1998-1999 ESSAY CONTEST

OPEN TO HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE STUDENTS
EVERY SCHOOL ENTERING TEN OR MORE QUALIFYING PAPERS, WINS

SUBJECT: The role of personal responsibility in balancing individual liberty and the common good.

First Prize = $200

Second Prize = $100

Third Prize = $ 75

The prizes will be awarded to the three top essays at  every school that enters ten or more qualifying papers. Schools entering fewer than ten students, or papers that are too short or do not abide by other rules, will not be considered for prizes. Please consult the rules. Excerpts from qualifying essays, will be published in a book and sent to the 535 members of congress, the press and other officials around the country. Papers must be postmarked no later than December 31, 1998 to be assured the school is represented in the book which will be published in the spring of 1999. Later entries will be accepted, but without that assurance.

Detach and staple a completed and signed application and questionnaire to every essay submitted. Make copies to obtain as many forms as your school requires.

STUDENT'S APPLICATION
(Please type or print clearly)

Student's name___________________________________________________Grade______ Age_______

School_______________________________________________________School's Phone_____________

School's Address________________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________________________                                                    City                                                                                  State                                          Zip

Name of teacher or adult sponsor over age 21__________________________________________________
"I have examined this paper for spelling and grammatical errors and have suggested corrections where needed. There are______ words in this essay."                                                                                                                                            (please count words)

_______________________________________ _______________________ ____________________        
             Signature of teacher or adult sponsor                                      Phone                                      Date

RULES

1) Material will be sent via surface mail, if for some reason you cannot download the required reading and questions at www.singerfoundation.org/main/announcements Let us know. Copies of the required reading should be made for each participating student.

2) All quotations used in essays must be noted and cited at the end of the work. The only notation in the body of the paper should be quotation marks. No quote should exceed four sentences.

3) Papers should incorporate answers to questions #2, #3 and #4. Answers to the other questions may be included in the essay also, but #2, #3 and #4 are mandatory.

4) All students must answer questions concerning the required reading and submit the Q & A with their completed essays.

5) All essays must be typed (English only) double spaced, checked for grammatical and spelling errors and be no less than 750 words nor more than 1,000 words in length. Please submit originals; xeroxed copies are not acceptable. Please be sure to keep a copy at your end.

____________________________________________________________________________________
Students with access to a computer and a modem will have the opportunity to exchange essays with another school. Written criteria for judging the essays will be provided by the Foundation. This will work because schools are not being judged against one another. By awarding prizes class by class, the Harry Singer Foundation offers a unique opportunity for students to learn by reviewing the papers of their peers. Let us know if you want to be matched with an exchange school.

If a class does not wish to exchange papers with another school, papers may be exchanged with students in your own school. There might be even more learning involved if papers were read by students not otherwise involved in the contest. Of course all papers will still be reviewed by the Foundation.

Papers may be submitted via surface mail or via email. Excerpts from the essays will be posted on the internet as they are read. All papers and answers to qualifying questions are due at least 8 weeks before the end of the school so we may get results to you. To be represented in the published book, essays must be postmarked no later than December 31, 1998.

Entries will not be returned, and upon submittal become the property of The Harry Singer Foundation.

If you have questions: phone (831) 625-4223, fax (831) 624-7994, email staff@singerfoundation.org.

Address surface mail correspondence to:

Essay Contest, The Harry Singer Foundation,
P.O. Box 223159
Carmel, CA 93922

Harry Singer Foundation

1998-1999 Essay Contest

Questions To Answer After Completing The Required Reading

Q1. Choose (underline) from the list below, things that you believe government is justified in regulating for the common good. Explain your choices (paragraph for each).

curfews ordinances                                                                          prohibiting gangs

helmet laws                                                                                      prohibitions against smoking

seatbelt laws                                                                                    prohibitions against teen pregnancy

smog inspections                                                                              prohibitions against gambling

mandatory insurance                                                                        prohibitions against prostitution

gun control                                                                                      censorship of pornography

restrictions on advertising                                                                 licensing and continuing education requirements

taxes on alcohol and tobacco                                                          limitations on property development rights

Q2. Do you agree with Schoenbrun that the founding fathers might have "put greater emphasis on the protection of the community over individual liberty? Why or why not?

Q3. Do you agree with Schoenbrun, that balancing individual rights and the welfare of the community should be left to the police and courts? Why or why not?

