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The Ex Ante Function of the Criminal Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

John M. Darley ,
Paul H. Robinson  and
Kevin M. Carlsmith
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Abstract

Criminal legal codes draw clear lines between permissible and illegal conduct, and the criminal justice system counts on people knowing these lines and governing their conduct accordingly. This is the “ex ante” function of the law; lines are drawn, and because citizens fear punishments or believe in the moral validity of the legal codes they do not cross these lines. But do people in fact know the lines that legal codes draw? The fact that several states have adopted laws that deviate from other state laws enables a field experiment to address this question. Residents (N = 203) of states (Wisconsin, Texas, North Dakota, and South Dakota) that had adopted a minority position on some aspect of criminal law reported the relevant law of their state to be no different than did citizens of “majoritarian” states. Path analyses using structural equation modeling suggest that people make guesses about what their state law holds by extrapolating from their personal view of whether or not the act in question ought to be criminalized.

Type
Papers of General Interest
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , 2001 , pp. 165 - 189
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

The authors wish to express their gratitude to Anne Faranetta for identifying and contacting participants throughout the country. Robyn LeBoeuf, Michael Norton, Benoit Monin, and Leif Nelson commented on and greatly improved an earlier draft of this article.

References

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Statutes Cited

North Dakota Century Code § 12.1-05-03 (Allen Smith 1985 & Supp. 1997)..Google Scholar
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