Introduction.
The Penal Law Web attempts to harness web technology to capture the structure, diversity, and scope of modern penal law.   Through hyperlinks and frame-based comparers, the Law Web allows users to explore the connections within a given system of criminal law, as well as across different systems.  At the same time, the Web's focus extends beyond the core of penal law-including serious crimes such as homicide, robbery, and rape-to the everexpanding periphery of regulatory offenses, which has long threatened to become the exception that swallows the rule.

The Penal Law Web is part of a broad integrated program to reform American penal law teaching, scholarship, and practice.  If you'd like to learn more about this program and the Penal Law Web's place within it, you can download "Reforming American Penal Law," with hyperlinks (in Word) and without (in pdf).  The program also has been published at 90 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 49 (1999) (click here for a reprint).  "Penal Panopticon: The Idea of a Modern Model Penal Code," an article exploring, among other things, the Web's role in modern penal legislation is also available (in pdf).  This paper appears in the Buffalo Criminal Law Review's Model Penal Code Symposium (2000).

The Penal Law Web currently covers only one aspect of the system of penal law, substantive criminal law.  Ideally, penal law will be integrated in its entirety, reaching from the definition of penal norms (the province of substantive criminal law) to their imposition (the law of criminal procedure) and, finally and most importantly, the actual infliction of punishment for their violation (prison or correction law).  A comprehensive overview, including a flowchart, depicting the last two, applicational rather than definitional, aspects of the penal process, is available here.

Continuously updated to reflect recent developments in penal law, the Penal Law Web currently includes:

• Analytic Structure of American Criminal Law, a three-level analysis of criminal liability with links to codes, cases, & commentary--with emphasis on the Model Penal Code & New York Penal Law
• Overview of American Criminal Law, a systematic selection of codes, cases, & commentary covering the general & special part of American criminal law--with emphasis on the Model Penal Code, New York Penal Law, & U.S. Code
• Constitutional Criminal Law, a collection of materials concerning constitutional limitations on substantive, not procedural, criminal law
• annotated versions of the Model Penal Code and the New York Penal Law, hyperlinked with court opinions, commentary, and relevant statutory materials
• unannotated versions of 50+ domestic and foreign penal codes as well as other statutory materials on penal law and related areas
• 300+ court opinions on penal law from the United States and other countries, indexed alphabetically, jurisdictionally, and topically
• four frame-based comparers to
• compare selected codes by topic (the Penal Code Comparer)
• compare full-text codes
• compare court opinions
• compare full-text codes with court opinions interpreting code provisions
• three search engines to
• analyze various penal codes by topic (the Penal Code Analyzer)
• search the annotated New York Penal Law
• search the court opinions collected in the Penal Law Web

User's Guide.
The Penal Law Web is designed as a resource for teachers, students, scholars, legislators, lawyers & judges, as well as for the interested public, in the United States and elsewhere.

Teachers.
The Penal Law Web gives teachers access to an extensive library of penal law materials before, during, and after class.  As a result, penal law teachers can communicate to their students not merely a multitude of rules, but also their interconnectedness in the complex system of modern penal law.

In preparing for class, the teacher may select code sections or court opinions to illustrate certain points during her prepared presentation.  In class, the Penal Law Web then can be projected onto a screen, using a computer with internet access to select from the Law Web's various components.  In addition to supplementing her presentation with selections from the Web, the teacher would also be free to draw on the Web's collection of materials to illustrate and pursue an unanticipated line of inquiry or to frame and address a student's question.  For example, as a student's comment hints at a distinction between the insanity defense in federal and California law, the teacher might use the Penal Code Comparer to pull up the relevant sections of each jurisdiction's code on a split screen and then explore their structure and content in detail, in front of and for the benefit of the entire class.  Similarly, she might drive home the historical foundation of the Federal Criminal Code's definition of insanity by using the code/case comparison function to display, side by side, the relevant provision in Title 18 and the highlighted passage in the 1843 English case of M'Naghten upon which it is based.

