NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT ¨C On the opening day of law school, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.
I wish this caution were only theoretical. It isn¡¯t. Whatever your view on the refusal of a New York City grand jury to indict the police officer whose chokehold apparently led to the death of Eric Garner, it¡¯s useful to remember the crime that Garner is alleged to have committed: He was selling individual cigarettes in violation of New York law.
The obvious racial dynamics of the case ¡ª the police officer, Daniel Pantaleo, is white; Garner was black ¡ª have sparked understandable outrage. But, at least among libertarians, so has the law that was being enforced. Wrote Nick Gillespie in the Daily Beast, ¡°Clearly something has gone horribly wrong when a man lies dead after being confronted for selling cigarettes to willing buyers.¡± Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, appearing on MSNBC, also blamed the statute: ¡°Some politician put a tax of $5.85 on a pack of cigarettes, so they¡¯ve driven cigarettes underground by making them so expensive.¡±
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