The Politics of a New Legal Regime: Governing International Crime through Domestic Immigration Law

Through an analysis of a unique and understudied unit within the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Unit (HRVWCU, or “the Unit”), this article addresses the following theoretical and policy question: once someone has been admitted to the United States and granted permanent residency, or even citizenship, how does the law facilitate the reversal of that decision based on acts committed long ago and far away? We argue that the HRVWCU has created a significant new way to govern immigration through crime—specifically international crime—while simultaneously trying to ensure justice for mass atrocities through immigration law. In offering an overview of the Unit's origins and approach in blending international criminal law, domestic criminal law, and immigration law, we show how this Unit reflects an expansion of crimmigration in the United States and abroad. In order to illustrate the dilemma of internationalized crimmigration, the article focuses on the Unit's cases related to war crimes in Liberia and Bosnia, which have two very different (at least from the perspective of international criminal law) types of alleged perpetrators: those who allegedly gave orders and those who allegedly followed orders.     

Victim and Society: Sharing Wrongs, but in Which Roles?

This paper discusses what kinds of conflicts arise when a crime has been committed, and with whom—and in which of their possible roles—the offender should be seen as having such conflicts. The possible roles of the victim are in focus, as is the constitutive role of the act of criminalizing a certain kind of behavior. It is argued that while in the tort conflict the victim should be seen as a party qua him- or herself in a ‘fuller’ sense (and with full freedom on how to handle the conflict, including dropping it), in the criminal law conflict it is community, the ‘we’, that should be looked upon as the party to the conflict with the offender. The victim should not be seen as excluded from the criminal law conflict, though: to the contrary, he or she is a member of community and has an important role to play. This role, however, needs to be strictly defined in a way that gives the victim the function of a certain kind of representative for ‘us’, the community. This role should not allow the victim much room to influence how the criminal law conflict is handled. The model I am suggesting presupposes—I think, at least—that criminal law conflict and tort conflict should be handled together at the same trial.     

Born unto Brothels—Toward a Legal Ethnography of Sex Work in an Indian Red-Light Area

The global sex panic around sex work and trafficking has fostered prostitution law reform worldwide. While the normative status of sex work remains deeply contested, abolitionists and sex work advocates alike display an unwavering faith in the power of criminal law; for abolitionists, strictly enforced criminal laws can eliminate sex markets, whereas for sex work advocates, decriminalization can empower sex workers. I problematize both narratives by delineating the political economy and legal ethnography of Sonagachi, one of India's largest red-light areas. I show how within Sonagachi there exist highly internally differentiated groups of stakeholders, including sex workers, who, variously endowed by a plural rule network—consisting of formal legal rules, informal social norms, and market structures—routinely enter into bargains in the shadow of the criminal law whose outcomes cannot be determined a priori. I highlight the complex relationship between criminal law and sex markets by analyzing the distributional effects of criminalizing customers on Sonagachi's sex industry.     

Principle,Discretion, and Symbolic Power in Rousseau's Account of Judicial Virtue

Rousseau's understanding of legislation as the expression of the general will implies a constitutional principle of legislative supremacy. In turn, this should translate to a narrow, mechanical account of adjudication, lest creative judicial interpretation subvert the primacy of legislative power. Yet in his constitutional writings, Rousseau recommends open‐textured and vague legislative codes, which he openly admits will require judicial development. Thus he apparently trusts a great deal in judicial discretion. Ostensibly, then, he overlooks the problem of how legislative indeterminacy—and correspondingly, judicial discretion—may undermine the authority of the general will. However, I argue that Rousseau aims to check judicial subversion of legislative supremacy simply by extending his broader social politics—and specifically, his peculiar concept of republican virtue—to the domain of law. His main concern is that the law should not develop as a mystifying expert practice; therefore, he necessarily rejects any understanding of judicial virtue as lying in principled discourse. Instead, he envisages that judicial power will be checked by a more generic sense of republican virtue. In turn this echoes his apprehension of social differentiation and social complexity as sources of domination and hierarchy.     

