"Very Broad Laws Offend Due Process"

Monday, August 20, 2018

Kiel Brennan-Marquez has this post at The Volokh Conspiracy. In part:

Many thanks to the editors for inviting me to discuss my new article, Very Broad Laws, in which I develop a due process argument against extreme breadth in criminal law; my goal is to lay the conceptual groundwork for a "void-for-breadth" doctrine, whereby courts can bring the hammer down on criminal statutes that are so porously drafted, they effectively sweep in large swaths of everyday conduct. These types of criminal statutes suffer the same essential infirmity, I suggest, as vague and ambiguous criminal statutes: they fail to give ordinary people "fair notice" of how the legal system is likely to respond to their conduct. This is a due process problem because it frustrates predictability. When people lack a meaningful sense of what conduct invites serious intrusion into their lives — either because criminal statutes fail to convey what conduct they prohibit, or because they sweep so broadly that no one has a clue what the "actual" prohibition is — the rule-of-law is undermined.

http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/crimprof_blog/2018/08/very-broad-laws-offend-due-process.html

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"Very Broad Laws Offend Due Process" curated from CrimProf Blog