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UNITED STATES v. BALSYS

Opinion of the Court

ing degree of international cooperation is coming to charac-
terize the enterprise of criminal prosecution.15 The mission
of the OSI as shown in this case exempliﬁes the international
cooperation that is said to undermine the legitimacy of treat-
ing separate governmental authorities as separate for pur-
poses of liberty protection in domestic courts. Because the
Government now has a signiﬁcant interest in seeing individu-
als convicted abroad for their crimes, it is subject to the same
incentive to overreach that has required application of the
privilege in the domestic context. Balsys says that this ar-
gument is nothing more than the reasoning of the Murphy
Court when it justiﬁed its recognition of a fear of state prose-
cution by looking to the signiﬁcance of “ ‘cooperative federal-
ism,’ ” the teamwork of state and national ofﬁcials to ﬁght
interstate crime.

378 U. S., at 55–56.

But Balsys invests Murphy’s “cooperative federalism”
with a signiﬁcance unsupported by that opinion. We have
already pointed out that Murphy’s expansion upon Murdock
is not supported by Murphy’s unsound historical reexamina-
tion, but must rest on Murphy’s other rationale, under which
its holding is a consequence of Malloy. That latter reading
is essential to an understanding of “cooperative federalism.”
For the Murphy majority, “cooperative federalism” was not
important standing alone, but simply because it underscored
the signiﬁcance of the Court’s holding that after Malloy it
would be unjustiﬁably formalistic for a federal court to ig-
nore fear of state prosecution when ruling on a privilege
claim. Thus, the Court described the “whipsaw” effect that
the decision in Malloy would have created if fear of state
prosecution were not cognizable in a federal proceeding:

“[The] policies and purposes [of the privilege] are
defeated when a witness can be whipsawed into in-
criminating himself under both state and federal law

15 The Court of Appeals cited a considerable number of studies in the

growing literature on the subject.

119 F. 3d 122, 130–131 (CA2 1997).