Realism about the Nature of Law

Legal realism comes in two main versions, namely American legal realism and Scandinavian legal realism. In this article, I shall be concerned with the Scandinavian realists, who were naturalists and non‐cognitivists, and who maintained that conceptual analysis (in a fairly broad sense) is a central task of legal philosophers, and that such analysis must proceed in a naturalist, anti‐metaphysical spirit. Specifically, I want to consider the commitment to ontological naturalism and non‐cognitivism on the part of the Scandinavians and its implications for their view of the nature of law. I argue (i) that the Scandinavians differ from legal positivists in that they reject the idea that there are legal relations, that is, legal entities and properties, and to varying degrees defend the view that law is a matter of human behavior rather than legal norms, and (ii) that they do not and cannot accept the idea that there is a ‘world of the ought’ in Kelsen's sense. I also argue, more specifically, (iii) that the objection to non‐naturalist theories raised by the Scandinavians—that there is and can be no connection between the higher realm of norms and values (the ‘world of the ought’) and the world of time and space—is convincing, and (iv) that Kelsen's introduction of a so‐called modally indifferent substrate does nothing to undermine this objection. In addition, I argue (v) that the Scandinavians can account for the existence of legal relations that do not presuppose the existence of morally binding legal norms by embracing conventionalism about the existence of the sources of law, while pointing out that in doing so they would also be abandoning their legal realism for legal positivism. Finally, I argue (vi) that the implications for legal scholarship of the realist emphasis on human behavior instead of legal norms is not well explained by the realists and appear to amount to little more than a preference for teleological interpretation of legal norms.     

刑法框架下见危不助犯罪化的具体考量

基于刑事一体化的要求,刑事立法也应从"一体化"的要求出发,在研制出法律文本的同时顾及司法与守法的可能。通过对见危不助犯罪化的刑事立法本身及其在法律实践中的实际效果进行分析与研究表明,将见危不助行为犯罪化的做法,无法在法益判断上寻求到立法的根据,司法实践中也会遭遇无法解决的困难。将道德纳入刑法体系,未必见得公民便能确立对法律的忠诚,刑法并不是我们在规制见危不助行为方面所能达致的普遍共识。     

空白罪状适用的规范性解释——以前置性规范为中心

空白罪状的适用是以法律、法规的前置性规范判断为基础。前置性规范中"国家规定"的法律位阶应进行限制性解释,不包括操作纪律、习惯等非规范性形式;立足于空白罪状双重违法性的结构,依据缓和的违法性理论,前置性规范必须有违法性要件的明确提示,而不必然有刑事责任条款,对前置性规范适用采取以直接补充为主、二次间接补充为辅的限制原则,对于体系有冲突的应以刑法规范和刑法概念为准,坚持刑法解释的独立性品格;按照刑法的实质解释的原理运用以法益为指导目的的解释方法,法益制约着具体空白刑法条文所参照的前置性规范范围,按照法益同一性规则还可以适用的扩张与限缩解释。前置性规范的变动适用中,应承认前置性规范的刑法间接渊源地位,以实质的罪刑法定原则为判断基准,前置性规范的溯及力应按照从旧兼从轻的适用规则。     

隐性双轨制：刑法中保安处分的教义学阐释

我国现行法律中虽无保安处分的概念,但在刑法中已实质性地存在保安处分,其与刑罚共同构成刑法所规定的法律后果,由此形成“隐性双轨制”的格局。对保安处分规范的识别,首先应从与罪责的关系上、目的与功能的差异上明晰刑罚与保安处分的基本界分,进而从法律特征上区分刑罚规范与保安处分规范,最终将现行刑法中的保安处分措施“挖掘”出来。澄清现行刑法中保安处分措施的性质和法律地位,有利于确保这类措施的正当适用,同时也有利于保障个人的基本权利免受不当干涉。     

