Is Chevron relevant to federal criminal law?

The principles of legality and separation of powers we conventionally understood to require that lawmaking, law-interpreting, and law-enforcement be carried out by distinct institutions. This Article challenges this understanding in the context of federal criminal law Descriptively, Professor Kahan maintains that federal criminal law is most accurately conceptualised as a ''common law-making'' regime in which Congress delegates power to courts by enacting incompletely specified statutes. Normatively he argues that the law would be better if the delegated lawmaking authority that courts now exercise were instead wielded by the Department of Justice. The legal mechanism for this reform would be the so-called Chevron doctrine, which requires courts to defer to executive branch readings of ambiguous regulatory statutes. The likely advantages of such an arrangement, Professor Kahan argues, include greater expertise in the making of criminal law greater uniformity in the interpretation of it, and (mast surprisingly) greater moderation in the enforcement of it.