This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, March 12, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown.

Federal statutes have bugs in them. Federal criminal statutes are no different crimes of honest services fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, and others often mean no victims, no intent, and a chilling effect on standard legal business practices.

Cato Institute adjunct scholar Marie Griffin is on standard legal business practices.

Cato Institute, adjunct scholar Marie Griffin,

is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

She comments.

For most of Western common law history,

we have reserved criminal sanctions for only people that

deserve society's harshest condemnation for willingly violating the

social contract and so what we call the blameworthiness principle

was just the principle in the law that you had to be truly blameworthy, you had to

have a guilty mind as well as committing a guilty act in order to be held criminally liable under the law.

If you didn't meet that standard, you might be civilly liable, for example, that's the context

of a lawsuit, but we wouldn't impose criminal sanctions on you.

Throughout the 20th century, though, in the United States, we have experienced a steady erosion of this traditional limiting principle in the criminal law.

We have increasingly criminalized

inadvertent violations not only of arcane vague federal statutes but also

of regulations and this is a problem because it means that ordinary business people,

you know, ordinary citizens who are going about their business not intending

to violate a law can nonetheless find themselves being criminally prosecuted.

Why has this occurred, do you suspect?

Well, it accompanied the rise of the regulatory state in the 20th century.

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