Q4. Do you agree with the Supreme Court's ruling against the Gun-Free School Zones Act? Comment, mentioning at least two pros and two cons.

Q5. Explain "prosecutorial discretion" and justify the exceptions.

Q6. React to the possibility of "editing genes in the womb."

Q7. Explain what Susan Estrich means when she claims "A balkanized polity will surely demand the perverse equality of irresponsibility: that is the lesson of the explosion of syndrome defenses."

Required Reading

1998-1999 Essay Contest

We must balance personal liberty and community welfare
by Maurice J. Schoenbrun

(The Herald, Monterey, California)

Which comes first, the rights of the individual or the welfare of the community?

Obviously both must be protected, but it becomes increasingly difficult for the police and the courts to decide when an infringement on personal liberty is proper and necessary.

Many cities, Salinas [California] included, have enacted ordinances prohibiting recognized gangs from roaming the streets. The legality of this type of regulation is being questioned by the American Civil Liberties Union, which appears to have a knee-jerk reaction to curtailment of the right to assemble. But the purpose of the ACLU is to provide an opportunity for judicial exploration of constitutionality; it has no political bone to gnaw.

Over the years, all levels of our government have attempted to proscribe individual freedom with varying success. The basic question remains: When should law supersede personal freedom in the interest of the community?

We tried to legislate the use of alcohol out of existence and only succeeded in raising the price and creating a new industry, bootlegging. Now we're hoping to ease the ravages of tobacco by taxing it heavily and controlling advertising. More people are being harmed by tobacco smoke than are being killed or maimed by drunken drivers. But an outright ban might be illegal, as well as offensive to many. We can only make smoking more difficult. The ultimate responsibility is personal determination.

Over the centuries, we, among other countries, have tried to legislate morality, but prostitution has diminished only because the available supply of nonprofessional sex has glutted the market.

The classic problem today is gun control. When our forefathers spoke of "a well-trained military," they didn't envision inexpensive mass-produced revolvers being brought onto school grounds by dissident students. Nor could they imagine how much damage could be inflicted by one deranged person with an arsenal of assault weapons.

One of the largest problems facing the United States is juvenile crime. The experts involved in the behavioral sciences agree that television and the movies are among the prime causes. Our children, for various reasons, spend many more uncontrolled hours watching the tube than we ever did. As a consequence, it's become their frame of reference, the only reality they know. If we spent as much time immersed in TV garbage as they do, we would lose much of our rational contact with the real world.

Shall we censor television so that everything shown is on a level that is acceptable for children? Do we produce all movies with a similar objective in mind? Obviously not. Again, adult responsibility and self-discipline is the main cure.

We curtail the personal liberty of our bus drivers and airline pilots by testing them for drugs. We investigate the background of our teachers, hoping to weed out obvious moral or character flaws that could impinge on our children. We even surround our physicians with legal parameters, which may constrict their practice and influence their treatment of their patients. Government does this to provide a framework deemed necessary for the protection of the patient.

Conversely, we also regulate the confidentiality in the relationship of the psychiatrist and his patient who commits a felony. The court ruling in this benchmark decision stated, "Protective privilege ends where public peril begins."

When our founding fathers wrote the Constitution, they couldn't know how complex ad interdependent our civilization would become, and how the actions of one person or group would be able to affect the public so widely. It's possible they would have adjusted this balance between individual liberty and the welfare of the public and put greater emphasis on the protection of the community.

John Stuart Mills, the distinguished philosopher, said, "It is one of the undisputed functions of government to take precautions against crime before it has been committed, as well as to detect and punish it afterward."

Every curtailment of individual liberty may bring an improvement in some aspect of well-being for the community. But at what cost? This is the delicate balance that is the responsibility of our police, and ultimately our courts, to determine.

Politicians practicing "nanny government"
by Dan Walters

(McClatchy Newspapers)

When [California] state Senator Tim Leslie staged a Capitol news conference recently to denounce the expansion of legal gambling in California, he was engaging in what has become a popular political exercise: trying to alter conduct he dislikes.

Leslie is a Republican but there's nothing partisan about the trend toward what some have labeled "nanny government",  using police powers to force people to act in ways that those in power have deemed socially responsible.

