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Tim Lynch joins Trevor Burrus this week for a discussion on the role of criminal law in America.
What’s the proper scope of criminal law, from a libertarian point of view? Why does America lead the world in incarceration rates? How is the federal War on Drugs affecting our legal system?
Burrus and Lynch explain how policies like mandatory minimum sentencing and three strike laws erode civil liberties and talk about the proliferation of strict liability standards in criminal law. They also discuss the effects tactics like police militarization and no-knock raids have on small communities like Ferguson, Missouri and the more generalized problem of police misconduct in America.
Tim Lynch is Director of the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice. His research interests include the war on terrorism, overcriminalization, the drug war, the militarization of police tactics, and gun control.
Trevor Burrus was a research fellow in the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. His research interests include constitutional law, civil and criminal law, legal and political philosophy, legal history, and the interface between science and public policy.
He is the editor of A Conspiracy against Obamacare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Deep Commitments: The Past, Present, and Future of Religious Liberty (Cato, 2017). Burrus holds a BA in philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a JD from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. He also contributed a chapter to Libertarianism.org’s Visions of Liberty.