[anigbrowl]

I don't buy Silverglate's thesis at all. Every long-form article of his I've ever read is awash in BS (for example http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732382670457835...). There are daft laws that people sometimes break and get punished for, which could not have been foreseen and for which no moral culpability can inure. Those cases are exceptional. But the idea that people are typically committing three felonies a day and effectively living in a state of perpetual blackmail is just not true.

He spends much of his book complaining (with some justification) that people such as securities traders have so much bureaucracy to deal with that they face a heightened risk of criminality through non-compliance. I think that both our regulatory and litigation systems are extremely unwieldy and that what we need is a bit less mechanistic proceduralism and a bit more bureaucratic autonomy and accountability but that's a far cry from the notion that pretty much everyone is a criminal.