While conservatives and Republicans try to regulate gambling, sexual behavior, drugs or other human activities deemed vices, liberals and Democrats weigh in with proposals to restrict gun ownership, prevent people from smoking, limit property development rights or otherwise curb practices they find noxious.

Peter McWilliams, author of "Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do," a new book on the phenomenon of what he calls "consensual crime," estimates that more than 750,000 persons are behind bars in America for doing things that by any rational measure should not be crimes and that such nannyism costs taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.

But politicians on the right and left seem incapable of grasping that simple concept, the essence of the American revolution which began on this day 220 years ago. They flood city councils, county boards of supervisors, state legislatures and Congress with proposals to regulate victimless adult behavior, always in the name of the public good, but often merely pandering to narrow-minded pressure groups.

When Leslie, for instance, bemoaned the expansion of gambling in California, worrying aloud about "a wholesale onslaught" of casinos that would promote social decay, he used words quite similar to those voiced by liberals when demanding more controls on guns or increased efforts to curb smoking.

Leslie has often decried gun control legislation, saying that gun owners should be free to pursue their hobby and that penalties should be imposed only on unlawful use.

But is there any difference between that and gambling? Leslie worries that expanding gambling will mean more gambling addiction, unemployment and other social ills. "The impacts of gambling's expansion," he said, "read like a list of deadly sins."

His use of the word "sins" is a tip-off to what's really happening here. He doesn't like gambling, considers it a sin and therefore he wants to stop it.

Underlying all of this is a philosophical rejection of free will and responsibility.

It's high time that adults tell the politicians to take care of legitimate public business and leave the rest of us alone to live our lives as we see fit, whether the blue noses like it or not.

Defects in the Gene Argument
Reviewed by Beret E. Strong

(California Lawyer July 1998)

"Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality"
by William Wright

"Getting Away With Murder: How Politics Is Destroying the Criminal Justice System"
by Susan Estrich

If scientists identify a gene for sexual aggression, will future rapists win acquittals on the grounds that they were genetically programmed to attack their victims? In their latest books William Wright and Susan Estrich both answer no, each for their own reasons, and campaign for the philosophical and legal status of free will in our society.

In Born That Way, Wright wants us to come to terms with the role genes play in our personalities and behavior, but he rebuts the common fear that as we accept the power of our genes, we will lose a sense of self-determination. In Getting Away With Murder Estrich wants to save our troubled criminal justice system from various threats, including a pervasive tendency to employ "abuse excuses" to defend people who commit crimes of extreme violence. She believes we are agents of free will, in spite of our genes and personal circumstances. In her view, we must hold one another accountable for our choices if we are to have a functioning society.

Wright would have us believe that the 20th century has been the battleground for an American "civil war" between the environmental and biological views of human nature. In 1975 Edward Q. Wilson published Sociobiology: A New Synthesis, a landmark study on animal behavior that nonetheless tackled the evolution of the human brain and announced "sociobiology" as a field that would, as Wright says, "monitor the genetic basis of human behavior." (Fifteen prominent academics promptly published a letter in the New York Review of Books denouncing both the book and its author.) And in 1993 Scientific American published an article called "Trends in Behavioral Genetics: Eugenics Revisited: The Dubious Link Between Genes and Behavior."

Our society's attitude has now flipped 180 degrees. The cover of Life ("Were You Born That Way?" April 1998) says it all. A huge blue-and-gold coil of DNA, looking a lot like Jack's beanstalk, snakes up alongside the cover lines: "Personality, temperament, even life choices. New studies show it's mostly in your genes."

Wright marshals plenty of evidence, mainly from studies of identical twins, to argue for the role of genes in our behavior and personalities. But, he emphasizes, we are not determined by our genes. We are merely strongly influenced by them.

Even the notion of environmental influence has been undermined of late.
We used to believe that if you and your siblings were brought up in the same home, you had the same environment. But it turns out there's no way to get away from those genes. Studies of identical twins reared apart suggest that to a significant degree, we are who we were born to be. The Minnesota Twin Study included a pair of Englishwomen, one of whom had dropped out of school at age 16 to go to work while her twin went on to graduate from excellent private schools. As a researcher commented, "One had a Cockney accent, and the other spoke like the Queen." But their IQ results were found to be just one point apart.