Right,Crime, and Court: Toward a Unifying Political Conception of International Law

It is widely acknowledged that human rights law (hereafter, HRL) and international criminal law (hereafter, ICL) share core normative features. Yet, the literature has not yet reconstructed this underlying basis in a systematic way. In this contribution, I lay down the basis of such an account. I first identify a similar tension between a “moral” and a “political” approach to the normative foundations of those norms and to the legitimate role of international courts (hereafter, ICs) and tribunals adjudicating those norms. With a view to bring the debate forward, I then turn to the practices of HRL and international criminal law (hereafter, ICL) to examine which of those approaches best illuminates some salient aspects of the adjudication of ICs. Finally, I argue that the political approach best explains the practice. While each preserves a distinct role, HRL and ICL both establish the basic conditions for the primary subject of international law (HRL and ICL, for the purpose of this article), namely the state, to legitimately govern its own subjects constructed as free and equal moral agents.     

Corrective Justice as A Principle of Criminal Law: A Prolegomenon

This article argues that corrective justice is an adequate principle of criminalization. On my interpretation, corrective justice holds that, in order for an action to count as a crime, there needs to be a plausible normative story about an offender having violated the interests of a victim in a way that disturbs their relationship as equal persons and a subsequent story about responding to crime in a way that corrects this disturbance. More specifically, I claim that corrective justice is concerned with the protection of interests that persons have in owning private goods throughout standard interactions with other persons. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, I specify the subject-matter that principles of criminal law need to ground and provide an outline of the idea of corrective justice. Second, I show that corrective justice can account for the main cases of crime and the salient modes of criminal responsibility. I also argue that corrective justice can make sense of two prima facie recalcitrant types of cases (rape and inchoate offenses). Third, and finally, I address two objections to my corrective justice theory of criminal law. The first concerns the implications corrective justice has for locating criminal law along the private/public law divide. The second objection raises the putatively problematic consequences corrective justice has for understanding the separation between criminal and civil law.     

Criminalizing Health-Related Behaviors Dangerous to Others? Disease Transmission, Transmission-Facilitation, and the Importance of Trust

Statutes criminalizing behavior that risks transmission of HIV/AIDS exemplify use of the criminal law against individuals who are victims of infectious disease. These statutes, despite their frequency, are misguided in terms of the goals of the criminal law and the public health aim of reducing overall burdens of disease, for at least three important reasons. First, they identify individual offenders for punishment, a paradigm that is misplaced in the most typical contexts of transmission of infectious disease and even for HIV/AIDS, despite claims of AIDS exceptionalism. Second, although there are examples of individuals who transmit infectious disease in a manner that fits the criminal law paradigm of identification of individual offenders for deterrence or retribution, these examples are limited and can be accommodated by existing criminal laws not devoted specifically to infectious disease. Third, and most importantly, the current criminal laws regarding HIV/AIDS, like many other criminal laws applied to infectious disease transmission, have been misguided in focusing on punishment of the diseased individual as a wrongful transmitter. Instead of individual offenders, activities that enhance the scale of disease transmission—behaviors that might be characterized as ‘transmission facilitation’—are a more appropriate target for the criminal law. Examples are trafficking in human beings (including sex trafficking, organ trafficking, and labor trafficking), suppression of information about the emergence of infection in circumstances in which there is a legally established obligation to disclose, and intentional or reckless activities to discourage disease treatment or prevention. Difficulties remain with justifications for criminalizing even these behaviors, however, most importantly the need for trust in reducing overall burdens of disease, problems in identifying individual responsible offenders, and potential misalignment between static criminal law and the changing nature of infectious disease.     

