Frontiers of federal criminalization

A case called Bond v. U.S., arising from an admittedly bizarre fact pattern involving a wife’s attempt to injure a romantic rival, provides an opportunity to test the limits of extension of federal criminal law into areas that would ordinarily serve as the occasion of state-level prosecution. The Cato Institute has filed an amicus brief urging a narrow view of the proper federal criminal role in the case, in pursuit of the view that the federal government is one of limited, enumerated powers. [Ilya Shapiro, Cato]

Federalist Society videos online

The Federalist Society has posted numerous videos from its recent National Lawyers’ Convention, including sessions on the aggressive regulatory stance of today’s Environmental Protection Agency, the constitutionality of Obamacare, anonymity and the First Amendment in media and campaign-regulation law, NYU’s Richard Epstein debating Yale’s Bill Eskridge on the court battle over California’s Prop 8, recusal and campaign rules for judges, Dodd-Frank, and the Christian Legal Society v. Martinez case on accreditation of student groups, among other topics. And civil procedure/Iqbal-Twombly buffs may be interested in a luncheon panel held just yesterday in D.C. (I was in the audience) in which four law professors (Don Elliott of Yale, Martin Redish and Ronald Allen of Northwestern, and Rick Esenberg of Marquette) outlined ideas for reforming the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to reduce discovery costs and improve screening of cases in the earliest stages of filing.

The video above is of the Society’s 10th annual Barbara Olson Memorial Lecture, in which Second Circuit Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs provocatively criticizes legal academia and other precincts of influential legal thinking for misunderstanding the role of the military and its relation to the law.