{"id":695,"date":"2019-08-05T11:01:08","date_gmt":"2019-08-05T15:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/103-online\/oversized-frauds-undersized-fish-and-deconstruction-of-the-sarbanes-oxley-act\/"},"modified":"2025-05-12T11:14:16","modified_gmt":"2025-05-12T15:14:16","slug":"oversized-frauds-undersized-fish-and-deconstruction-of-the-sarbanes-oxley-act","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/submit\/glj-online\/103-online\/oversized-frauds-undersized-fish-and-deconstruction-of-the-sarbanes-oxley-act\/","title":{"rendered":"Oversized Frauds, Undersized Fish, and Deconstruction of the Sarbanes\u2013Oxley Act"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Occasionally the Supreme Court of the United States hears a case simply to correct an injustice. That happened in\u00a0<em>United States v. Yates<\/em>. Yates, a fishing captain, threw back three undersized fish. He later was convicted of violating the Sarbanes\u2013Oxley Act, a statute designed to prevent corporate fraud, on the ground that he destroyed a \u201crecord, document, or tangible object,\u201d even though the fish could not remotely be deemed a financial record or an information-storage device.\u00a0 The court of appeals upheld Yates\u2019s conviction by relying entirely on a dictionary definition of the term \u201ctangible object.\u201d That literal-mindedness led to an uncommonly silly result. The Supreme Court should not only reverse the judgment of conviction, but also underscore two canons of construction. First, courts should use common sense when interpreting criminal laws, rather than be slaves to the dictionary. Second, the rule of lenity is a \u201crule<b>\u201d<\/b>\u00a0of lenity, not just an \u201coption\u201d of lenity, and it is an especially important rule when a defendant faces a potentially severe sentence.<\/p>\n<p>Continue reading <em>Oversized Frauds, Undersized Fish, and Deconstruction of the Sarbanes\u2013Oxley Act <\/em>on <a href=\"https:\/\/heinonline.org\/HOL\/P?h=hein.journals\/gljon104&amp;i=17&amp;a=Z2VvcmdldG93bi5lZHU\">HeinOnline<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Occasionally the Supreme Court of the United States hears a case simply to correct an injustice. That happened in\u00a0United States v. Yates. Yates, a fishing captain, threw back three undersized [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":627,"featured_media":0,"parent":671,"menu_order":5,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"abstract.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"footnotes":"","_tec_slr_enabled":"","_tec_slr_layout":""},"class_list":["post-695","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"ticketed":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/627"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=695"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":925,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/695\/revisions\/925"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}