Improving Economic Sanctions In The States

Economic sanctions in the U.S. justice system have acquired newfound attention from the public and policymakers across the country in recent years. As states reconsider excessively severe sentences for low level offenders captured in the justice system, there is a renewed interest in using alternatives to incarceration - including economic sanctions - to further penal policy while avoiding the high costs of incarceration. This development lies in tension with the reality that many defendants cannot afford even minimal economic sanctions and instead accrue criminal justice debt. Policymakers are only just starting to engage with substantive solutions to this problem. The American Law Institute finds itself at the forefront in considering these realities as it completely restructures the Model Penal Code's approach to economic sanctions. This Article discusses the American Law Institute's new approach in the context of the competing interests that make determining an appropriate economic sanctions policy perspective difficult. It highlights the ways that this policy reform strikes a balance between the competing goals before proposing practical measures to build upon this new approach. The Article also discusses how broader trends in criminal justice policy could prevent the improvements envisioned by the Code's revised approach. Ultimately this Article argues that using economic sanctions in a way that is productive and proportionate - like other punitive policies in the states - requires changing the way we punish for more than just cost-saving reasons. The revised Model Penal Code makes great strides in this direction, but more can, and must, be done.

This is a comprehensive analysis of the myriad US laws for imposing economic sanctions for foreign policy reasons. Against a broad range of target countries, the United States has resorted increasingly to a variety of economic pressures as a major tool in its foreign policy. Examples include South Africa, Panama, Libya, Nicaragua, the Soviet Union, Poland and Iran. The book is written in a lucid style designed for both non-lawyer and lawyer. It begins with a brief history and examination of the effectiveness of economic sanctions, drawing upon the existing literature. It then breaks ground by carefully analysing the wide range of US laws that authorize controls on government programmes (such as foreign aid), US exports, imports, private financial transactions, and assistance by international financial institutions. The study offers discussion of the 1988 omnibus trade bill and includes a useful chapter examining the widely differing laws of major US allies, notably the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and the European Community.

The growing use of U.S. and multilateral economic sanctions--and the increasing and controversial attention such measures are attracting internationally--create a need for a detailed legal analysis of the subject and its policy implications for both U.S. practitioners and their counterparts in other countries. The expanding field of sanctions is especially worthy of close scrutiny as it generates significant (and often inadvertent) influence on finance and trade. Increasingly, lawyers and business people involved in international transactions must take account of the risks, both actual and potential, inherent in compliance with economic sanctions on trading partners. This major new work, a completely revised successor edition to the author's much-cited Economic Sanctions and U.S. Trade, shifts the main emphasis from the mechanics of applying foreign policy objectives to a careful and complete articulation of what those goals are or ought to be--an approach that leads inevitably to a concrete methodology for assessing the effectiveness of sanctions. In the process the book examines such salient characteristics of the current and developing sanctions regime as the following: the growing prominence of U.S. Congressionally-mandated sanctions programs; the complex interaction of economic sanctions and trade policy; and the marked increase in multilateral sanctions programs in which the U.S. is a participant. In-depth analysis of major U.S. sanctions programs (those imposed on Cuba, Libya, and Iraq, as well as several other lesser programs) presents numerous hypothetical but realistic international scenarios, demonstrating their working-out under the practical application of specific elements of each sanctions program.

Dr. Zachary Selden provides a detailed examination of how sanctions can and cannot be used effectively to further U.S. foreign interests. In the post-Cold War era, sanctions are becoming a frequently used tool of foreign policy, but Selden offers an important cautionary note. Sanctions are often counterproductive, and they create interest groups within the target country who have a vested interest in seeing that sanctions and the policies that brought them to bear are maintained. While sanctions aimed at capital flows can be highly effective, those aimed at trade often become the functional equivalent of a protective tariff, stimulating Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) and creating groups of producers or suppliers who take steps in the political arena to ensure that their economic windfall is maintained. After demonstrating the ISI effects in a large sample of cases, Selden goes on to demonstrate how sanctions fueled the rise of a powerful criminal elite in Yugoslavia who sponsored extreme nationalist political figures and how sanctions were twisted to Saddam Hussein's personal benefit in Iraq. More than simply of academic interest, this study serves as a guide for the more effective use of sanctions. It will be of particular interest to scholars, researchers, and policy makers involved with American foreign and military policy.

Tracing the history of economic sanctions from the blockades of World War I to the policing of colonial empires and the interwar confrontation with fascism, Nicholas Mulder combines political, economic, legal, and military history to reveal how a coercive wartime tool was adopted as an instrument of peacekeeping by the League of Nations.This timely study casts an overdue light on why sanctions are widely considered a form of war, and why their unintended consequences are so tremendous.

What cannot be disputed is that economic sanctions are increasingly at the center of American foreign policy: to stem the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, promote human rights, discourage aggression, protect the environment, and thwart drug trafficking.

"Justice is expensive. So is injustice. These kinds of judgments are usually made in terms of money, and an economic focus makes sense in the context of criminal law and procedure, since money has long played a role in how society deals with unlawful behavior. These economic sanctions, the court-imposed financial obligations that follow a criminal conviction, are useful because they apply a metric that is understood by everyone. The notion of using money as a means of resolving criminal and civil problems goes back almost four thousand years, to the Code of Hammurabi (Van Ness, 1990), and there are several Biblical injunctions regarding payment after crimes. In the Middle Ages, victims were entitled to compensation for injuries (adjusted for their rank in society), and by the twelfth century, the king was entitled to a fee for administering the system (Klein, 1997)"--