336
Opinion of the Court
merchandise; (3) and any other's villain than ours shall be likewise amerced, saving his wainage." Magna Charta, 9 Hen. III, ch. 14 (1225), 1 Stat. at Large 6-7 (1762 ed.).
None of these sources suggests how disproportional to the gravity of an offense a fine must be in order to be deemed constitutionally excessive.
We must therefore rely on other considerations in deriving a constitutional excessiveness standard, and there are two that we find particularly relevant. The first, which we have emphasized in our cases interpreting the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause, is that judgments about the appropriate punishment for an offense belong in the first instance to the legislature. See, e. g., Solem v. Helm, 463 U. S. 277, 290 (1983) ("Reviewing courts . . . should grant substantial deference to the broad authority that legislatures necessarily possess in determining the types and limits of punishments for crimes"); see also Gore v. United States, 357 U. S. 386, 393 (1958) ("Whatever views may be entertained regarding severity of punishment, . . . these are peculiarly questions of legislative policy"). The second is that any judicial determination regarding the gravity of a particular criminal offense will be inherently imprecise. Both of these principles counsel against requiring strict proportionality between the amount of a punitive forfeiture and the gravity of a criminal offense, and we therefore adopt the standard of gross disproportionality articulated in our Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause precedents. See, e. g., Solem v. Helm, supra, at 288; Rummel v. Estelle, 445 U. S. 263, 271 (1980).
In applying this standard, the district courts in the first instance, and the courts of appeals, reviewing the proportionality determination de novo,10 must compare the amount
10 At oral argument, respondent urged that a district court's determination of excessiveness should be reviewed by an appellate court for abuse of discretion. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 32. We cannot accept this submission. The factual findings made by the district courts in conducting the exces-
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