| Venue: | SCOTUS |
| Facts: | Lopez comes to school with a .38 and five bullets. He's charged under a TX statute, but that is soon dismissed, and federal agents charge him under the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990. |
| Posture: | Dunno, but probably Lopez is the one appealing here... |
| Issue: | Can keeping guns out of schools be regulated by congress as an interstate commerce issue? |
| Holding: | No, this clearly exceeds the scope of the authority conferred in Art. I § 8. |
| Rule: | Congress can regulate the channels of interstate commerce, the instrumentalities of interstate commerce, and activities having a substantial relation to interstate commerce. |
| Reasoning: | States have the primary authority for enforcing criminal law. This is just so remote (guns in schools make people scared to go to school and that affects the quality of education which makes the citizenry less productive, thereby adversely affecting the nation's well-being). This logic would allow the government to regulate not only all violent crime, but all activities that might lead to violent crime: in other words, all activities. |
| Dicta: | Kennedy (concurring): The states need to be free to be laboratories
for experimentation. Injecting federal authority causes
friction and diminishes local political accountability.
Thomas (concurring): The governmnent's reasoning is an inversion of 10A: it reserves to the US all powers not expressly prohibited. We can't just say that the commerce clause's boundares are defined as commensurate to the nation's needs. Souter (dissenting): Judicial restraint demands deference to the legislature. Congressional authority has inherent legitimacy because of political accountability. It's not the court's place to draw the line between what is commercial enough to be regulated and what is not. This case may be epochal, even though it looks minor on the surface. Breyer (dissenting): Congress is better able to make empirical judgments than the court. This statute doesn't enlarge the scope of the commerce clause-- it merely recognizes that the world is changing, and with it, the contours of what affects interstate commerce. |