There is a Ripley's Believe It Or Not quality to some of these twin stories. Perhaps the most striking is the account of identical twin brothers raised in vastly different circumstances: one was a Trinidadian Jew who moved to Israel, and the other grew up in Nazi Germany and served in Hitler's youth corps. Needless to say, when the brothers were reunited, they had an uneasy relationship, not least because the German brother hadn't told his Catholic in-laws about his Jewish heritage. When the brothers disembarked from separate planes and met in the Minneapolis airport after 25 years apart, they were eerily surprised to find they were both wearing odd shaped metal-rimmed sunglasses, nearly identical mustaches, and blue shirts with epaulettes and four front pockets. As the week wore on they discovered that they both liked to string rubber bands around their wrists, flush the toilet before using it, read magazines from back to front, and disrupt somber moments by faking sneezes in public. Such similarities stir up skepticism, but the abundance of twin studies suggests that there's nothing bogus about it.

Earlier in this century, says Wright, "[t]alk of genetic influences suggested unchangeable humans and was seen as justification for such societal brutalities as racism and slavery." The problem goes back at least as far as Charles Darwin, whose theory of natural selection, Wright notes, "was wrenched into the service of reactionary systems such as social Darwinism (if you are poor it is because you were born to be poor), eugenics (stop the unfit from propagating), and Nazism (eliminate the unfit already here)." The worry today is that people will be seen as genetically destined to drop out of school or kill their neighbors, and treated accordingly.

Scientists around the world are working to map the human genome. The future of the field promises to be exciting and full of ethical dilemmas. Wright reports that in a recent study of young couples asked what they would do if their unborn baby had a 50 percent chance of growing up to be obese, fully three-quarters said they would abort. In addition, he is not enthusiastic about the possibility that we may undertake to "edit genes in the womb." Would we, he asks, "strip the world of future Handels, Dostoyevskys, and van Goghs in a drive to prevent the birth of flawed humans?"

The Pandora's box of genetic engineering has been open for some time now. University of   Minnesota psychologist David Lykken, mentioned in Wright's book, was recently quoted in Life as saying he advocates licensing biological parents. "We wouldn't let a crack addict, a teenager, or a criminal adopt a child," he says. "Why not make the same minimal requirements for people having children biologically?" For this, he has been branded a fascist.

The problem with his proposal is that it will never be so simple. Genes influence chemical reactions in the body, but they don't cause behavior. And what exactly is he proposing: that we shouldn't let "bad people" have babies? Will the enforcement be mandatory sterilization or tax penalties for having children without a license? For obvious reasons, Wright deplores scientists giving science a bad name.

In Getting Away With Murder: How Politics Is Destroying the Criminal Justice System Susan Estrich shares many of Wright's concerns: How do we live with our knowledge of ourselves and of, say, our potential for violent crime? What if the tendency to commit violent crime is proven to be highly heritable?

For Estrich, in this short book, that shouldn't matter. Neither should a whole bunch of environmental circumstances that change people's lives: being adopted or battered or suffering trauma in a war. She defends the "reasonable man" standard because she believes that though it is imperfect, it's the best we've got. If criminal defendants aren't held to a common, consensually agreed-upon standard, she argues, our system dissolves into a plethora of conflicting points of view.

Estrich objects to the idea that we can run a justice system by viewing the world through the eyes of a criminal defendant. Is the reasonable man Bernard Goetz? Is the reasonable woman a battered woman? "A balkanized polity will surely demand the perverse equality of irresponsibility: that is the lesson of the explosion of syndrome defenses," writes Estrich.

I found myself agreeing with much of Estrich's argument. In the case of a man (identified as Chinese by Estrich) sentenced to only five years' probation for murdering his wife, whom he believed was having an affair, the sentencing judge commented that the defendant's cultural background…made him more susceptible to cracking under the circumstances." Do the women of our country, whatever their backgrounds, feel that this represents justice? I don't. And what about Ellie Nesler, who walked into a California courtroom and shot to death the man accused of molesting her son? Though she had specific intent and premeditation, she was convicted of the lowest charge against heróvoluntary manslaughteróon the basis of a sympathy defense. I sympathize with her, but that doesn't mean I can support her vigilantism, especially if it sets a standard for other people with similar grievances.

Estrich's one-size-fits-all standard can, however, be too rigid. What about the mother who kills her child because she has a medically proven case of post-partum psychosis? What about eleven-year-old children who kill? And what about Estrich's acknowledgment that our legal system is sexist and racist?

