In March 2019, over fifty people were criminally charged with participating in a scheme to gain fraudulent student admissions to various U.S. universities. How did these individuals end up engaging in plainly nefarious felony criminal offenses? Some of the perpetrators were likely fully aware of both the criminal and unethical nature of their behavior. But others seem to have convinced themselves that their behavior was acceptable because this is how the “system” works. In his book "The Law of Good People," Yuval Feldman argues that people’s limited awareness of the unethical nature of their behavior requires redesigning legal rules to anticipate this aspect of human psychology. Feldman’s bottom line is that because people are often unaware of the moral meaning of their behavior, law must focus on identifying and regulating that behavior before the fact, rather than punishing it afterwards. This review explores an important category of wrongdoing for which the traditional regulatory approach of threats of punishment ex-post might in many cases be suboptimal: corruption. This category provides examples of settings where actors are difficult to deter within standard enforcement frameworks because their motivations are complex. Building on my earlier work on expressive law and social norms, I develop an alternative conception of compliance achieved by supplementing threatened sanctions with leveraging the expressive power of law to decrease the likelihood that people will deceive themselves about the social and ethical meaning of their behavior. Theories of expressive law posit that law can influence behavior through means that go beyond the legal sanctions threatened for violation. I will specifically focus on informational expressive law: the idea that the state can deploy law to provide information, which can in turn change individual beliefs and social norms, which in turn can shape behavior. By leveraging the informational function of expressive law, the state can identify situations in which individuals are likely to fail to fully appreciate the meaning of their behavior. Identifying and sorting “good people,” I argue, is less important than identifying situations and structures that are amenable to legal interventions that leverage social norms.

中文翻译：

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普通人与错误行为的合理化

2019 年 3 月，超过 50 人被刑事指控参与一项骗取美国各大学学生入学的计划。这些人是如何最终参与明显邪恶的重罪刑事犯罪的？一些肇事者可能完全意识到他们行为的犯罪性质和不道德性质。但其他人似乎已经说服自己，他们的行为是可以接受的，因为这就是“系统”的运作方式。尤瓦尔·费尔德曼 (Yuval Feldman) 在他的著作《好人的法则》(The Law of Good People) 中认为，人们对其行为的不道德本质的认识有限，因此需要重新设计法律规则以预测人类心理的这一方面。费尔德曼的底线是，因为人们往往不知道他们行为的道德意义，法律必须侧重于在事前识别和规范该行为，而不是事后对其进行惩罚。这篇综述探讨了一个重要的不当行为类别，在许多情况下，事后惩罚威胁的传统监管方法可能不是最理想的：腐败。此类别提供了在标准执法框架内难以阻止参与者的设置示例，因为他们的动机很复杂。在我早期关于表达性法律和社会规范的工作的基础上，我发展了一种替代的遵守概念，通过利用法律的表达性来补充威胁制裁来减少人们在其行为的社会和伦理意义方面欺骗自己的可能性。表达法理论认为，法律可以通过超越威胁违法的法律制裁的手段来影响行为。我将特别关注信息表达法：国家可以部署法律来提供信息，这反过来可以改变个人信仰和社会规范，进而可以塑造行为。通过利用表达法的信息功能，国家可以识别个人可能无法完全理解其行为意义的情况。我认为，识别和分类“好人”不如识别适合利用社会规范的法律干预的情况和结构重要。国家可以运用法律来提供信息，这反过来又可以改变个人信仰和社会规范，进而影响行为的想法。通过利用表达法的信息功能，国家可以识别个人可能无法完全理解其行为意义的情况。我认为，识别和分类“好人”不如识别适合利用社会规范进行法律干预的情况和结构重要。国家可以运用法律来提供信息，这反过来又可以改变个人信仰和社会规范，进而影响行为的想法。通过利用表达法的信息功能，国家可以识别个人可能无法完全理解其行为意义的情况。我认为，识别和分类“好人”不如识别适合利用社会规范进行法律干预的情况和结构重要。