Self-defense is a right so fundamental that the scholarly literature regularly refers to it as the “ancient” or “first civil” right. And at the risk of stating the obvious, it has never been more relevant than in the present era of widespread calls for criminal justice reform. In this presentation, Markus, built on his 2021 critically acclaimed book on the subject, and advanced the patinaed discussion by introducing for the first time a comprehensive value-centric approach to thinking about the defense’s deeper rationale.