Some Observations on the Use of Criminal Sanctions in Enforcing Economic Regulations

HOSE who have had occasion to look for answers to the problems of the use of sanctions, taken to include the whole range of official modes of securing compliance with norms of conduct, have commonly agreed for some time now that there are few to be found.1In view of the antiquity of the legal experience, which for the most part has always entailed the use of sanctions of one kind or another, this is a remarkable verdict.Indeed, works written at the turn of the eighteenth century by Jeremy Bentham 2 are still the basic works in the area, a sobering observation which could scarcely be made of more than a handful of subjects of inquiry.In this state of affairs it is not surprising that we are largely ignorant of the impact of the penal sanction, which is only one aspect of the larger problem of sanctions; and still less so that we know little about the use of the penal sanction in an area of relatively recent development, economic regulatory legislation.These are only sectors of a much larger unexplored terrain.Moreover, unnecessary confusion has become an ally of ignorance in impeding understanding of these areas.