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BRYAN v. UNITED STATES

Opinion of the Court

pretation of “willfully” in two other contexts.
In certain
cases involving willful violations of the tax laws, we have
concluded that the jury must ﬁnd that the defendant was
aware of the speciﬁc provision of the tax code that he was
charged with violating. See, e. g., Cheek v. United States,
498 U. S. 192, 201 (1991).17 Similarly, in order to satisfy a
willful violation in Ratzlaf, we concluded that the jury had
to ﬁnd that the defendant knew that his structuring of
cash transactions to avoid a reporting requirement was un-
lawful. See 510 U. S., at 138, 149. Those cases, however,
are readily distinguishable. Both the tax cases 18 and Ratz-
laf 19 involved highly technical statutes that presented the
danger of ensnaring individuals engaged in apparently inno-
cent conduct.20 As a result, we held that these statutes

17 Even in tax cases, we have not always required this heightened mens
In United States v. Pomponio, 429 U. S. 10 (1976) (per curiam), for
rea.
example, the jury was instructed that a willful act is one done “with [the]
bad purpose either to disobey or to disregard the law.”
Id., at 11. We
approved of this instruction, concluding that “[t]he trial judge . . . ade-
quately instructed the jury on willfulness.”

Id., at 13.

18 As we stated in Cheek v. United States, 498 U. S. 192, 199–200 (1991):
“The proliferation of statutes and regulations has sometimes made it
difﬁcult for the average citizen to know and comprehend the extent of the
duties and obligations imposed by the tax laws. Congress has accordingly
softened the impact of the common-law presumption by making speciﬁc
intent to violate the law an element of certain federal criminal tax of-
fenses. Thus, the Court almost 60 years ago interpreted the statutory
term ‘willfully’ as used in the federal criminal tax statutes as carving out
an exception to the traditional rule [that every person is presumed to
know the law]. This special treatment of criminal tax offenses is largely
due to the complexity of the tax laws.”

19 See Bates v. United States, 522 U. S. 23, 31, n. 6 (1997) (noting that
Ratzlaf ’s holding was based on the “particular statutory context of cur-
rency structuring”); Ratzlaf, 510 U. S., at 149 (Court’s holding based on
“particular contex[t]” of currency structuring statute).

20 Id., at 144–145 (“[C]urrency structuring is not inevitably nefarious. . . .
Nor is a person who structures a currency transaction invariably moti-
vated by a desire to keep the Government in the dark”; Government’s
construction of the statute would criminalize apparently innocent activ-
ity); Cheek, 498 U. S., at 205 (“[I]n ‘our complex tax system, uncertainty