This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Thursday, April 19th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Supreme Court recently threw out a portion of a statute for being unconstitutionally vague.

The question dealt with what kinds of crimes would trigger an automatic deportation.

The case continues to push the line over what makes a statute too vague.

Clark Neely, Vice President for Criminal Justice at the Cato Institute,

discusses the case and its likely impact.

Well, it's important, I think, for two reasons.

First, it's important because the court has the Supreme Court has struck down

Provision in a law that effectively delegated to the judiciary to

Determine the scope of the law. Essentially, this is a law that says that a lawful permanent resident or other alien

may be removed from the United States if they commit certain crimes and then those are listed.

And then any other crime that is a felony and that by its nature would be the sort of crime where there's a substantial risk that physical force would be used against a person.

And the judiciary is just supposed to apparently kind of imagine what other crimes those might be.

So case by case basis, well this was violent or this had this risk of becoming, this could have turned

violent and is therefore for our purposes violent.

Yeah it's even more problematic than that and the second thing that was important about

this case is the very interesting opinion written by Justice Gorsuch where he joined the so-called

liberal wing of the court to be the fifth vote for striking down this

provision and what he points out is that it's not even a matter of just deciding was the particular crime at issue in the case violent, but that what Congress has effectively instructed the course to do is to assess the sort of, you know,

the metaphysical nature of this kind of crime and determine whether in general this sort of crime does or does not typically involve violence and then on that basis decide, you know,

whether the statutory requirements are met and whether the person should be removed and

...