This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, March 5, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown.

When you take a day off to go to the ball game but don't tell the boss, is it really criminal fraud?

The Supreme Court is trying to figure out just what it means to

deny someone the intangible right of honest services. In the case of Jeffrey Skilling

of Enron is now in the hands of the court. Tim Sandifer, an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute

and a principal attorney, the Pacific Legal Foundation,

comments on the oral argument.

I think that we saw the Supreme Court really concerned about two issues.

The first issue that they were really concerned about was the selection of the jury and

whether Skilling got a fair trial given the heat of this issue of Enron's collapse in in Houston when it happened.

But secondly, and the issue that PLF and Cato filed the brief on was the vagueness of the statute and what it means and the fact is we don't know really anything more than we did about what exactly the statute means.

What has the Supreme Court said in the past with regard to the vagueness of statutes, what has it said about

due process of law and your right to do process and understanding statute?

Well, when it comes to criminal law, they've made it very clear that a statute that is so vague

that no reasonable person could understand what is prohibited and what is allowed that it violates

due process of law to convict a person of that. And that was 90 years ago.

Yeah, I mean the first case I know of was in the 1920s or something like that.

And that has been the standard since, and it's been applied in a couple of other areas, particularly

in the realm of restrictions on free speech.

During the 1960s, particularly there were a lot of attempts to censor free speech. During the 1960s, particularly, there were a lot of attempts

to censor free speech on the grounds of nuisance.

They would declare a protest to be a nuisance

...