United States v. Lopez | US government and civics | Khan Academy

What we're going to do in this video is talk about a relatively recent U.S. Supreme Court case, and this is the United States versus Lopez. The decision was made in 1995, and this is significant because many of the cases we have talked about are things that broaden the power of the federal government.

While the decision United States versus Lopez, which was a split decision, it was a five to four decision, put some limits on federal power. So just to understand what happened, in 1990, the U.S. Congress passes the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990. It says it shall be unlawful for any individual knowingly to possess a firearm at a place that the individual knows or has reasonable cause to believe is a school zone.

In 1992, a high school student in San Antonio, Texas, Alfonso Lopez carries a concealed firearm into his high school. He is arrested and then he is eventually prosecuted under the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990, a federal law, and he is tried in a federal court. His lawyers say, “Hey, this is unconstitutional. The federal government does not have the right to regulate whether someone carries a gun into a school or not.”

While the federal government says, “Hey, yes, we can do this because look at the United States Constitution. We, the federal government, have a right to regulate interstate trade.” And remember what McCulloch versus Maryland told us: from the Necessary and Proper Clause, anything that is a means to regulate, say, another enumerated power like interstate commerce, that is also constitutional for the federal government.

But then you could imagine Lopez's lawyer said, “Hold on a second, that is a very tenuous connection. If you're trying to connect the notion of firearms in schools and school safety to interstate commerce, well, you could connect almost anything to interstate commerce.” This would mean that between the Necessary and Proper Clause, the implied powers, and the enumerated powers of regulating interstate commerce, well then the federal government could just regulate anything.

So it eventually gets appealed all the way to the United States Supreme Court, and in a split five to four decision, the United States Supreme Court decides in favor of Lopez. That the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990, at least as it was originally written, was indeed unconstitutional; that it's an overreach of federal power.

To appreciate the majority's thinking here is an excerpt of the decision by William Rehnquist, who is the Chief Justice and who was in the majority. He wrote, “To uphold the government's contentions here, the contention that the government is making that it is constitutional to regulate the possession of firearms in a school, we have to pile inference upon inference in a manner that would bid fair to convert congressional authority under the commerce clause to a general police power of the sort retained by the states.”

So Rehnquist is saying, “Hey, look, if we say that the regulation of firearms is connected to interstate commerce somehow, because it somehow affects the economy between states, well then almost anything, if you layer pile inference upon inference, then that would give the right to the federal government to police almost anything, a type of police power that's generally retained by the states.”

Admittedly, some of our prior cases have taken long steps down that road, giving great deference to congressional action. And you could go all the way back to McCullough versus Maryland. He's saying, “Yeah, the Supreme Court has ruled many times in favor of the federal government having a broad understanding of implied powers. The broad language in these opinions has suggested the possibility of additional expansion, but we decline here to proceed any further.”

So they're drawing the line in this decision on the expansion of congressional power. “To do so would require us to conclude that the Constitution's enumeration of powers does not presuppose something not enumerated and that there never will be a distinction between what is truly national and what is truly local. This we are unwilling to do.”

So he's saying, “Hey, look, if we took the government's side on this, there's no end. There really isn't anything that the federal government can't do, and then there won't be a distinction between what is truly national and what is truly local.”

I'll let you decide, but it's a fascinating case, and it's really important in this discussion on power between states and the federal government because this was a decision that kind of drew a line and said, “Okay, you know, we can't let the federal government have an unlimited number of powers based on just being able to tie inference upon inference to something like the commerce clause.”