Students.
By integrating its comprehensive collection of penal law materials into an analytic and a topical structure, the Penal Law Web helps students fit individual rules into a larger context, without sacrificing the scope or complexity of modern penal law.  Since the Penal Law Web is available at any time, students can use it to prepare for class, as well as to review the materials after class and to prepare for the exam.  Some students print out the reading assignments once before class and mark up their copy with comments, then print out another clean version for detailed notetaking in class.  Students also take advantage of the dynamic features of the site, including the comparers and the hyperlinks interconnecting the codes, cases, and commentary throughout the Penal Law Web.  In this way, they can on their own time and at their own pace appreciate and explore conceptual connections within a given body of law or across jurisdictional lines.  This out-of-class work enhances students' understanding of the subject as well as the quality of class discussions.  The Web's various structural features have proved particularly useful in the preparation of outlines for the review of the subject in preparation for an exam.

Scholars.
The use of the code-based, comparative Penal Law Web to any scholar exploring a comparative approach to penal law, domestically or internationally, is apparent.  She will find the Penal Code Comparer, as well as the comparative chart of analytic structures and modes of culpability, of particular interest.  By capturing the tremendous variety and scope of modern penal law within a given jurisdiction, the Penal Law Web encourages even the scholar whose research interest is confined to a single jurisdiction to expand her inquiry beyond the traditional heartland of American penal law, the general part as applied to the law of homicide, to the continuously expanding mass of regulatory offenses.

 
Legislators.
The comprehensive interconnectedness of the Penal Law Web within a given jurisdiction also could guide representative lawmakers deciding-as they must often decide-whether (and, if so, how) the penal law might be employed to deal with a particular policy matter.  For instance, by providing a comprehensive overview of American penal law, the Penal Law Web might help to stem the recent tide of haphazard, duplicative, inconsistent, and generally unsystematic penal lawmaking.  Perhaps that overview alone may give lawmakers pause before continuing the current trend of wholesale and undifferentiated penalization.  Similarly, lawmakers might use the Law Web's selection of American and international penal codes, supplemented by the Penal Code Comparer, to gain an overview of the approaches that other jurisdictions have taken to general and specific issues of penal codification, ranging from the scope and structure of a penal code to the formulation of a particular provision.

Lawyers & Judges.
Not only legislators and their various aides and consultants (including legislative staffers and members of law revision commissions), but also other participants in the various aspects of the American penal system may turn to the Penal Law Web as a systematic collection of penal norms, supplemented by the workhorse of American legal practice, "precedent."  Most immediately, the Penal Law Web should be of use to those who work with any of the Law Web's penal codes that have been annotated by internal and external hyperlinks.  Using links embedded in such a code, e.g., the New York Penal Law, the practicing lawyer or judge may be able to recognize systematic connections among provisions within the Penal Law as well as among the Penal Law and other related codes, such as the Vehicle & Traffic Law or the Criminal Procedure Law.  This greater appreciation of the systematic context of a given provision may permit her to develop a more sophisticated analysis of a given case or controversy, which may ultimately result in a more consistent body of penal jurisprudence.
 
General Public.
No matter what their objective, preventive or retributive, penal norms may not be addressed merely to a specially trained subgroup of the state's constituents.  In the long run the legitimacy of American penal law can only be achieved if the penal law is brought home to its ultimate object-subjects, the very citizens who constitute the state that threatens and eventually inflicts punitive pain upon themselves in the name of penal law.  In fact, the legitimacy of American penal law will only be guaranteed if the distinction between official and non-official participants in the communal praxis of punishment is discarded, i.e., if all members of the American political community recognize the state's penal law as also their penal law.  As a publicly accessible resource, the Penal Law Web enables this long-term legitimation of American penal law by cutting through the layers of official system participants whose expert knowledge threatens to insulate the penal law from the constant public critical analysis it must undergo to achieve and retain legitimacy.

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