Purpose

The idea behind this blog is the political significance of the wave of new regulatory laws. Most obvious is sex offender laws, but there is much more. Regulations in general subvert the Constitution and the Bill of Rights like the criminal law never could. Usually these new regulations are enacted by taking advantage of some public outcry or another after the airing, day after day, of some high profile case. The public's emotions are stirred and they are blinded. Politicians feed the fire by lying while pandering for votes, further fueling "times of heat and violence."

"Nothing is more common than for a free people, in times of heat and violence, to gratify momentary passions by letting into the government principles and precedents which afterwards prove fatal to themselves. Of this kind is the doctrine of disqualification, disfranchisement, and banishment by acts of the legislature. The dangerous consequences of this power are manifest. If the legislature can disfranchise any number of citizens at pleasure by general descriptions, it may soon confine all the votes to a small number of partisans, and establish an aristocracy or an oligarchy; if it may banish at discretion all those whom particular circumstances render obnoxious, without hearing or trial, no man can be safe, nor know when he may be the innocent victim of a prevailing faction. The name of liberty applied to such a government would be a mockery of common sense." - Alexander Hamilton.

Feel free to post links to articles and examples that support this theme, be they on moral panic, political pandering, vigilante injustice, studies on the harms or ineffectiveness of some laws, or notes on how they are subversive to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Or email me if you would rather.