Cite as: 524 U. S. 184 (1998)
Scalia, J., dissenting
a license), I see no principled way to determine what law the defendant must be conscious of violating. See, e. g., Lewis v. United States, 523 U. S. 155, 174-175 (1998) (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment) (pointing out a similar interpretive problem potentially raised by the Assimilative Crimes Act).
Congress is free, of course, to make criminal liability under one statute turn on knowledge of another, to use its firearms dealer statutes to encourage compliance with New York City's tax collection efforts, and to put judges and juries through the kind of mental gymnastics described above. But these are strange results, and I would not lightly assume that Congress intended to make liability under a federal criminal statute depend so heavily upon the vagaries of local law—particularly local law dealing with completely unrelated subjects. If we must have a presumption in cases like this one, I think it would be more reasonable to presume that, when Congress makes ignorance of the law a defense to a criminal prohibition, it ordinarily means ignorance of the unlawfulness of the specific conduct punished by that criminal prohibition.
That is the meaning we have given the word "willfully" in other contexts where we have concluded it requires knowledge of the law. See, e. g., Ratzlaf, supra, at 149 ("To convict Ratzlaf of the crime with which he was charged, . . . the jury had to find he knew the structuring in which he engaged was unlawful"); Cheek v. United States, 498 U. S. 192, 201 (1991) ("[T]he standard for the statutory willfulness requirement is the 'voluntary, intentional violation of a known legal duty.' . . . [T]he issue is whether the defendant knew of the duty purportedly imposed by the provision of the statute or regulation he is accused of violating"). The Court explains these cases on the ground that they involved "highly technical statutes that presented the danger of ensnaring individuals engaged in apparently innocent conduct." Ante, at 194. That is no explanation at all. The complexity of the tax and currency laws may explain why the Court interpreted
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