The talk is Wed Feb 19 2020, 12:30-1:30pm, at the Toulson Law Library at the University of Surrey School of Law. Mr Bystranowski is a PhD candidate at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and currently SCLP visiting fellow.

Abstract: I define proxy crimes as offences that are defined over-inclusively in order to overcome evidentiary hurdles. In other words, a proxy crime criminalizes conduct that might be innocent in itself but which stands in for some possibly hard-to-prove primary wrongdoing. I argue that proxy crimes so defined denote a set of offences that are not only numerous in modern criminal codes but also encounter normative problems that are quite distinct from those faced by other types of over-inclusive criminal legislation. I argue that even scholars that understood proxy crimes roughly along these lines have mostly failed to address adequately some other problematic theoretical points about proxy crimes, such as the level of selectivity of their enforcement or the sense in which criminalized proxy conduct is ‘innocent.’

In this talk, I focus on normative problems faced by proxy crimes from a non-consequentialist perspective: what their true object of punishment is (the primary wrongdoing or a distinct wrong of behaving suspiciously), problems of extension (unacceptable risk of punishing the innocent), and problems of intension (failure to properly name the true object of punishment).

Finally, I present some preliminary results of my experimental research on normative intuitions surrounding proxy crimes. I show that legal professionals seem to be much more likely than laypeople to understand proxy crimes as playing a purely instrumental role in going after the primary wrongdoing.