Because we generalize about young black men on the basis of crime statistics, it's impossible not to be racist. Estrich writes, "The only way truly to address racism in the criminal justice system is to cut the crime rate among blacks."

Getting Away With Murder addresses what Estrich considers four problems degrading our criminal justice system. Jury nullification makes sending a political message more important than trying the case at hand. It takes away the individual's right to a fair trial based on a unique set of facts. She so dislikes "abuse excuses" that she devotes most of a chapter to it and includes an appendix of the top ten "sympathy defenses" and their memorable cases. Another section is devoted to rebuking politicians so afraid of being seen as soft on crime that they've legislated rigid sentencing rules that deny judges their traditional use of discretion. In another chapter, she chastises lawyers who want to win so badly they help their clients get away with murder. We need to protect the rule of law, not undermine it, she admonishes. "Are we professionals or prostitutes?"

Though both Wright and Estrich are passionately committed to their causesóthe legitimacy of genes and the need to salvage our criminal justice system, respectivelyótheir rhetorical strategies are nearly opposite. Wright believes that geneticists have been victimized and that his opponents, the environmental faction, are just plain wrong. He therefore doesn't tell us much about the opposing camp's point of view or even how one could go about integrating the two modelsóthe book that will synthesize the discoveries of this century and end the "civil war" has yet to be written.

Estrich, on the other hand, explores all sides of an issue, even raising prospective rebuttals and facing mitigating arguments head on. She gives you the raw material with which to disagree. Her book, in spite of its chord of perhaps unjustified idealism, is, at bottom, persuasive: We must have a unified vision of our justice system if it is to serve us as a society.

Estrich wants to return to the criminal justice system as it existed 20 or 30 years ago. To deal with new and pressing problems, such as the fact that in California "40 percent of black men between the ages of 20 and 30 are convicted criminals," she wants to see community policing, education incentives, and parenting training. Prevention is better than punishment, she argues. "If four out of ten of our white sons were facing the likelihood that their lives would be ruined, would our solution be simply to make sure there were enough cemeteries to hold them?"

Guns at school shove the Supreme Court backward
By David P. Schneider

(San Francisco Examiner July 24, 1998)

Inn the old days, kids packed lunches when they went to school. Now, according to authoritative estimates, 135,000 high school students every day pack something else with the sandwich and milk.  Handguns.

And 645,000 kids have carried guns to school or to other paces at least once in the last month.

According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, firearms are responsible for more deaths to U.S. teenagers than all natural diseases combined.

Firearm fatalities among teens are expected to surpass auto deaths around the turn of the century.

About 4, 000 youngsters between 15 and 19 were killed by firearms in 1990, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

Nobody knows just how much the gun industry pockets from all of this. But in 1994, the IRS collected excise taxes of $67 millionó 10 percent of the reported sales price of pistols and revolvers.

That's $670 million, total.

Are we talking more than pocket change? Would you believe two-thirds of a billion dollars in reported sales of revolvers and pistols?

But if you think that's big, it's peanuts compared to the $20.4 billion in estimated health costs to society as a whole as a result of firearms injuries or deaths in 1990.

Congress tried to remedy a small part of the picture,  the threat at schools,   by approving the Gun-Free School Zones Act, which makes it illegal to carry a gun within 1,000 feet of a school.

And then the U.S. Supreme Court, in the Lopez case, declared the law unconstitutional. Leaders of the National Rifle Association probably celebrated, although the law itself was moderate and limited.

After all, the Congress could have banned all handguns everywhere, except for the military, as part of the much larger national handgun violence picture.

I the Lopez case, the government contended that the Gun-Free School Zones Act was based on the constitutional power of Congress to regulate commerce.

The justices disagreed. The high court may be turning back the clock to a period in judicial history when it let the world of business and industry do just about anything it wanted.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote the majority opinion in the 5 to 4 decision. He was joined by
Associate Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas, some of whom wrote concurring opinions.

The majority held that regulating possession of guns in a school was not sufficiently related to commerce. It also said states could regulate school gun possession and that for Congress to do so could lead to a national police state.

