International Criminal Investigations

Economic globalization has led to a striking increase in the amount and sophistication of criminal activity that crosses borders, which in turn has led to heightened responses by law enforcement authorities. This includes increased reliance on traditional procedures such as extradition and treaty-based information sharing, and significant trends in their evolution to address new challenges. National regimes and international communities are also pursuing new strategies to address rapidly changing problems such as cyber-crime. The practical and legal limits of a sovereign's powers to fight crime that takes place in part outside its territory, conflicts among criminal procedure regimes, the phenomenon of multi-jurisdictional investigations and of the "deterritorialization of data," and the evolving utility of international agreements and organizations are critically important.

This course will address the conceptual and practical challenges raised by cross-border white collar investigations. It will first review some of the substantive criminal laws that lead to such investigations, including international tax evasion, bribery, cyber crime, and money laundering. It will then address principles of extraterritoriality and the practical effect of these principles on national efforts to fight international crime. It will cover current developments in classic procedures such as extradition and international evidence searches, the challenge posed by national regimes to protect privacy, and problems posed by conflicting criminal procedure regimes. It concludes with a review of the cross-border investigative practices of international criminal tribunals such as the International Criminal Court and of recourse to international organizations such as Interpol.

The course will use An Introduction to Transnational Criminal Law (2018) by Neil Boister as its principal text, which will be supplemented with recent texts and decisions from US and other courts. In addition to a conceptual review of applicable laws and procedures it will explore topics and lawyering skills that are essential to modern criminal legal practice, and will be of value to students interested in criminal prosecution or defense, and in international relations generally.

Students have an option of being graded either on the basis of an exam OR a term-end paper. For those students opting to write a paper, they will be asked to submit a short (3-page) proposal mid-way through the semester, on which I will provide written feedback; the roughly 20-page final paper will generally serve to satisfy writing requirements. The exam will be take-home, open book.