Robert Alt is director of the Rule of Law Programs and senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. He sat down with us to discuss Heritage’s Overcriminalization project. Q: How long have you been working on the Overcriminalization project? A: Five years. Overcriminalization was …
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 …
There are many shocking real-life stories in Heritage Foundation Senior Legal Research Fellow Brian Walsh’s and co-author Visiting Fellow Paul Rosenzweig’s new book, One Nation Under Arrest: How Crazy Laws, Rogue Prosecutors, and Activist Judges Threaten Your Liberty. None perhaps as revealing as the one The Economist chose to highlight …
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 …
Chapter 5 of One Nation Under Arrest is titled “Criminalizing Kids.” This chapter includes stories demonstrating that it is not just adults who face the dangers of overcriminalization. The prevailing mindset among most legislators and government policy makers is that criminal law and criminal punishment are generally the best tools …
How should a city treat one of its long-time, law-abiding citizens if her mature, decades-old hedges offend aggressive new standards set by city bureaucrats? What if this citizen is a 61-year-old grandmother fighting breast cancer? The answer the City of Palo Alto, California, provided to these questions was to send …
Twelve-year-old Ansche Hedgepeth grabbed an order of French fries after school on her way to the Tenleytown/American University Metrorail station in Washington, D.C. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority had decided to kick off a week of “zero tolerance” enforcement of “quality of life offenses.” When a police officer noticed …
