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Full-Text Articles in Law
A Causation Approach To Criminal Omissions, Arthur Leavens
A Causation Approach To Criminal Omissions, Arthur Leavens
Faculty Scholarship
This Article examines the scope of criminal laws that impose liability for failures to prevent a proscribed harm. Traditionally, courts have only imposed criminal sanctions upon individuals for their failure to act where the individual has a "legal duty" to prevent a specific harm. Professor Leavens rejects this conventional approach as being an artificial and ultimately unfair way to set the limits of omission liability. He asserts that in order for the courts validly to utilize any concept -- including "legal duty"-- to define the scope of omission liability, that concept must fairly reflect the underlying criminal prohibition; namely, that …
Legality And Discretion In The Distribution Of Criminal Sanctions, Paul H. Robinson
Legality And Discretion In The Distribution Of Criminal Sanctions, Paul H. Robinson
All Faculty Scholarship
The judicial system now responds to criminal conduct in two rather divergent steps. A judge or jury first determines if a defendant should be held liable for a criminal offense. If so, then the judge or jury goes on to choose a penalty. Precise rules, designed to ensure fairness and predictability, govern the first stage, liability assignment. In the second stage, sentencing, however, judges and juries exercise broad discretion in meting out sanctions. In this Article, Professor Robinson argues that both liability assignment and sentencing are part of a single process of punishing criminal behavior and should be made more …
Hush: The Criminal Status Of Confidential Information After Mcnally And Carpenter And The Enduring Problem Of Overcriminalization, John C. Coffee Jr.
Hush: The Criminal Status Of Confidential Information After Mcnally And Carpenter And The Enduring Problem Of Overcriminalization, John C. Coffee Jr.
Faculty Scholarship
Each of the last three decades has witnessed an intense public reaction to a distinctive type of "white collar" crime. In the early 1960's, public attention was riveted by the Electrical Equipment conspiracy and the image of senior corporate executives of major firms meeting clandestinely to fix prices. In the mid-1970's, the focus shifted to corporate bribery, as the media ran daily stories regarding questionable payments abroad and illegal political contributions at home. The representative white collar crime of the 1980's is undoubtedly "insider trading." The archetype of this new kind of criminal in the public's mind is Ivan Boesky …
A Vice Of Its Virtues: The Perils Of Precision In Criminal Codification, As Illustrated By Retreat, General Justification, And Dangerous Utterances, Kent Greenawalt
A Vice Of Its Virtues: The Perils Of Precision In Criminal Codification, As Illustrated By Retreat, General Justification, And Dangerous Utterances, Kent Greenawalt
Faculty Scholarship
My subject, the problem of precision in criminal codes, is hardly novel. Greater precision has been a major aim of systematic codification, which can specify what behavior is criminal in a way that is more rational, coordinated, and exact than would be possible if liability were determined by occasional statutory enactment, by common-law development, or by a combination of occasional statutes and judicial development. Under this last approach, which was typical in the United States prior to the Model Penal Code, statutes loosely set out the list of offenses and their penalties; critical elements of offenses and many defenses of …