刑法学中事实概念与规范概念之嬗变——基于刑法信条学上犯罪构造理论的考察

犯罪构造理论在刑法学历史上占据举足轻重的地位。它标志着现代刑法的诞生,自此犯罪被牢牢地与刑法法规连在一起,罪刑法定原则亦从宣言走向实践。可以说,作为刑法学支柱的犯罪构造理论,其重要性体现在对刑法学知识体系的正当性建基。回顾刑法学的发展沿革,从古典犯罪论体系到新古典犯罪论体系、目的主义犯罪论体系再到目的理性主义犯罪体系,犯罪构造理论走出了一条从纯粹的事实到不断融入规范因素的轨迹,而对于犯罪构造理论中事实概念与规范概念的廓清在当下刑法学界显得尤为必要。     

Theorizing Criminal Law Reform

How are we to understand criminal law reform? The idea seems simple—the criminal law on the books is wrong: it should be changed. But 'wrong’ how? By what norms 'wrong’? As soon as one tries to answer those questions, the issue becomes more complex. One kind of answer is that the criminal law is substantively wrong: that is, we assume valid norms of background political morality, and we argue that doctrinally the criminal law on the books does not embody those norms. Another kind of answer is that the criminal law as it stands presupposes certain empirical facts, and yet those facts do not hold. Traditionally, criminal law reform has been informed by both these answers. Analytical theorists examine doctrine for its conceptual structure, and social scientists examine the actual workings of the criminal justice system. This tidy picture is, however, challenged by social constructivist accounts of the criminal law. They challenge the stability and conceptual purity of doctrine, and they challenge the objectivity of social science. On the basis of these challenges, they undermine the ambitions of traditional criminal law reform, and argue that the only reforms to the criminal law that matter are politicized ones—that criminal law reform is pointless unless it serves the interests of the marginalized and the dispossessed. It seems undeniable that in some sense our perceptions of crime in our society are indeed moulded by social forces, and that crime does not exist independently of the social structures and processes that help to define and control it. But why should those insights have the implications for our understanding of criminal law reform that they are alleged to have? How could it follow from those insights that criminal law reform either becomes radicalized or valueless? The aim of this paper is to show that what can legitimately be taken from the emphasis on the social constructedness of crime does not require wholesale abandonment of the traditional picture of criminal law reform, even though it may require some modifications of that picture.     

论网络著作权犯罪之“以营利为目的”

进入网络时代,行为人侵犯著作权犯罪的目的趋向多样化。在网络空间中,＂以营利为目的＂的主观构成要件严重束缚了我国《刑法》的打击范围,对未经授权作品的非法复制、再现作品的数量和速度决定了必须废止＂以营利为目的＂这一主观要件。在我国现有的《刑法》规定和犯罪构成框架下,不应拘泥于传统的营利方式,而应当根据网络营利的特有模式进行具体的认定。     

Redefining Apartheid in International Criminal Law

This article asks: to what extent is Article 7(1)(j) of the Rome Statute—the crime of apartheid—a tenable crime in international criminal law? It will be argued that despite the obligations incumbent on states not to intentionally discriminate against social groups, there is no customary legal norm of apartheid as a distinct crime against humanity. This is premised on the distinction between state obligations as different from norms demanding individual liability in international criminal law, as well as inadequacies of the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (1973) and the absence of case law relying on apartheid as a crime against humanity. Further, the weaknesses hindering the formation of a customary norm of apartheid as a distinct crime against humanity will be assessed with regard to the Rome Statute. Also it will be shown that the lack of coherence of Article 7(1)(j) demonstrates that the crime of apartheid is subsumed by the crime of persecution. Finally, two suggestions are offered on how the crime of apartheid could be established as a distinct offence in international criminal law. The central thesis of this paper is that the crime of apartheid is ambiguous and inoperable. In order for Article 7(1)(j) to be relevant in international criminal law, the offence must be reworked and clearly articulated.     

