The ex ante function of the criminal law

Criminal legal codes draw clear lines between permissible and illegal condu ct, and the criminal justice system counts on people knowing these lines an d governing their conduct accordingly. This is the "ex ante" function of th e lavi; lines are drawn, and because citizens fear punishments or believe i n the moral validity of the legal codes they do not cross these lines. But do people in fact know the lines that legal codes draw? The fact that sever al states have adopted laws that deviate from other state laws enables a fi eld experiment to address this question. Residents (N = 203) of states (Wis consin, Texas, North Dakota, and South Dakota) that had adopted a minority position on some aspect of criminal law reported the relevant law of their state to be no different than did citizens of "majoritarian" states. Path a nalyses using structural equation modeling suggest that people make guesses about what their state law holds by extrapolating from their personal view of whether or not the act in question ought to be criminalized.