Legal scholar Elie Mystal talks about his new book, Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America. From the Hyde Amendment's impact on reproductive rights to laws that shield gun manufacturers, Mystal argues flaws within these laws have made life harder for all of us. We'll talk about immigration law, voting rights, and why the deregulation of the airline industry has made most of us hate the experience of flying. Also, our TV critic David Bianculli reviews the delightful new mystery series Ludwig, from Britbox.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. My guest today, legal scholar Elie Mistal, says if it were up to him, every law passed before 1965 would be deemed unconstitutional. From his view, before the Voting Rights Act, the U.S. was basically an apartheid state.
Estal's new book, Bad Law, Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America, mixes humor with deep analysis to argue that our laws on immigration, religious freedom, abortion, and voting rights are actually making life worse than better. They've caused, he argues, massive social and political harm and don't reflect the will of most Americans.
Ellie Mistal is a legal analyst and justice correspondent for The Nation and the legal editor of the More Perfect podcast on the Supreme Court for Radiolab. He's also an Alfred Knobler Fellow at Type Media Center and the author of Allow Me to Retort, A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution. And Ellie Mistal, as you always seem to do, you've made this subject both funny and informational.
So we'll be laughing today to keep from crying. Thank you so much for this book and welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you so much for having me, Tanya.
Okay, so in each chapter of the book, you give an analysis of a law that you say is ruining America. There are 10 of them. How did you go about choosing which laws to focus on?
That was the most difficult part of writing this book because, as you can imagine, there are a lot of laws. Many of them are stupid, and I did not read them all. So trying to scope how to pick just 10 was the initial challenge of the book. And where I landed on was trying to focus on laws that could be stricken today and and have life be better tomorrow, right?
There are many laws that we have that are dumb but inconsequential, right? And there are many laws that we have that are dumb but really complicated, right? And require not repeal but reform, require updates, require massaging, right? The laws that I focused on in my book are both consequential but
but don't need to be reformed, don't need to be massaged, don't need to be updated for the modern age. They're just stupid. And if we just got rid of them, things would be better the day after we got rid of those laws. So that was the kind of fundamental scoping of the book. And that's how I came up with the 10 that I chose to focus on.
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