This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, October 14th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It was a comment offered mostly in passing, but Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has identified

one casualty of federal drug laws, the quality of the federal judiciary itself.

Tim Lynch, director of the Ko Institute's project on criminal justice, comments.

He was making an observation about what the impact has been on the federal judiciary as a result of Congress passing federal

drug laws and especially expanding the personnel, law enforcement agents, prosecutors, and judges, so that kind of a

ramping up of the drug war so that more and more drug cases are coming into the

federal system and he was making the observation that this has definite negative repercussions on the federal system and his specific

observation was that the quality of federal judges has deteriorated over the years.

Why does that occur?

Well, there used to be an expression in the United States.

The expression was don't make a federal case out of it, which meant that the federal legal system was limited, small, and was high quality.

A federal judge ship used to be a very rare and prestigious appointment.

But over the past 30 or 40 years with when successive administrations want to

expand and ramp up the drug war they've had to hire more police they've had to hire more prosecutors and they've had to hire more judges and

build more prisons to expand this system in order to process the number of cases that are coming through. So, you know,

standard economics and public choice tells us that, you know, when you expand the personnel in these rapid numbers the quality is going to go down.

You're not going to see the high quality federal judgeships that you use to people who were very very scholarly people had

like a prestigious academic appointments would go into the judiciary and they

had issued these very thoughtful legal opinions.

Now they're just totally overwhelmed with marijuana cases and

...