The primary dissenting opinion was written by Associate Justice Stephen Breyer, who was joined by Associate Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

A short concurring dissent by Stevens said, in part: "Guns are both articles of commerce and articles that can be used to restrain commerce. Their possession is the consequence, either directly or indirectly, of commercial activity… "The market for possession of handguns by school-age children is, distressingly, substantial. Whether or not the national interest in eliminating that market would have justified federal legislation in 1789, it surely does today."

It seems that the majority was looking backward to the years between the framing of the Constitution and the New Deal.

O'Connor and Kennedy in their concurring opinion cited now-discredited Supreme Court cases that once destroyed the power of Congress to: Prohibit the discharge of an employee because of his membership in a labor organization (struck down in the Adair case, 1908). Prohibit shipment in interstate commerce of goods using child labor (struck down in the Hammer case in 1918); fix workers hours and wages (struck down in Schecter case in 1935 because the activity was supposedly only indirectly related to interstate commerce).

Under a threat from President Franklin D. Roosevelt to put justices on the court who understood law and social responsibility, these decisions were in substance over-turned, starting in 1937.

In his Lopez dissent, Souter noted that the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 allowed Congress to exercise "general police powers at the national level," and the "fulcrums of judicial review in these cases (pre-1937) were the notions of liberty and property characteristic of laissez-fare economics…but under each conception of judicial review the court's character for the first third of the century showed itself in exacting judicial scrutiny of a legislature's choice of economic ends and of the legislative means selected to reach them ."

In plain words, the court thought it was a better policy maker than Congress.

Justice Thomas used a 1789 dictionary, among others, to look up the meaning of "commerce." I trust he had his musket ready. No women, and most men who weren't property owners, could vote then. Blacks were enslaved. And, of course, there wouldn't be any legally sanctioned labor unions.

The majority of today's high court evidently wants to return to the letter of the law at the time of the framing of the Constitution. But students and school personnel endangered by guns at school are real people who exist today, not in 1789.

In two recent years, 79 persons died in shootings at schools, according to a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Another report on school violence during a four-year period lists 201 persons severely wounded and 242 individuals held hostage.

Isn't it rational to presume that at one time or another the handguns used by these students and others were in interstate commerce and that, in addition to the states, Congress can act to protect the national interest by banning them around schools?

Or are we going to go back to those laissez-faire, pro-business over kids?

Shouldn't we really be looking to 2018 with fewer guns and less violence instead? And hope that when a student opens his lunch box then he gets a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, not a .22 on rye?

Columnist
George Hostetter

(Fresno Bee)

"How much regulation do we want in a country that is supposed to have a free market economy?"

A handful of readers responded. All voted for a minimum of government regulation. But there was no agreement on what that is.

"I believe our government [has] spent at least the last 50 years convincing us of the need for regulation," wrote Marty Reilly of Fresno. "If we as a country start moving toward less regulation and more free market in an orderly fashion, then the public will have time to adjust."

Stephen Mettee of Fresno wrote that business, big or small, needs freedom to thrive. "Certainly that means unfettered by government interference to the greatest extent reasonably possible."

But Mettee added, it's not just government red tape that makes markets less than free.

Monopolies that crush competitors are hardly friends to free markets, Mettee wrote. And misleading advertising can sow mistrust among consumers, further eroding their faith in free markets.

Steven E. Gilbert of Fresno raised a good point: Government can affect the free market choices of consumers, too. Such as when the state requires drivers to buy car insurance. "When insurance is compulsory, the free market is automatically compromised."

In the end, my own feelings were best mirrored by Kenneth D. Martin of Fresno. What we want, Martin wrote, is a compromise between a totally free market and complete government control. He also identified the source of our confusion.

"As our lives become more complex, we are less able to keep up with business and all of its changes," Martin wrote. "This leaves us feeling a bit vulnerable."

Most of us don't have the time to become sophisticated consumers in every field of business, he wrote. So, it's only natural that we look to the government to help level the playing field.

"What I believe consumers want is a free market where they can trade ad do business as they like without being conned, ripped-off or taken advantage of," Martin wrote.

Our economy is stronger when consumers know that if they have been "conned, ripped-off or taken advantage of," organizations like the CPUC are here to help even the score.

Neighbor's in-home secondhand smoke a nuisance, lawsuit charges

(Associated Press July 7,1996)

(Los Angeles) -- Roy Platt is suing his downstairs neighbors for lighting up, objecting to secondhand cigarette smoke wafting through his windows.

