Abstract
Response to Irina D. Manta, The High Cost of Low Sanctions
In her thoughtful new article, The High Cost of Low Sanctions, Professor Irina D. Manta provides a useful analysis of the (often) unanticipated negative effects that low legal sanctions can have. While the presence of low legal sanctions may assuage the public’s concerns about any given law, Manta argues that in many cases, low sanctions create a false sense of security. Indeed, in some instances low legal sanctions may be worse than high sanctions for a number of reasons: (1) they may make it easier to pass faulty laws in the first place; (2) these faulty laws then become increasingly difficult to eliminate; and (3) over time, the initially low legal sanctions grow into high sanctions either through incremental additions or simply through the way the laws are enforced.
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