From: Randall Parker 

In , the sagacious
blucy{at}mediaone.net Bill Lucy perspicated:
> Oh, there were sovereignty conflicts back then -- lots of them. The
> Fugitive Slave Act (which resulted in the Dennison and Ableman cases)
> caused a lot of State-Federal conflict. There were the Slaughterhouse
> Cases in the 1870s.

Bill,

This sounds like a lot but it isn't much compared to today. Congress has
passed laws on a great many topics in last few decades that never were
issues that the US gov't use to give a hoot about.

Besides, a lot of those sovereignty issues were between the state and
federal governments. They were a turf war between those governments. Most
of them are not relevant to the double jeopardy issue.

In the example I cited a person got found not guilty by a state court. The
Feds decided they didn't like the outcome and probably are going bring
their own charges. The state gov't isn't going to try to block them and it
is really a fight between the individual and multiple sovereign entities.

> Don't idealize the era -- this was mean and nasty, and the law then was
> quite often more obtuse than it is now.

I realize all this. I also know that the set of laws that were federal was
way smaller then as a fraction of all the total laws. That is my point.
Therefore double jeopardy by having multiple government entities bringing
charges was way less likely to happen to the individual. I mean, just how
many people in the 1800s served time in _federal_ prisons? How many ways
can I say it? This point is not dependent on whether the writer made
mistakes in his recounting of legal history.

>Geeze, read Dennison -- Taney
> goes to great lengths to justify an unjustifiable position on an act
> that wasn't found unconstitutional until 1969!

That's nice.

> You can't take the easy way out here, Randall. This is dense stuff, and
> the author whose article you quoted was way in over his head. Your
> defense of his position indicates to me you aren't willing to take
> anything other than a shallow position.

Bill, he may have got the history of these rulings wrong. Fine. I'll even
tell him about it since the Reason writers are, in my experience, quite
interested in being corrected on their articles. Aside: I just got a
response from Ron Bailey thanking me and asking me for more info when I
told him it wasn't originally the FDA's idea to put folic acid in foods
(they opposed it for a while) and that the Spina Bifida Association of
America and others are dissatisfied with the current levels and were
dissatisfied back in 93 when the original FDA proposal was made. But I
digress...

What you are saying is informative. But that is really besides my point.
You are obsessing on this writer's mistakes while ignoring my point and
telling me what a fool I'm being. Yet my view here (that the Feds are
passing large numbers of laws that duplicate state laws and making a
mockery of double jeopardy the process as well as getting the Feds involved
in things they ought not be involved in) does not depend on the accuracy of
that writer's account of the history of Supreme Court rulings on this
topic.

> You're capable of better.

So are you Bill.


you like reading about free radicals, I like reading Supreme Court
> cases>

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