"It's been absolutely unbearable," said the 49-year-old Platt, who does not work and remains at home most of the day working on model trains. "The smoke comes right into my room, like mustard gas."

Also named in the lawsuit filed last month in Los Angeles Superior Court are officers of Platt's condominium, owners association, who he said should either ban smoking or impose conditions on smokers.

The lawsuit seeks restrictions to prevent smoke from entering his condominium, and unspecified monetary damages, said Platt's lawyer, Joseph M. Cobert.

Platt's neighbor Steve Landi, said it was "ludicrous" to go to court over the "six or seven cigarettes" his elderly mother smokes in her bedroom each day.

"Some perspective needs to be placed here," Landi said.

Legal scholars began questioning the belief that in-home smoking is a private activity.

Banzhaf noted that authorities can regulate other "nuisances" so there's no reason why smoking can't be included as well.

The legal definition of "nuisance" can be interpreted to cover virtually any situation where an irritating activity interferes with a neighbor's use of their property, said Gary T. Schwartz, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Idaho county tests enforcement of law to cut teen pregnancy
Column by William F. Buckley

(Universal Press Syndicate July 12, 1996)

The Wall Street Journal reports on Gem County in Idaho that is conducting a daredevil experiment with the law,  by enforcing it. Sitting in the statute books all these years is a little derelict that says that "any unmarried person who shall have sex with an unmarried person of the opposite sex shall be found guilty of fornication."

The county prosecutor whose bright idea was to apply the law didn't do so indiscriminately. To have done this would of course have meant to repeal the Playboy Philosophy. But Douglas Varie decided to focus on just one fruit of the law: teen-age pregnancy.

Narrow focus
As everybody (almost everybody) knows, there is such a thing as prosecutorial discretion, which means that you can't defy the cop who stops you for speeding on the grounds that he didn't stop the other guy for speeding. There are exceptions. If prosecutorial conduct bumps into civil rights laws, then intervention by the courts can be tried. If only Hispanics or women are stopped for speeding, they can complain and get a hospitable hearing.

But Mr. Varie didn't start snooping around in motels or parking lots overlooking the scenic splendors of the state of Idaho. He started looking for pregnant teen-agers. In fact, he narrowed the search still further. He has been looking for pregnant teen-agers who apply for federal and state welfare.

Having done this, he then looks for the father. And although this is often another teen-ager, sometimes it is not, for instance in a recent case in which Michael Hopkins, the stud in question, was 22 years old. The penalty for lewd and lascivious behavior can be life imprisonment. Nobody expects this to happen, but the mere thought of it might interfere with Michael's cocksureness in future encounters.

One pregnant girl was sentenced to 30 days for a misdemeanor, and she was quite shocked by the severity of the sentence. The prosecutor pointed out that the community had every right to be shocked at the prospect of a child being born out of wedlock, which increases by a very high percentage the probability that that child will end up in prison, on welfare, illiterate and on drugs.

Needless to say, the American Civil Liberties Union has got into the act, though it isn't absolutely clear what case it has. The prosecutor asked the general question: Does the community intend to enforce the law against statutory rape? This is defined as a sexual encounter with a girl under a certain age. What does one do, he asked, in a situation in which a 15-year-old girl is made pregnant, say by a 22-year-old man, and declines to charge her companion with rape? The common-law provision in such cases is to pronounce any sexual intercourse with underage girls as that exactly-- rape. And whatever ambiguities beset the law when deciding whether sexual congress took place, there aren't any when the girl is pregnant.

No Consequences
The Idaho experiment reminds us once again of a paradox in the development of social practices in free societies. It is that these societies suffer from heavy criticism of their toughness but shrink from getting the benefits from toughness. We terribly much want American children to learn to read and write, and we offer them public facilities in which to learn how to do this. But if they refuse to learn, we do,  nothing.We terribly want boys and girls not to create children doomed to neglect, but far from discouraging such activity, we subsidize it.

A free society is one that in most cases imposes penalties by its own devices. If you start a mousetrap factory and produce a product less successful than that of your competitors, what happens is that you go broke. The people who work for you lose their jobs, you lose your capital, and the empty factory building is auctioned off. But if you create one of the 1 million children born out of wedlock every year, you pass along the welfare cost to the government and, often, produce another child.

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