessity.
| Law Encyclopedia: Necessity |
A defense asserted by a criminal or civil defendant that he or she had no choice but to break the law.
The necessity defense has long been recognized at common law and has also been made part of most states' statutory law. Although no federal statute acknowledges the defense, the Supreme Court has recognized it as part of the common law. The rationale behind the necessity defense is that sometimes, in a particular situation, a technical breach of the law is more advantageous to society than the consequence of strict adherence to the law. The defense is often used successfully in cases that involve a trespass on property to save a person's life or property. It also has been used, with varying degrees of success, in cases involving more complex questions.
Almost all common-law and statutory definitions of the necessity defense include the following elements: (1) the defendant acted to avoid a significant risk of harm; (2) no adequate lawful means could have been used to escape the harm; and (3) the harm avoided was greater than that caused by breaking the law. Some jurisdictions require in addition that the harm must have been imminent and that the action taken must have been reasonably expected to avoid the imminent danger. All these elements mirror the principles on which the defense of necessity was founded: first, that the highest social value is not always achieved by blind adherence to the law; second, that it is unjust to punish those who technically violate the letter of the law when they are acting to promote or achieve a higher social value than would be served by strict adherence to the law; and third, that it is in society's best interest to promote the greatest good and to encourage people to seek to achieve the greatest good, even if doing so necessitates a technical breach of the law.
The defense of necessity is considered a justification defense, as compared with an excuse defense such as duress. An action that is harmful but praiseworthy is justified, whereas an action that is harmful but ought to be forgiven may be excused. Rather than focusing on the actor's state of mind, as would be done with an excuse defense, the court with a necessity defense focuses on the value of the act. No court has ever accepted a defense of necessity to justify killing a person to protect property.
Most states that have codified the necessity defense make it available only if the defendant's value choice has not been specifically contradicted by the state legislature. For example, in 1993 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court rejected the necessity defense of two people who were prosecuted for operating a needle-exchange program that was intended to reduce the transmission of AIDS through the sharing of contaminated hypodermic needles (Massachusetts v. Leno, 415 Mass. 835, 616 N.E.2d 453). Their actions violated a state law prohibiting the distribution of hypodermic needles without a physician's prescription. In rejecting the defense, the court held that the situation posed no clear and imminent danger. The court reasoned that citizens who disagree with the legislature's policy are not without remedy, as they can seek to have the law changed through popular initiative.
The necessity defense has been used with sporadic and very limited success in the area of civil disobedience since the 1970s. The most common circumstances involve public protests against abortion, nuclear power, and nuclear weapons. Virtually all abortion protesters who have tried to avail themselves of the defense have lost. The courts have reasoned that because the right to an abortion is constitutionally protected, it cannot simultaneously be a legally recognized harm justifying illegal action. In these cases the courts have also denied the defense on the basis that the criminal act of protest would not stop abortions from occurring; that the harm caused by the act was greater than the harm of abortion; and that legal means of protest, such as demonstrating outside of the clinic rather than entering the clinic or trespassing on its property, were available. Consequently, according to the courts, there was no necessity for the protesters to break the law. In the vast majority of cases in which protesters, trespassing on property, blocked the entrance to nuclear plants, the courts have denied the necessity defense on the grounds that there was no imminent danger and that the trespassing protesters could not reasonably have believed that their actions would halt the manufacture of nuclear materials (see, e.g., State v. Marley, 54 Haw. 450, 509 P.2d 1095 [Haw. 1973]). The defense has also been denied in civil disobedience cases involving protests against U.S. policy abroad, the homeless problem, lack of funding for AIDS research, harmful logging practices, prison conditions, and human and animal rights violations.
Necessity has been used successfully by inmates who escape from prison under certain circumstances. In Spakes v. State, 913 S.W.2d 597 (Tex. Crim. App. 1996), the highest criminal court in Texas allowed the jury to be instructed on the necessity defense before deliberating the verdict for an inmate whose three cellmates had planned an escape and threatened to slit his throat if he did not accompany them. The defendant inmate argued that because of the terribly violent crimes of which his cellmates had been convicted (one had bragged about chopping his girlfriend up with an ax), he accompanied them and escaped. Even though he made no attempt to return himself to custody when he was separated from his cellmates, the court still allowed the defense. In contrast, most jurisdictions have held that an escapee must make an attempt to surrender or report to authorities as a condition for asserting the necessity defense. These courts have reasoned that once the immediate threat is no longer present, the action of escape is no longer necessary, and consequently it should end.
| Word Tutor: necessity |
After getting sick from drinking the water, they understood the necessity of boiling it first.
| Quotes About: Necessity |
Quotes:
"Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity."
- Hannah Arendt
"We come into the world laden with the weight of an infinite necessity."
- Albert Camus
"Arguably the only goods people need these days are food and happiness."
