Question

U.S. v. Lopez (1995)

facts of the case

law:

Commerce Clause

Gun Free School Zone Act of 1990

Question: Does the Gun Free School Zone Act of 1990, which forbids individuals from knowingly carrying a gun into a school zone, exceed Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause?

Yes

5 to 4 decision

Opinion of the Court (Rehnquist)

The government defends the Act with three arguments:

1. Violent crime is costly by way of increasing insurance.

2. Violent crime reduces commercial activity, because people are less likely to have businesses.

3. Violence crime reduces educational quality, threatens the learning environment, handicaps education and makes it less likely that students will grow up to be productive members of society.

Rehnquist details the three broad categories of activity that Congress can regulate under the Commerce Clause.

1. channels of interstate commerce

2. Protect the instrumentalities of interstate commerce

3. Activities that have substantial relation

The Act cannot be sustained as category 1 or 2. If it is sustained, it must be under category 3.

Rehnquist rejects the “cost of crime” argument for two reasons.

    1. By this logic, Congress can regulate anything.

    2. This logic requires too many inferences.

    3. This Act is a criminal statute—it criminalizes the possession of a gun within a school zone—that’s not really about regulating a commercial activity.

Justice Thomas, concurring

Commerce Clause drift

Current jurisprudence effectively gives Congress the power to regulate almost any activity like a federal police power. This is a problem.

Return to original meaning of the clause that respects state authority over intra-state activity.

Justice Breyer, dissenting

1. We should uphold the Act, as Congress’s use of the Commerce Clause is well within our previous cases.

2. The Act merely needs to meet the rational basis standard. Does Congress have a rational basis for this law?

3. Numerous studies demonstrate the connection between violent crime involving guns and poor learning environments.

4. This Act is not an expansion of the Commerce Clause, but a consistent application of it. The Court is wrongly narrowing its application.

In U.S. v. Lopez, who do you think makes the best argument--Rehnquist, Thomas, or Breyer--on how the Commerce Clause should have been applied to the Gun-Free School Zone Act of 1990 and why?

Answer 1

The Supreme Court has continuously affirmed and substantially extended, the rights of Congress under the Commerce Clause from 1937 until the United States v. Lopez. The Supreme Court had interpreted the provision practically and strictly until the New Deal, ruling in US v. E. For example, C. Knight (1895) and Schechter Poultry v. United States (1935), that the Commerce Clause only allows federal laws on the procurement, selling and transport of products within states, not on the manufacture of products between states, even though that produce was closely related to interstate trade. Yet in the late 1930s, the direction of the Supreme Court shifted significantly, finding that federal legislation governing the local production of commodities "substantially impacted" international commerce, and therefore lawful. In addition, by the 1960s and 1970s, the Court found that laws restricting segregation in roadside motels and restaurants as well as outlawing local loan sharking activities were "substantially impaired" by interstate trade and were lawful.

Lopez thus represented the first time the Court had restricted the ever-growing economic influence of Congress in more than 50 years. Though not returning the Court to its pre-1937 stance on the extent of trade control, the decision of the Rehnquist Court in Lopez and the cases that followed it could be the harbinger of a constitutional change in federalism that is emerging.