This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 15th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The New Yorker has awakened many people to the scourge of civil asset forfeiture

how it endangers basic property rights and gives police

incredible leverage against average people.

Scott Bullock is a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice and co-author of IJ's

policing for- profit report.

We spoke about asset forfeiture earlier this week.

This New Yorker's story has sort of reawaken interest in civil

civil forfeiture in a way that it really hasn't been awakened before but of

course people who've been following this story for some time as an issue what is

the real functional problem here legally speaking with civil forfeiture?

Well it's true the New Yorker piece really did generate a whole lot of interests and really

captured some of the really fundamental problems of civil forfeiture.

And a civil forfeiture got some attention back in the 1990s.

There were tales of abuse.

There was some media attention on it.

Congress got involved, passed a reform in 2000, which did improve at least federal

forfeiture law up to a point. But a lot of people thought then, well the problem is

solved, let's move on to something else but what happened

is that forfeiture practice really didn't change a whole lot

forfeiture practices at the state level did not change at all because the

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