I often hear it argued (usually by tax cranks) that where the law says something like

As used herein, the term “United States” includes the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and other territories and possessions

it means that the law does not apply to Illinois. I wonder whether any of the twenty people who read these humble rantings can point me to any ruling in which the word include was held to be exclusive.

I’ve occasionally seen this language in contracts and/or regulations:

The masculine includes the feminine, and the singular includes the plural.

Am I to understand that such a clause redefines he to mean only the feminine they?

The world turned upside-down:

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals of San Francisco reversed the conviction, ruling that the congressional ban does not apply to homemade machine guns and their parts because they were never in the stream of commerce.

The court ruled that there was neither a transfer nor sale of the weapons or their parts, so Congress did not have the power under the Commerce Clause to regulate homemade guns crafted from scratch.

Robert Stewart was sentenced to five years imprisonment for being a felon in possession of firearms and of possessing illegal machine guns last year.

His attorney, Thomas Haney of Phoenix, said the decision doesn’t mean much for his client or for the gun movement. Few people have the skills to build a weapon from scratch, as Stewart did, Haney said.

Perhaps not (yet) — but that the Notorious Ninth reads the Commerce Clause narrowly, in a gun case of all things, is big news. (Link from Rational Review News Digest)

Punchline:

Stewart, meanwhile, faces about a 20-year sentence next week after being convicted this summer of soliciting a fellow prisoner at the Federal Correctional Institution in Phoenix to kill U.S. District Judge Roslyn Silver, the judge who last year sentenced him to five years on the weapons violations.

Eugene Volokh weighs in. Brett Thomas and Larry Solum debate the consequences for amateur marijuana growers.

Rasmusen on the value of liberty

What is wrong with government regulations? Well, first, of course, they are likely to be the result of special interests, and inefficient. But even good regulations have a cost that I don’t see mentioned: the cost of having to act carefully so as to avoid breaking the rules. In a society with numerous regulations, people spend a lot of time learning about the regulations.
. . . .
What I think the model might illustrate is that when lots of things are arbitrarily illegal, there are big transaction costs.

From the Mercury-News: What’s next? Redistricting

Emboldened by the success of his recall initiative, anti-tax crusader Ted Costa said Tuesday he plans to go back to the voters with a ballot measure to break incumbents’ grip on California’s Legislature and congressional delegation.

. . . .

The details of Costa’s 2004 initiative are still under discussion, but in general, he said it would take the redistricting process out of the hands of party leaders. Instead, all legislators and outside interest groups, such as the League of Conservation Voters, would be invited to submit redistricting plans to a panel of retired judges appointed by a court yet to be determined. The judges would choose the best plan based on a new set of guidelines designed to discourage gerrymandering.

Rather than transferring the task from one body of men to another, my apportionment reform would ask the People to choose among a number of purely algorithmic approaches. The three most popular algorithms would then be applied to the three sets of seats to be assigned, in order of their size. (California has 80 seats in the state Assembly, 53 in Congress, and 40 in the state Senate.)

Rethinking the Articles of Confederation, by Scott Trask

The American confederation was destined to become a free-trade area, even without a consolidated union. Hamilton, in Federalist No. 12, all but admitted, and complained, that such would be the case. He worried that the multiplicity of state jurisdictions would keep tariffs too low and variable for the raising of sufficient revenue or the provision of industrial promotion.

The relative situation of these States; the number of rivers with which they are intersected, and of bays that wash their shores; the facility of communication in every direction; the affinity of language and manners; the familiar habits of intercourse – all these are circumstances that would conspire to render an illicit trade between them a matter of little difficulty and would insure frequent evasions of the commercial regulations of each other. The separate States or confederacies would be necessitated by mutual jealousy to avoid the temptations to that kind of trade by the lowness of their duties.

Randy Barnett sees something new in recent Supreme Court decisions:

. . . Justice Kennedy refused to rest abortion rights on a “right to privacy,” though this crucial move has been generally ignored. Instead he rested it on liberty, and explicitly on the Ninth Amendment:

Neither the Bill of Rights nor the specific practices of States at the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment marks the outer limits of the substantive sphere of liberty which the Fourteenth Amendment protects. See U.S. Const., Amend. 9.

Resting abortion rights on liberty, as opposed to privacy, was newsworthy, but I seemed to be among the only one to get the news. . . .

Daniel Webster:

It is hardly too strong to say that the [US] Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions.