Lambert v. California
The Supreme Court struck down a Los Angeles ordinance that punished convicted felons for failing to register with police, because the woman convicted under it had no way of knowing she had to register.
The ruling means that when a law punishes someone purely for doing nothing — not for any act — due process requires the government to show the person actually knew about the duty, or had reason to know, before it can convict them.
“Were it otherwise, the evil would be as great as it is when the law is written in print too fine to read or in a language foreign to the community.”
Explaining why punishing someone with no notice of a legal duty offends due process.
How it got here: A jury convicted her and the trial court denied her constitutional objections; the Appellate Department of California's Superior Court affirmed, and she appealed to the Supreme Court.
The Case in Depth
What happened
A Los Angeles ordinance required anyone convicted of a felony to register with police within five days of arriving or living in the city, with daily failure to register treated as a separate crime. A woman who had lived in Los Angeles for over seven years and had a prior forgery conviction there was arrested on an unrelated matter and charged with never having registered. She said she never knew about the registration requirement.
The question before the Court
Can a city punish someone for failing to register as a felon when she had no idea the law required her to register?
Why it matters
People with past felony convictions living in cities with similar registration ordinances cannot be punished for silently failing to register unless prosecutors show they knew or should have known about the requirement. The decision limits how far governments can go in criminalizing pure inaction without any notice to the person affected.
What changes now
The reversal ends this particular conviction; the woman cannot be punished under the ordinance as applied without proof she knew or probably knew of the registration duty. The ruling is a final decision on the merits, not a temporary order. Cities with similar 'mere presence' registration laws must now build in some notice mechanism or prove knowledge to sustain convictions for failing to register.
What this does not decide
The Court did not say that all registration or licensing laws require proof of knowledge — only laws punishing pure inaction with no circumstances that would alert a person to check the law. Laws tied to an underlying business activity or affirmative conduct were left untouched by this ruling.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Burton
Justice Burton dissented in a single sentence, stating simply that he believed the ordinance as applied to this woman did not violate her constitutional rights, without further elaboration.
Dissent — Justice Frankfurter
“I feel confident that the present decision will turn out to be an isolated deviation from the strong current of precedents — a derelict on the waters of the law.”Frankfurter predicting the ruling would not become an influential precedent.
Justice Frankfurter argued that countless laws punish people who had no awareness their conduct was wrongful, and that the majority's distinction between requiring action and requiring inaction has no constitutional basis, comparing it to outdated common-law distinctions between feasance and nonfeasance. He warned that if taken seriously, the majority's reasoning would threaten a huge body of existing regulatory legislation, but predicted the decision would instead be an isolated exception rather than a broadly followed rule.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court acknowledged that lawmakers generally have wide latitude to create crimes without requiring proof that the person knew their conduct was illegal, since 'ignorance of the law is no excuse' is a long-standing rule.
- But the Court distinguished this ordinance because it punished someone for doing nothing at all — pure passivity — rather than for taking an action or failing to act under circumstances that would tip a person off that something might be legally significant.
- The Court then invoked due process's core promise of notice: fairness generally requires that people have a chance to learn of a legal duty before being punished for violating it, a principle usually applied to protect property interests but extended here to a criminal penalty for total inaction.
- Applying that principle, the Court found that because the woman had no actual knowledge of the registration duty and the prosecution offered no proof that she probably knew or should have known about it, punishing her deprived her of any real chance to comply or defend herself.
- The Court concluded that convicting a wholly passive, unknowing person under such a registration law violates due process, so actual knowledge or proof of probable knowledge of the duty is required before a conviction can stand.