Criminalizing Disobedience

Abstract Criminalizing Disobedience examines an important and widespread feature of modern criminal law: many laws penalize conduct not because it is inherently wrongful but because the government has prohibited it. Such “disobedience offenses” include: administration of justice crimes (contempt, obstruction of justice, perjury); failure-to-assist crimes (hindering prosecution, receiving stolen property, money laundering, failure to register or to report); regulatory offenses (involving, for example, environmental, drug, or medical device laws); preventive offenses (attempt, possession of weapons or drugs); and national security offenses (treason, espionage, export control and sanctions violations). What unifies these otherwise disparate offenses is that their core wrong lies in noncompliance with legal directives—not in unjustifiably harming or endangering others—and the principal reason to refrain from such conduct is simply that the government has said not to do it. By contrast, laws against, say, murder or rape prohibit conduct that is morally wrongful even in the absence of legal prohibition. This book addresses the important normative and conceptual questions these laws raise: How should disobedience be understood? Is it blameworthy to disobey the state? In what ways does the state criminalize and punish disobedience? What should be the limits to the state’s power to demand obedience and punish disobedience? This book explores these questions across a range of legal domains and develops a philosophically sophisticated framework for evaluating such laws—one that, in the process, sheds new light on longstanding questions of political obligation, criminalization, and punishment.