How much danger does the federal government’s unprincipled, out-of-control body of criminal law pose to, say, the average American small-business person? Well, suppose you were a small-business owner, and for twelve years both U.S. Customs and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had been inspecting the shipments of seafood you were importing to sell to U.S. restaurant distributors. Suppose that for the entirety of those twelve years you had always packaged your shipments using plastic bags rather than cardboard boxes. Suppose that there is no U.S. law requiring you …
Aspiring inventor Krister Evertson received a two-year sentence for allegedly abandoning materials that he had stored in sealed, stainless-steel containers, thus doing no harm to the environment. Indianapolis 500 champion Bobby Unser was prosecuted and convicted because federal prosecutors estimated that he and his snowmobiling companion wandered into a national wilderness area when they were fighting for their very lives, stranded for 2 days in a Rocky Mountain high-country blizzard. And federal officials prosecuted and convicted two arrowhead-collecting hobbyists, 66-year-old Eddie Leroy Anderson and his son, who unsuccessfully spent time …
The Wall Street Journal this weekend documented several sad features of the federal government’s proliferation of poorly written criminal laws, many of which leave it to prosecutors to pick and choose which Americans to prosecute as criminals. The Journal chronicles the stories of a half dozen Americans who became the targets of unprincipled, amorphous federal criminal laws. Heritage’s One Nation Under Arrest tells several more. It is thus disturbing that Congress has recently and repeatedly been mounting efforts to shutter the few rays of light the U.S. Supreme Court has …
We’ve all heard of the fashion police but probably assumed that was just a figure of speech. It turns out, however, that if you don’t have the bureaucratic blessing of a license and yet deign to select drapes, recommend paintings, or (horrors!) place Persian rugs and decorative partitions for a non-residence in Florida, you could be sent to prison for up to one year. Further, if you hire a person without a license to do these things for you, both of you could be sent to prison for up to …
Today the U.S. Supreme Court will consider the connection between an international convention to eliminate chemical weapons and a suburban Philadelphia love triangle. Remarkably, the first and apparently only person prosecuted under the United States’ implementation of the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention is Carol Anne Bond, a Lansdale, Pennsylvania, woman who used chemical irritants to cause a slight burn on the thumb of Bond’s formerly close friend after the friend bore Bond’s husband’s love-child. Today the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in the case (Bond v. United States). Neither Bond …
What happens when the Florida legislature eliminates the centuries-old requirement that the government must prove that an accused person acted with criminal intent before he may be punished as a criminal? It risks making almost anyone a criminal – both those who intend to commit a crime and those who do so by accident. And that’s wrong. It’s wrong as a matter of policy, and it’s wrong as a matter of history. In high school civics class, and from law-and-order television shows and films, every American has learned that in …
One of the reasons that John Stossel’s face, voice, and trademark “Give Me a Break” tagline are so familiar to conservatives is that he has mastered the art of illustrating the absurdity of arbitrary, overreaching decisions by bureaucrats, lawmakers, and other government officials. Tonight, his show on Fox Business focuses on “Attacks on Freedom”, including the (often hidden) dangers that legislators and prosecutors have created through overcriminalization. Overcriminalization endangers average Americans who have no idea that they have become federal criminals by – for example – mixing two types of …
7:30 Alt on Kagan’s Activism and Willingness to Interpret the Constitution based on Foreign Law Robert Alt entered into the record a written statement in support of his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee this evening. Alt’s statement explains why Kagan’s activism calls into question her fitness for a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the nation. The key question for any nominee is how will they approach the judicial process—what is their judicial philosophy. There is a reason that critics of the Roberts Court have chosen the nomenclature …
In Day Three questioning of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, conservative senators continued to press for clear, forthright answers to resolve the serious questions surrounding Kagan’s unlawful policy on military recruiting at Harvard Law School and her views on the reach of federal power to regulate details of American life, the constitutionality of state bans on partial-birth abortions, and the validity of recent Court precedent on the First and Second Amendments. After a round of obscurantist answers on Day Two, Senators Sessions, Hatch, Grassley, Kyl, Graham, Cornyn, and Coburn labored …
Day two of the Elena Kagan confirmation hearings saw a little less posturing than yesterday’s opening salvos by Senators bent on diverting attention from Kagan’s record by excoriating the current Supreme Court and falsely characterizing it as a bunch of “conservative activists.” Unfortunately, there was the same lack of meaningful information regarding Kagan’s qualifications to be given a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. Kagan dodged probing questions on a wide range of important legal issues – the value of precedent, the role of the Court, the identification of …
