The Regulatory Offence Revolution in Criminal Justice (Part 1/2)
Regulatory offences do not receive enough attention.
Regulatory offences are quasi-criminal offences that typically result in a financial penalty (note that these offences can also be punishable by imprisonment). Examples of regulatory offences include traffic code offences (e.g.: driving without a seatbelt, failing to activate one’s turn-signal before changing lanes), and municipal ordinance/bylaw violations (e.g.: excessive noise, littering, urban camping).
Legal scholarship, Supreme Court decisions, and media attention tend to focus primarily on crimes. This is understandable. Crimes tend to produce greater harm, generate more significant risks to others, involve conduct that is more morally reprehensible, and involve higher degrees of culpability. These are generalizations. But they capture some of the reasons why crimes overshadow regulatory offences.
But regulatory offences generate profound consequences that we tend to overlook. And regulatory offences merit much greater scrutiny than they currently receive.
I recently completed a two-part article series that aims to draw much needed attention to regulatory offences and their implications. The two-part series will appear in the Alberta Law Review and includes the following:
The Regulatory Offence Revolution in Criminal Justice, Part 1: The Expansive Role of Regulatory Offences.
The Regulatory Offence Revolution in Criminal Justice, Part 2: The Choice Architecture of Regulatory Offences.
In this blog post, I provide a summary of the first part of this two-part article series, which is entitled: The Regulatory Offence Revolution in Criminal Justice, Part 1: The Expansive Role of Regulatory Offences
(Click here to read the full article).
Here is the abstract:
Criminal law scholarship and judicial decisions devote significant attention to crimes, especially the most salient ones. In contrast, regulatory offences receive much less scrutiny and matter much more than we think.
This first part of a two-part article on regulatory offences argues that these offences occupy an ever-expanding role in the criminal justice system. It advances four core arguments.
First, police officers may enforce regulatory offences to gather information and produce intelligence.
Second, these offences can facilitate pretextual police interventions and investigation cascades.
Third, police departments may leverage regulatory offences to generate revenue in a manner that evades political backlash against local governments.
Fourth, these offences can contribute to criminal law localism.
Together, the volume of regulatory offences — and their expansive role — can also facilitate disparate and discriminatory enforcement practices. Ultimately, this article highlights the various functions of regulatory offences and demonstrates why they matter for reasons we typically overlook.
The second part of the article is entitled: The Regulatory Offence Revolution in Criminal Justice, Part 2: The Choice Architecture of Regulatory Offences. It draws on behavioural economics and choice architecture to differentiate crimes and regulatory offences.
It should be available shortly and will be summarized in a future blog post.
All views expressed are my own. They do not represent — and are not endorsed by — any academic institution or research center.
