United States v. Jay Scott Ballinger

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• considering the defendant’s travel across state lines in the context of its necessity and temporal proximity to his crimes
• affirming Congressional power to prohibit destruction of religious property “in or affect[ing] interstate or foreign commerce.”
• noting defendant-appellant’s concession that “sending a bomb to a church by mail would place that offense in commerce, since the mail is an instrumentality of commerce”
• combining multiple aspects of the defendant’s conduct, such as “travel in a van (an instrumentality of commerce) along interstate highways (a channel of commerce)” to conclude that the nexus to the Commerce Clause was satisfied
• describing “Congress’[s] well-established power to forbid or 112 punish the use of the channels and instrumentalities of interstate commerce ‘to promote . . . the spread of any evil or harm to the people of other states from the state of origin’” (second alteration in original
• \[A court] need not and should not countenance an interpretation of statutory language that leads to absurd or futile results[.]\

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).