Eighteen-year-old Alfonso Lopez Jr. was just six weeks short of his high school graduation when, in March 1992, he was caught carrying a .38-cal. handgun on school grounds. Although Lopez insisted that the weapon had simply been given to him by one classmate with instructions to deliver it to another, the San Antonio, Texas, senior suddenly found himself in deep trouble. He had no money for bail, no funds to hire a lawyer and, thanks to a law Congress had passed two years earlier that banned guns within 1,000 ft. of a school, little chance of escaping a six-month prison sentence.
Little chance, that is, until Lopez's court-appointed defense attorney decided that his client's case was hopeless enough to warrant a bold gamble. In a move that is about the closest an attorney ever gets to throwing a Hail Mary pass in the final two seconds of the Super Bowl, Jack Carter conceded that Lopez had indeed broken the law-and then went on to argue that the law itself was wrong. Thirty-seven months and two appeals later, the obscure public defender persuaded five Supreme Court Justices to overturn a law that several hundred legislators and the President of the U.S. had already approved.
What's more, he did it with a constitutional argument that calls into question several decades of federal legislation. Because the majority ruling in U.S. v. Lopez represents a fundamental break with the way the court has interpreted the delicate balance between state and federal authority for the past 60 years, "it may be the most important case of the decade," says Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee. "It redefines the nature of the Federal Government."
Contrary to the impression often conveyed by formidable law-enforcement agencies like the FBI, the Federal Government's dominion is limited to only those powers specifically spelled out in the U.S. Constitution. Remaining areas of authority, such as law enforcement and education, are jealously cloistered behind the parapet of state sovereignty. Since the New Deal, however, the Supreme Court has permitted the government to breach certain portions of this wall, using a clause in the Constitution that grants Congress the power to "regulate commerce among the several states." With the court's acquiescence, federal lawmakers have employed the clause as a way to extend their authority into areas of life as diverse as racial discrimination in restaurants and limits on farm products. Most of the civil rights legislation of the 1960s depends on the Commerce Clause. And in recent years Congress has eagerly seized upon the court's generous reading of the clause as a license to extend its jurisdiction even further, adding to the list of federal offenses crimes such as carjacking and drive-by shootings.