US. v. Lopez :: essays research papers

U.S. v. Lopez514 U.S. 549 (1995), Vote of 5 to 4, Rehnquist for the court.Congress in 1990 enacted the Gun-Free School district Act, making it a federal official offence to possess a firearm in a school zone. Congress relied on the authority of the Commerce clause of the Constitution to justify passage of legislation as a way of stemming the rising tide of gun related incidents in public schools. In 1992 Alfonso Lopez, junior was a senior at Edison High School in San Antonio, Texas. Acting on an anonymous tip, school authorities confronted Lopez and discovered that he was carrying a .38 quality handgun and five bullets. A federal grand jury subsequently indicted Lopez, who then moved to have the indictment dismissed on grounds that the federal political science had no authority to legislate control over the public schools. At a bench trial, the federal district court judge engraft Lopez guilty and sentenced him to six months imprisonment and two years supervised release. Lopez then appealed to the Fifth Circuit, which reversed the conviction and held the Gun-Free School Zone Act unconstitutional as an invalid exercise dy congress of the commerce power.The Lopez case posed the question of the extent to which Congress could exercise authority over street offense and, in so doing, intrude into constitutional space traditionally occupied by the states. Since the New Deal of the 1930s, the Supreme Court had accepted that Congress had large authority to regulate virtually every aspect of American life under the cover of the federal Commerce Clause. Moreover, the bombing of the federal office make in Okalahoma City, while it had occurred after the passage of the Gun-Free School Zone Act, created a political environment where the Clinton administration and the Republican congressional leaders believed that the federal government had to combat domestic terrorist groups and the weapons that they apply.The case drew considerable attention from diverse interest gr oups. The National Education Association, for example, joined with the Clinton administration and various antigun groups to argue that schools had undergo difficulty in handling gun related crimes. Soliciter General Drew S. Days argued that the law was different from other statutes dealing with firearms in that it targeted possession sooner than sale. Yet Days also insisted that a close connection 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.