“What are Federal Corruption Prosecutions for?”

The title of this post is the title of this new paper now available via SSRN authored by Lauren Ouziel. Here is its abstract:

What explains the Supreme Court’s repeated rejection of public-corruption prosecutions over the last two decades?  This Essay turns the lens on prosecutors, examining how their tendency to rely on broad theories of liability has paradoxically narrowed federal criminal law’s reach over public corruption.  It investigates the dynamics of public-corruption prosecutions that push prosecutors towards breadth and away from the alternatives (a narrower theory or no prosecution at all).  It considers how, relative to those alternatives, reversals at the Supreme Court have harmed the broader anticorruption project.  And it proposes an alternative approach to the exercise of charging discretion in public-corruption prosecutions, one rooted in a wholesale reassessment of what those prosecutions should be for.  The ultimate goal is not to find a theory through which corrupt acts are prosecutable federal crimes; the ultimate goal is to reduce corruption.  This guiding principle should steer federal prosecution to where it does the greatest good: bringing to light those corrupt acts that would otherwise remain invisible to the public and thus immune from political or other consequences.