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Limits On The Perfect Preventive State, Michael L. Rich
Limits On The Perfect Preventive State, Michael L. Rich
Michael L Rich
Traditional methods of crime prevention—the punishment of the culpable and the preventive restraint of the dangerous—are slowly being supplemented and supplanted by technologies that seek to perfectly prevent crime by making criminal conduct practically impossible. For instance, the federal government is developing in-car technology that would prevent vehicle operation when a driver has a blood alcohol level in excess of the legal limit. Less directly, the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 2000 try to prevent copyright infringement by eliminating technologies that enable such infringement. Such structural regulation of private conduct is not new, but few scholars …
Should We Make Crime Impossible?, Michael L. Rich
Should We Make Crime Impossible?, Michael L. Rich
Michael L Rich
Technology often makes possible what once was impossible, but it also can do the reverse: it can make impossible what once was possible. Specifically, technology has opened the door to “impossibility measures,” government programs aimed at making it effectively impossible to engage in certain criminal conduct. But even if we can, should we make crime impossible? This question will soon be before legislators and policymakers, and intuitive reactions to potential impossibility measures are confused and contradictory. Yet until now, legal scholars have failed to provide a satisfactory analytical framework for those decision-makers who will be forced to decide whether making …