Spring 2013
    Law No.: LAW7056
    Sched. No.: 113210049

Criminal Law in the Supreme Court
Section 1
X
Low, Peter W.



Administrative Information:
During SIS enrollment, check on SIS for real-time enrollment numbers
Days, Times (Room):MTW, 1300-1400 (WB104)
Credits:2Type:Lecture
Capacity:45 **This information is current as of 06/12/2013 06:17:57 AM**
Current Enrollment:33 **This information is current as of 06/12/2013 06:17:57 AM**

Course Description:

This course meets January 21-March 20.

1. Structure. A two-hour course is required to meet 24 times at 60-minutes each. This course will satisfy this requirement by meeting for 60 minutes three days a week, starting at the beginning of the semester and ending after eight weeks of classes. No casebook or other materials will need to be purchased. Course materials will be available in the Law School Copy Center. In the main, they will consist of unedited United States Supreme Court opinions, supplemented here and there by Notes tailored to the course. In lieu of an examination, students will be required write a 15-page essay based on the reading materials and class discussions. The paper will be due at the end of the examination period. No additional research is required or expected. The purpose of the essay will be to demonstrate understanding of the reading materials and class discussions and to elaborate on the integrating themes that can be drawn from both.

The course is open to first-, second-, and third-year students. It is a suitable spring elective for first-year students because it builds on themes studied in the first semester Criminal Law course and there are no other prerequisites.

2. Content. The course will begin by considering how the Constitution, leaving Bill of Rights issues aside, constrains legislative choice in crime definition. The Supreme Court has held that crime must based on conduct (but has not incorporated the common law voluntary act requirement or other constraints on choice into the constitutional limitation). The Court has also developed a jurisprudence on the level of clarity required in crime definition and interpretation. This jurisprudence will be explored both as the source of stand-alone constitutional limitations and as implemented through the vagueness doctrine. State and federal crimes present different problems in this respect. For openers, the Supreme Court can narrow the language of federal crimes by interpretation (an option it does not have with state law). Two illustrations of this phenomenon will be considered—one involving a civil rights crime, the other mail fraud. In both situations dissenting Justices voted to hold the statute unconstitutionally vague but a majority saved the statute by a narrowing construction.

Once a crime has been defined, it follows that, absent a guilty plea, the prosecutor can gain a conviction only by proving each of its elements to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Does this requirement extend to defenses and mitigations and to facts that are considered at sentencing? The answer is a complicated “sometimes,” a complexity reflected in numerous Supreme Court cases. Exploration of this topic will lead to discussion of how application of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines are now administered by federal judges. One important theme here is that the rule of law—which is central to the issues of crime definition and interpretation considered at the beginning of the course—operates much differently when it comes to sentencing.

COURSE REQUIREMENT: 15-page paper

Mutually Exclusive with: Federal Criminal Law