a little law philosophy

I have not written for the blog in nearly two weeks because I have been so busy with school. Also my wife 'Tzipi' has needed me to take care of our daughters while she teaches in the evenings and last weekend she was working as a labor doula.

I was up till 2am last night working on my first paper of the semester - for phil of law. It was an argumentative essay, meaning I had to criticise the work of a published law philosopher. My own fault I had to stay up late - I didn't start writing until around 4pm, even though I took the day off from work to do it. Also the daughters continually interrupted. :-) The 4-year-old can use the potty all by herself, but *sometimes* needs help wiping. The 3-year-old doesn't like to have help wiping (which is okay because she does a decent enough job) but she's keen to graduate to the BIG potty, and her little legs are not long enough to get her all the way up there. This is especially funny because for the longest time she refused to use anything but the daiper. We would put her in panties during the day to start her off, and she'd hold everything in until bedtime when we'd put the daiper on her. Aside from potty issues, they get "hungry" every five minutes when Mommy and Daddy are both busy. Ah, well. I remember how it was for me at that age, so I stay calm and do the best I can. Sometimes they don't like it.

So anyway, my paper dealt with the issue of entrapment. What it is, why it is an issue, when it can be applied, etc. I will touch on the issue very briefly here.

Entrapment is a defense to a criminal charge. The defense is that the defendant would not have committed the crime charged if the law enforcement agents had not employed the investigative methods they did.

The methods talked about are proactive methods. Let me explain. Traditionally, law enforcement has been reactive - the police wait around until a crime is reported, and then they take action against the offenders. But there are some kinds of crimes which never or seldom get reported. They might not get reported because everyone affected by the crime is a willing participant, such as in drug deals or briberies. Or, it could be the case that the victim of the crime is unaware of the crime, as when corporations engage in price-fixing. Or the victim may be unwilling or unable to report the crime, as in rape or extortion. Proactive enforcement methods target these crimes.

One of the advantages of proactive enforcement is that the investigators get to be the reporters as well. The idea is to set up a situation in which crime is likely to happen and in which it can be observed by the investigators. Sting operations, decoy operations, honeypot operations, and some others I can't think of right now are all proactive techniques.

The problem of entrapment comes about when the investigators step over the line and begin actually encouraging crime rather than merely setting up an opportunity for it to occur.

There's a lot more interesting stuff to go into but I'll write it later.

Ciao!