- Sir Terence Conran
"Necessity has no law."
- Oliver Cromwell
"Must! Is must a word to be addressed to princes? Little man, little man! thy father, if he had been alive, durst not have used that word."
- Elizabeth I
"Make yourself necessary to somebody."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
See more famous quotes about Necessity
| Wikipedia: Necessity |
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| Criminal defenses |
| Part of the common law series |
| Insanity · Immunity · Mental disorder Diminished responsibility Intoxication · Infancy Automatism Consent · Mistake Duress · Necessity Provocation · Self defense False confession · Entrapment |
| See also Criminal law and procedure |
| Other common law areas |
| Criminal · Contract · Tort · Property Wills trusts and estates Evidence |
| Portals |
| Law · Criminal justice |
In U.S. criminal law, necessity may be either a possible justification or an exculpation for breaking the law. Except for a few statutory exemptions and in some medical cases [1] there is no corresponding defense in English law.[2] Defendants seeking to rely on this defense argue that they should not be held liable for their actions as a crime because their conduct was necessary to prevent some greater harm and when that conduct is not excused under some other more specific provision of law such as self defense.
For example, a drunk driver might contend that he drove his car to get away from a kidnap (cf. North by Northwest). Most common law and civil law jurisdictions recognize this defense, but only under limited circumstances. Generally, the defendant must affirmatively show (i.e., introduce some evidence) that (a) the harm he sought to avoid outweighs the danger of the prohibited conduct he is charged with; (b) he had no reasonable alternative; (c) he ceased to engage in the prohibited conduct as soon as the danger passed; and (d) he did not himself create the danger he sought to avoid. Thus, with the "drunk driver" example cited above, the necessity defense will not be recognized if the defendant drove further than was reasonably necessary to get away from the kidnapper, or if some other reasonable alternative was available to him. However case law suggests necessity is narrowed to medical cases.
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As a matter of political expediency, states usually allow some classes of person to be excused from liability when they are engaged in socially useful functions but intentionally cause injury, loss or damage. For example, the fire services and other civil defence organizations have a general duty to keep the community safe from harm. If a fire or flood is threatening to spread out of control, it may be reasonably necessary to destroy other property to form a fire break, or to trespass on land to throw up mounds of earth to prevent the water from spreading. These examples have the common feature of individuals intentionally breaking the law because they believe it to be urgently necessary to protect others from harm, but some states distinguish between a response to a crisis arising from an entirely natural cause (an inanimate force of nature), e.g. a fire from a lightning strike or rain from a storm, and a response to an entirely human crisis. Thus, parents who lack the financial means to feed their children cannot use necessity as a defense if they steal food. The existence of welfare benefits and strategies other than self-help defeat the claim of an urgent necessity that cannot be avoided in any way other than by breaking the law. Further, some states apply a test of proportionality. So the defense would only be allowed where the degree of harm actually caused was a reasonably proportionate response to the degree of harm threatened. This is a legal form of Cost-benefit analysis.
In English law, the defence of necessity recognises that there may be situations of such an overwhelming urgency, that a person must be allowed to respond by breaking the law. There have been very few cases in which the defence has succeeded but the Crown Prosecution Service tends to exercise a discretion not to prosecute those cases where it believes that the potential defendants have acted reasonably in all the circumstances[citation needed].
Canadian criminal law allows for a common law defence of necessity. The leading case for the defence is Perka v. The Queen [1984] 2 S.C.R. 232 in which Dickson J. described the rationale for the defence as a recognition that:
a liberal and humane criminal law cannot hold people to the strict obedience of laws in emergency situations where normal human instincts, whether of self-preservation or of altruism, overwhelmingly impel disobedience.
However, it must be "strictly controlled and scrupulously limited." and can only be applied in the strictest of situations where true "involuntariness" is found. Three elements are required for a successful defence :
Each element must be proven on an objective standard. The peril or danger must be more than just foreseeable or likely. It must be near and unavoidable.
At a minimum the situation must be so emergent and the peril must be so pressing that normal human instincts cry out for action and make a counsel of patience unreasonable.
With regard to the second element, if there was a realistic or objectively reasonable legal alternative to breaking the law, then there can be no finding of necessity. Regarding the third element requiring proportionality, the harm avoided must be at least comparable to the harm inflicted.
In R. v. Latimer (2001), the Supreme Court of Canada affirmed that the defense of necessity is not available to a defendant when (1)the killing occurred when there was no imminent danger to either the defendant or the victim, (2) reasonable legal alternatives are available besides killing, and (3) the harm inflicted is not in proportion to the harm avoided.
The Model Penal Code of the American Law Institute adopts a belief-based "choice-of-evils" theory of necessity in Section 3.02 - "Justification Generally: Choice of Evils":
§ 3.02 (1) Conduct which the actor believes to be necessary to avoid a harm or evil to himself or another is justifiable . . . .
