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Mistake Of Federal Criminal Law: A Study Of Coaltions And Costly Information, Erin O'Hara O'Connor, Richard S. Murphy
Mistake Of Federal Criminal Law: A Study Of Coaltions And Costly Information, Erin O'Hara O'Connor, Richard S. Murphy
Scholarly Publications
This article analyzes Supreme Court and other federal court cases, to explain the seemingly disparate incorporation of mistake of law excuses into federal criminal statutes. Most of the cases can be explained from an information cost perspective. If an easily separable subset of the regulated population cannot be induced to learn their legal obligations given credibly low prior probabilities and high information costs, they are excused from criminal liability. Moreover, when criminal statutes are vulnerable to constituent protest, courts require that enforcers increase awareness of the law through information subsidies rather than convicting the ignorant. At least with mistake of …
United States Jurisdiction Over Extraterritorial Crime, Christopher L. Blakesley
United States Jurisdiction Over Extraterritorial Crime, Christopher L. Blakesley
Scholarly Works
The term jurisdiction may be defined as the authority to affect legal interests -- to prescribe rules of law (legislative jurisdiction), to adjudicate legal questions (judicial jurisdiction) and to enforce judgments the judiciary made (enforcement jurisdiction). The definition, nature and scope of jurisdiction vary depending on the context in which it is to be applied. United States domestic law, for example, defines and applies notions of jurisdiction pursuant to the United States constitutional provisions relating to the separation of powers. Within the United States, jurisdiction is defined and applied in a variegated fashion depending on whether a legal problem is …