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Monday, April 7, 2014

The over-federalization of criminal law in America

April 6, 2014 by Jazz Shaw

One popular topic among conservatives – and a frequent bone of contention when debating liberals on the subject – is the issue of states’ rights vs the federal government. We tend to hone in on specific cases as they crop up in a sort of whack-a-mole fashion, but Rodrigo SermeƱo has an excellent essay this weekend at PJ Media on the larger, overarching reality of this problem. There are simply too many federal laws on the books, with an average of more than fifty new ones being added each year, and most of them usurp legal issues already being handled by the states. This, as the author notes, leads to a variety of problems which are already metastasizing and coming back to bite us.

"Criminal law experts warned a House panel late last week about the dangers of over-federalization in the nation’s criminal law system.

The House Judiciary Committee’s Over-Criminalization Task Force held its second hearing of 2014, where members of Congress discussed the federal criminal code’s astonishing rate of growth.

Today, there are more than 4,500 crimes in federal statutes, according to a study by Louisiana State University law professor John S. Baker…

“Today there’s a continuing crisis in the overlap of federal and state law, particularly in the areas previously covered only by state law,” James Strazzella, professor of law at Temple University, told the panel. “With the growth of federal law demonstratively covering more and more traditionally state-crime areas, a mounting and duplicating patchwork of crimes has grown up in the last few decades.”….To Read More…..

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