The use of the defense is subject to certain limitations, notably: that the harm to be prevented be greater than that caused (§ 3.02(1)(a)); that it not be excluded by the law (§ 3.02(1)(b)) or a plain legislative purpose (§ 3.02(1)(c)); and that the actor not have recklessly or negligently have created the emergency, where the crime charged requires recklessness or negligence (§ 3.02(2)).
Note that the Model Penal Code is not the law of any state, though many states have adopted some of its rationale or provisions.
The Penal Law of the State of New York collapses justification and necessity into a single article. Article 35 - "Defense of Justification" comprises sections 35.05 through 35.30 of the Penal Law. The general provision relating to necessity, section 35.05, provides:
§ 35.05 Justification; generally. Unless otherwise limited by the ensuing provisions of this article defining justifiable use of physical force, conduct which would otherwise constitute an offense is justifiable and not criminal when: 1. Such conduct is required or authorized by law or by a judicial decree, or is performed by a public servant in the reasonable exercise of his official powers, duties or functions; or
2. Such conduct is necessary as an emergency measure to avoid an imminent public or private injury which is about to occur by reason of a situation occasioned or developed through no fault of the actor, and which is of such gravity that, according to ordinary standards of intelligence and morality, the desirability and urgency of avoiding such injury clearly outweigh the desirability of avoiding the injury sought to be prevented by the statute defining the offense in issue. The necessity and justifiability of such conduct may not rest upon considerations pertaining only to the morality and advisability of the statute, either in its general application or with respect to its application to a particular class of cases arising thereunder. Whenever evidence relating to the defense of justification under this subdivision is offered by the defendant, the court shall rule as a matter of law whether the claimed facts and circumstances would, if established, constitute a defense.
Under the "choice-of-evils" theory of section 35.05, it is a question of fact for the criminal jury whether the conduct was justified under the circumstances. See People of the State of New York v. Maher, 79 N.Y.2d 978 (1992). As discussed in People of the State of New York v. Gray, 150 Misc. 2d 852 (N.Y. Co. 1991), the defendant is generally held to a "reasonableness" standard--the question is whether a reasonable person in the defendant's position would have reached the conclusion that the relevant conduct was necessary. It is not necessary that the defendant actually avert a greater harm, just that his belief be reasonable. As the court observed:
To apply a strict liability standard in evaluating the other elements of this defense, however, and to find that only those actors who have actually averted a greater harm may avail themselves of the defense, is inconsistent with the law of justification in New York, as well as necessity's basic purpose to promote societal interests.
However, the defendant is subject to strict liability as to which harm is greater. For example, a defendant cannot choose to value property over life.
Similarly, when using physical force in defense of a person, the focus of the defense is not on whether the actor was in fact correct that his conduct was necessary to prevent harm, but whether that belief was reasonable. Section 35.15 (1) provides in relevant part:
1. A person may, subject to the provisions of subdivision two, use physical force upon another person when and to the extent he reasonably believes such to be necessary to defend himself or a third person from what he reasonably believes to be the use or imminent use of unlawful physical force by such other person . . . .
Thus, with respect to the example given above, the actor would, provided his belief was reasonable, be entitled to have a defense of justification presented to a jury.
It is important to distinguish between the defense of justification/necessity under Article 35 and the law of citizen's arrest. In general, to use physical force a private citizen must in fact be correct that a person has committed an offence, while a police officer must only have a reasonable belief.
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
| Translations: Necessity |
Dansk (Danish)
n. - nødvendighed, fornødenhed, trang
idioms:
Nederlands (Dutch)
noodzakelijkheid, noodzaak, armoede
Français (French)
n. - nécessité, besoin, impératif, choses essentielles, (Philos) nécessité
idioms:
Deutsch (German)
n. - Notwendigkeit, Bedürfnis, Unvermeidlichkeit, Not
idioms:
Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - ανάγκη, αναγκαίο
idioms:
idioms:
Português (Portuguese)
n. - necessidade (f), pobreza (f), exigência (f)
idioms:
Русский (Russian)
необходимость
idioms:
Español (Spanish)
n. - necesidad, indigencia
idioms:
Svenska (Swedish)
n. - nödvändighet, behov, nödvändigt ting, (livs)villkor
中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
需要, 必然, 必需品
idioms:
中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 需要, 必然, 必需品
idioms:
한국어 (Korean)
n. - 불가피성, 필수품, 궁핍
idioms:
日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 必然, 必要, 緊急の要, 欠乏, 貧困, 必要不可欠なもの, 必要性, 必然性
idioms:
العربيه (Arabic)
(الاسم) ضرورة, عوز
עברית (Hebrew)
n. - מצרך חיוני, הכרח, צורך, נחיצות, עוני, נצרכות, כפייה או הגבלה הנחשבים לחוק הטבע השולט בכל פעולות אנוש
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