Yesterday, Michael Dreeben, the attorney representing the U.S. government, tried to defend the controversial “honest services” statute from a constitutional challenge in front of the Supreme Court. When Dreeben informed the Court that the feds have essentially criminalized any ethical lapse in the workplace, Justice Breyer exclaimed,
[T]here are 150 million workers in the United States. I think possibly 140 [million] of them flunk your test.
There it is. Some of us have been trying to draw more attention to the dangerous trend of overcriminalization. Judge Alex Kozinski co-authored an article in my book entitled “You’re (Probably) a Federal Criminal.” And Cato adjunct scholar, Harvey Silverglate, calls his new book, Three Felonies a Day to stress the fact that the average professional unknowingly violates the federal criminal law several times each day (at least in the opinion of federal prosecutors). Not many people want to discuss that pernicious reality. To the extent defenders of big government address the problem at all, they’ve tried to write it all off as the rhetoric of a few libertarian lawyers. Given yesterday’s back-and-forth at the High Court, it is going to be much much harder to make that sort of claim.
