This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, August 31st, 2016 and Caleb Brown.

It's your right to attempt to influence your government, but to what extent can government burden your exercise of that right.

Many people who engage in state-level advocacy in Alabama

can find themselves guilty of a felony

unless they're willing to travel to Birmingham

and take a specific ethics course.

Paul Sherman with the Institute for Justice is challenging that requirement.

We spoke today.

Among the rights enshrined in the First Amendment, it is the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

We can appropriately think of lobbyists as intermediaries in the redress of grievances.

So what has Alabama done to deal with the problem, quote unquote, of people trying to influence their government.

Well, lots of states regulate lobbyists and subject them to some kind of registration or reporting requirement, but Alabama has

imposed a burden that is unique and uniquely burdensome.

Alabama has an exceptionally broad definition of lobbying and if you are considered a lobbyist in Alabama,

you are required to physically travel to Alabama, to Montgomery, to take an ethics class that is offered only four times a year and only in Montgomery, Alabama.

All right, so this is from the opinion written to Maggie Ellinger Lock, who is a local, she lives in the Washington, D.C.

area and works for the Marijuana Policy Project.

Judge Jerry Fielding of the Alabama Ethics Commission wrote to her, an individual

whose job responsibilities include either for compensation or a regular and usual part of employment

the practice of promoting, opposing, or in any manner influencing

or attempting to influence the introduction, defeat, or enactment of legislation before any legislative body is considered to be lobbying and must

register within 10 days of first undertaking the lobbying activity.

...