United States v. Lopez

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The U.S. Supreme Court is the nation's highest court of appeal. As a court of appeal, it does not retry cases but instead reviews cases from lower courts to ensure that the constitutional rights of parties are protected and that the law was applied correctly. In this case, the Supreme Court was asked to review the constitutionality of the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990, which made it a federal offense for anyone, including a student, to carry a gun onto school property or the area surrounding it. The respondent in this case—that is, the party who “responds” to the appeal filed by the “petitioner”—was Alfonso Lopez, a student who was charged with carrying a gun to school. Lopez asked a lower district court, which initially heard the case, to dismiss the charge. The district court denied his request. The case was appealed to a U.S. appeals court, which found the 1990 act unconstitutional. In United States v. Lopez, the Supreme Court affirmed the ruling of the appeals court.

At issue in this case was the reach of the U.S. Congress under the commerce clause, Article I, Section 8, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution. This clause gives Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce, or commerce that crosses state lines; commerce conducted solely within a state (intrastate commerce) falls under the authority of that state, not the federal government. In modern life, there are few forms of commerce that do not take place over state lines; products are sold in more than one state, suppliers of raw materials come from other states, and so on. Accordingly, there are few types of commerce that the federal government cannot regulate.

The larger question becomes, what is “commerce”? Normally, the word applies to the buying and selling of goods and services. But during the twentieth century, Congress began to regard as commerce any activity that might have a bearing on the economic fortunes of a community. Thus, even though a school would not normally be thought of as a business, its activities can have economic effects that extend across state lines. The level of education of a workforce, for example, can have an impact on whether or not businesses outside the state will do business in the community served by the school. In the case of guns and schools, Congress essentially decided that because schools can have an impact on interstate commerce, it had the authority to regulate guns in and around school property.

In the view of some legal scholars, Congress has extended its understanding of interstate commerce in ways that the Constitution does not support and never intended. This belief is the essence of Rehnquist's holding in United States v. Lopez. In the first sentence, he states explicitly, “The [Gun-Free School Zones] Act exceeds Congress' Commerce Clause authority.” He notes that although the Court has sometimes upheld state laws regulating intrastate commerce because they have an impact on interstate commerce, the act in question, as a criminal statute, has nothing to do with economic activity. He goes on to elaborate that sometimes such a statute can be part of a broader set of regulations that can, in fact, affect interstate commerce and that failure to uphold the one regulation would make it difficult for the broader set of laws to succeed in their intent. Rehnquist rejects the view that the Gun-Free School Zones Act is such a law. He continues by noting that the act of carrying a gun to school has nothing to do with interstate commerce or any kind of economic activity that would affect interstate commerce. He concludes that a law such as the one in question turns the commerce clause into a general police power on the part of the federal government, thus usurping the power of the states. It should be noted that Rehnquist was not in any way defending guns in schools. Rather, his view was that the federal government has no authority to regulate guns in schools, at least not on the basis of the commerce clause.

United States v. Lopez was a landmark case. Normally, the Supreme Court is more likely to overturn a law that bears on fundamental rights. The Court will apply the strict scrutiny standard it applied in Roe v. Wade to determine whether the state has a compelling interest in regulating the behavior in question. The Court, though, has another test, usually called the “rational basis standard.” This standard is less strict and applies in cases that do not involve fundamental rights. In applying the standard, the Court asks whether the state has an important or “rational” interest in controlling the behavior, and most of the time it concludes that it does, so relatively few such laws are declared unconstitutional. Further, because such cases do not involve fundamental rights, the Court will rarely overturn laws that it examines using the rational basis standard. United States v. Lopez was just such a case, so the Court's willingness to overturn the law and rein in Congress in its interpretation of the commerce clause was noteworthy. With the cases as a precedent, other congressional acts that are justified on the basis of the commerce clause are susceptible to increased scrutiny by the courts.