The Limits of the Harm Principle

The harm principle, understood as the normative requirement that conduct should be criminalized only if it is harmful, has difficulty in dealing with those core cases of criminal wrongdoing that can occur without causing any direct harm. Advocates of the harm principle typically find it implausible to hold that these core cases should not be crimes and so usually seek out some indirect harm that can justify criminalizing the seemingly harmless conduct. But this strategy justifies criminalization of a wide range of conduct on the basis of the fear, worry, and anxiety it generates among those who are not the direct victims of the conduct, and thereby undermines the limiting role of the harm principle by permitting the very move it was meant to prevent: the criminalization of harmless conduct on the ground of others’ feelings about it. The best way to avoid this dilemma is to recognize that people have rights, operating independently of the harm principle, to be treated in certain ways just because they are persons. The existence of such rights provides a ground for both criminalizing conduct and limiting the scope of criminalization because these rights point both to conduct that people must be permitted to engage in (regardless of its harmful effects) and conduct that might well be criminalized (though it is not harmful). A complete account of criminal law will therefore require the harm principle to work together with an independent account of rights.     

The Juror,the Citizen,and the Human Being: The Presumption of Innocence and the Burden of Judgment

In this essay, I suggest that the criminal trial is not only about the guilt or innocence of the defendant, but also about the character and growth of the jurors and the communities they represent. In earlier work, I have considered the potential impact of law and politics on the character of citizens, and thus on the capacity of citizens to thrive—to live full and rich human lives. Regarding the jury, I have argued that aspects of criminal trial procedure work to fix in jurors a sense of agency in and responsibility for verdicts of conviction. Here, I draw on those ideas with respect to the presumption of innocence. I suggest that the presumption of innocence works not primarily as legal rule, but rather as a moral framing device—a sort of moral discomfort device—encouraging jurors to feel and bear the weight of what they do. I offer an account of character development in which virtues are conceived of not merely as modes of conduct developed through habituation and practice, but also as capacities and ways of being developed in part through understanding and experience. The criminal trial, framed by the presumption of innocence, can be an experience through which jurors and their communities, by learning what it means and feels like to carry a certain sort of moral weight, may engender a certain set of moral strengths—strengths valuable to them not just as jurors, but also as citizens, and as human beings.     

Negotiating the Boundaries of Crime and Culture: A Sociolegal Perspective on Cultural Defense Strategies

In this article 1 offer a principled strategy for the courts to identify and to handle the uses of culture as a defense in a criminal proceeding. I begin by discussing the relationship between culture and behavior illuminated by sociologists of culture. I then explain the three categories into which cultural defenses fall–cultural reason, cultural requirement, and cultural tolerance–and the response of criminal courts in the United States to each. I argue that where culture offers an alternative explanation of the defendant's intent, it is highly relevant to determinations of criminal liability. However, where a defendant uses culture only to explain why he wanted to harm the victim and asks that the court be tolerant of such behavior, considerations of culture should not be allowed. In reaching this conclusion, I draw on theories of multiculturalism to consider the benefits and burdens of maintaining the facade of a "cultureless" criminal law in an increasingly heterogeneous society.     

非法获取计算机信息系统数据罪的规范结构与罪名功能——基于案例与比较法的反思

通过对非法获取计算机信息系统数据罪的案例法考察和域外法阐释,可以发现,其核心涵义指向侵犯数据机密性的情形和侵犯数据可用性的情形。其原因是机密性和可用性的规范结构导致该罪成为口袋罪:在罪名上,与人身安全、财产安全等多个章节的罪名产生交叉重合;在保护的利益上,不仅涵摄我国《刑法》其他章节所保护的法益,而且溢出整个刑法典,保护信息的时代重要性日益凸显、其他权益日益频繁地受到侵害。面对这种庞杂的规范结构,需要进行网络时代罪情、刑法基本原则的权衡考量,达致刑法规范的明确性与合理性。新的罪名标签“非法获取数据致损罪”,适应了双层社会虚实同构的态势、数据和利益在双层空间不断协同的复杂行为模式,是在刑法规范中嵌入网络风险控制的法律机制,有助于系统完善网络风险的治理格局。