This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Thursday, June 29th,

2003. I'm Caleb Brown. A law criminalizing some speech

encouraging people to violate immigration law passes Supreme Court muster, sorta,

and many questions about the interpretation of that law have been left unanswered.

In part thanks to the High Court's reliance on so-called constitutional

avoidance. Cato's Tommy Berry comments on the High Court ruling.

Tommy, we've discussed this case before, but if you don't mind, sort of recapitulate the issue at hand.

Sure the issue is a federal statute that criminally prohibits speech that encourages

or induces any violation of immigration law either

knowing or in reckless disregard that it will lead to that violation of

immigration law and essentially the dispute in this case is is that

statute so broad does it apply to so much First Amendment protected speech that it

violates the so-called facial overbreath doctrine, which means you have to strike down the law entirely under the First Amendment,

even if the particular defendant at issue in the case did not engage in protected speech. So the defendant in this case

there's no dispute that he himself did conduct that's a crime. He did a pretty

egregious fraud, lied to people about how they could become citizens when in fact they

couldn't for money but his argument was that in many other cases this language could

for example prohibit an op-ed in a newspaper encouraging people in the country legally to stay,

or a popular youtuber sort of rallying the non-documented alien community and things like that.

Whereas the government on the other side said no these

are terms of art even though it says encourages or induces you can just read

those as if they say solicit or facilitates which are terms of art and criminal law that have a much narrower

...