Anticorruption

For the past several decades, the Supreme Court has repeatedly sought to reinterpret the meaning of “property” within federal fraud statutes to limit the degree to which federal prosecutors can regulate state official misconduct. While the Court’s renewed interest in the federal fraud statutes has drawn varying degrees of praise and criticism from different sides of the legal community, this Note seeks to assess—in an apolitical, value-neutral...

In Kelly v. United States, the Supreme Court vacated the federal corruption convictions of the three government officials behind “Bridgegate.” In the process of doing so, the Court flagged an interesting tool that states have in their anticorruption toolkits that might’ve applied to the conduct before the Court: official misconduct statutes. These dynamic statutes are on the books in twenty-three states and territories, and another...