There are not a lot of civil asset forfeiture fans left. While police chiefs still swear they cannot fight the war on drugs without cleaning out citizens’ pockets, the rest of us aren’t so sure. Somewhere between the margarita machines and outright theft, people have lost their taste for civil asset forfeiture.   But all the Reason.com articles in the world aren’t going to change much as long as judges rubber stamp this legalized theft. In a recent pleasant surprise, the Supreme Court of South Carolina expressed some doubt over the process in a hotly contested oral argument in a…

The Fourth Amendment is the most important amendment in the Bill of Rights. All the rest don’t mean a thing if the police can stop you, search you, and seize you at will. And trust me, they can. Courts have spent the last century or so inventing enough exceptions to your right to remain free from unreasonable search and seizure that the Fourth Amendment isn’t worth the paper all those warrants aren’t written on. On the other hand, the idea that you might have to show your license before you buy a rocket launcher at Wal-Mart incenses a large group…

Judge Shelley Joseph is the poster-victim for an out of control government. In case you don’t know who she is, the Massachusetts state court judge was indicted by the feds for not playing ball with ICE agents that wanted to pull an allegedly illegal immigrant out of her courtroom.  But this isn’t a post about illegal immigration. It’s a post about what the government thinks about the citizens it accuses of crimes.  Jessica Vaughn is the Director of the Center for Immigration Studies. While CIS claims to be an independent, non-partisan research center, their website quickly reveals the group is…