Commerce Clause Research 5-5-2015 #8

 [9-7-2025: I am going through my prison journal, but this is not part of that journal. The federal government provided us with a free law library - LexisNexis, to be precise - and there came a time I decided to research the law that got me into prison, the Constitution's Commerce Clause. In law school, they teach us the law as it is, for that is what we must deal with for our clients. I took a slightly different approach, what I call a genealogical approach. Long ago, but after law school, I learned there is often a drift in judicial interpretations. This drift was not part of my education. That it happens is not as much a concern as where the law is at the time one has a case; the main stream of interpretation and any anomalies. My public defender had given me Gonzales v. Raich to read while in was in pretrial detention in 2010; four years later, I decided to find the sources of that case. My conclusion to all this research (and there will be a lot of this to post) is that the United Supreme Court has expanded and extended the Commerce Clause into a national police power that is not curbed by any constitutional provision, only by the political will of Congress, and can bring the power of the federal government into the most minute aspect of American lives. I thought that terrifying in 2014; today it poses a horrendous threat.

I will note that this present post may well be the rawest version of the notes. However, time and the mailing around and the shifts in their storage will make these posts messy. That and their apparent irrelevance to the lives of most people will probably drive most of you away from reading them. I ask for your patience, for they are relevant to your lives, since your lives are tangled in the jurisdiction of the Commerce Clause. 

While typing the previous section, I ran across the date of 6/1/12, so these notes may be even older, but I see no other dates and so will leave the title unchanged. The following paragraphs begin with the page number of 49. As I said, the originals are in a messy condition.

Caminetti v. United States, 242 U.S. 470 (1917) is the most important Commerce Clause case I never heard mentioned in law school, and is the key to modern Commerce Clause jurisprudence.

I will finish this part as I always preface my prison journal entries: What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars.

sch.]

Atlanta Motel (1964) appears in five cases between 1964 and 2012 to support the proposition of "channels of interstate commerce". Four of those cases will be of Atlanta Motel, quoting Caminetti: United States v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549 (1995); United States v. Morrison, 529 U.S. 598 (2000); Pierce County v. Guillen, 537 U.S. 129 (2003); and Gonzales v. Raich, 545 U.S. 1 (2005).

In Gonzales v. Raich, Justice Scalia cited to United States v. Morrison and United States v. Lopez, where those cases cite the Atlanta Motel. 

That Morrison alters the Caminetti quote has already been discussed. [Which discussion must be in the missing pages of these notes, since it is not to be found in what I have put on this blog. sch 9/7/2025]

sch

[Continued in Commerce Clause Research 5-5-2015 #9. sch 9/7/2025]