Professor Joel Johnson Receives Runner-Up Award for AALS Section on Criminal Law Junior Scholars Paper Competition

Professor Joel S. Johnson has received the Runner-Up Award for the AALS Section on Criminal Law Junior Scholars Paper Competition for his paper Major-Questions Lenity (SSRN). The competition is a national competition open to all junior criminal law scholars who have been teaching for six years or fewer.

From the Association of American Law Schools:

The awards are hosted by several of the association’s 108 sections that are organized around various academic disciplines and topics of interest. This year’s winners will be acknowledged during an awards ceremony at the 2025 AALS Annual Meeting on January 9.

“AALS sections are vital communities within our association, fostering collaboration, innovation, and excellence in legal education,” said Melanie D. Wilson, AALS President and Dean and Roy L. Steinheimer, Jr., Professor of Law at Washington and Lee University School of Law. “It is with great pride that we recognize these distinguished individuals and institutions that have been honored by their sections for outstanding contributions to scholarship, teaching, mentorship, and service. The theme for the AALS this year and the upcoming Annual Meeting is ‘Courage in Action.’ These honorees represent courage in our profession and inspire us all.”

The competition results may be found at Association of American Law Schools

Abstract of Major-Questions Lenity:

There is a fundamental connection between the historic rule of lenity and the new major questions doctrine.  At their core, both doctrines reflect a commitment to the separation of powers on important questions of policy.  In light of that shared justification, the logic of the newly articulated major questions doctrine in the administrative-law context has much to offer lenity in the criminal-law context, and the major-questions framework is strikingly similar to a rationale that has begun to emerge in some of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions adopting narrow constructions of federal penal statutes.  That emerging rationale can be understood as a modest form of major-questions lenity that may lead to a more robust version of the doctrine.

The Court significantly weakened lenity in the mid-twentieth century, and it now plays virtually no role in the construction of federal penal statutes. Instead, the Court relies on a set of more targeted interpretive tools for narrowly construing certain penal statutes.  The practical effect is a regime of partial leniency that deprioritizes the generic separation-of-powers value on which historic lenity was based while elevating more targeted concerns.  As a result, for most penal statutes, the principle that clear crime definition is the legislature’s obligation has been lost, and outcomes often turn on whether courts will exercise implicitly delegated lawmaking authority to adopt narrow constructions on a largely discretionary and ad hoc basis.

A robust major-questions lenity would work to restore historic lenity’s insistence on legislative clarity in crime definition.  It would promote the separation of powers by disciplining prosecutors, courts, and ultimately Congress.  Major-questions lenity would substantially limit the practice of implicit delegation of crime definition and help to curb the adoption of overly broad and literalistic constructions of penal states in the lower courts.