This is the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution.

I'm from your host Tom Church and the Libertarian is Professor Richard Epstein.

Richard is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow here at the Hoover Institution.

He's the Lawrence A Tisch Professor of Law at NYU

and is a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

And Richard, there's a lot to talk about this week,

so we're going to jump around to a few topics. The first

one in my home state of California has taken a page out of Texas's book and that is

because it passed a gun control bill allowing private citizens to sue anyone who imports, make, sells illegal guns in California.

Now it's not the state that's allowed to sell these people, but citizens and it's modeled after Texas's law that allows private citizens to sue anyone who

aides or about an abortion. There are laws that were specifically written to

prevent Supreme Court challenges. And Richard, this can't stand, so I need to know from you how is the Supreme Court

going to handle this because if it doesn't states will essentially be able to

circumvent traditional jurisdictional limits.

Well I think this is one time where you're asking the

question in a way that sort of answers it. I think we have talked about this before if

not here I've certainly talked about it elsewhere but I was never a fan of the Texas statute to begin with. My view

essentially is that what's really going on in that particular case is that these

citizens are delegated agents of the federal government, then what they have to do is to be subject to the same kinds of restrictions that would be done by the states themselves.

So the question that you would then want to ask exactly what is California going to be able to do?

Could it stop the importation of guns into the United States, rather into the state?

And I think the answer to that particular question is that it could not that is unless it turns out there's some specific prohibition that exists at the federal level the movement of guns like the movement of any other commodity back and forth against state lines is in fact

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