US. v. Lopez :: essays research papers

U.S. v. Lopez514 U.S. 549 (1995), Vote of 5 to 4, Rehnquist for the court. coition in 1990 enacted the Gun-Free School Zone arrange, making it a national law-breaking to possess a firearm in a school zone. relation relied on the strength of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution to justify departure of legislation as a way of stemming the rising tide of poor boy related incidents in mankind schools. In 1992 Alfonso Lopez, Jr. was a elderly at Edison High School in San Antonio, Texas. Acting on an nameless tip, school authorities confronted Lopez and discovered that he was carrying a .38 caliber shooting iron and five bullets. A federal grand jury subsequently indicted Lopez, who thus moved to have the indictment dismissed on grounds that the federal brass had no authority to legislate control over the public schools. At a bench trial, the federal district court venture found Lopez guilty and sentenced him to six months imprisonment and two years superintend release. Lopez then appealed to the Fifth Circuit, which reversed the conviction and held the Gun-Free School Zone Act un constitutive(a) as an invalid exercise dy congress of the vocation power.The Lopez case posed the question of the extent to which Congress could exercise authority over street crime and, in so doing, intrude into constitutional space traditionally occupied by the states. Since the New Deal of the 1930s, the imperious Court had accepted that Congress had broad authority to regulate about every aspect of American life under the cover of the federal Commerce Clause. Moreover, the bombing of the federal office building in Okalahoma City, sequence it had occurred after the passage of the Gun-Free School Zone Act, created a political surround where the Clinton administration and the Republican congressional leaders believed that the federal government had to assault domestic terrorist groups and the weapons that they used.The case drew considerable attention from diverse affair groups. The National Education Association, for example, joined with the Clinton administration and various antigun groups to argue that schools had experienced difficulty in handling gun related crimes. Soliciter General displace S. Days argued that the law was different from other statutes dealing with firearms in that it targeted obstinacy rather than sale. Yet Days also insisted that a close contact existed between violence in schools and the movement of guns in interstate commerce. The government insisted that guns were often used as part of the drug culture that was itself carried on through national commerce.