Every day, the average American commits iii felonies. And so argues civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate in his new book "Three Felonies a Day," the championship of which refers to the number of crimes he estimates that Americans perpetrate each day because of vague and overly burdensome laws.

In his book, Silverglate posits that federal criminal laws take become dangerously asunder from legal tradition and that prosecutors can now pin crimes on anyone for near nothing at all. The problem, he says, is modern criminal laws, which have exploded in number and become impossibly wide and vague.

I don't know if I buy all of Silverglate'south arguments. Some seem a touch overblown, and conceptually, I don't believe all of his exceptions make the dominion. And there is something to be said for laws that improve social policy, fifty-fifty if we think they're overly intrusive or burdensome. For example, I don't like speed limits. Indeed, I probably become over the speed limit every time I take the car out. But the data strongly show that speed limits salve lives–they generally make us go slower, a proficient thing.

Still, Silveglate's thesis is important and well-argued, and he shows without question that some laws take go painfully vague. And while his book occasionally reads more like a legal treatise than a popular text, information technology's one that prosecutors should be forced to read, if only to understand how easy information technology is to go too far.

I emailed Silverglate a few questions recently. His answers are beneath.

Why did you lot determine to write this book?
Sometime in the mid-1980s I started to notice a change in the nature of the federal criminal prosecutions that I was handling during the course of my criminal defence and civil liberties law practice. I started to correspond more and more indicted clients where neither I nor other lawyers in my firm could figure out quite what the customer/defendant had washed to deserve to become indicted (or, if we got the case pre-indictment, what the customer had done to go investigated or targeted). The client'south behave seems to me to suit to normal standards and expectations, even if sometimes a chip aggressive or "precipitous." I started to proceed notes on this miracle.

As the years wore on, the issues got more frequent and more than acute. I was representing more than and more federal criminal defendants who had washed the deeds charged confronting them, only I did not deem what they did to constitute a law-breaking. In the late 1990s I co-authored another long-gestating book, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America'south Campuses, most disciplinary proceedings on higher campuses on the basis of vague speech codes. I vowed that someday I would write a volume on this other phenomenon of federal criminal prosecutions on the basis of vague statutes, directed against innocent people.

Why is it important?

Every bit a civil liberties thing, a government which has the ability to prosecute innocent citizens at will, is a government which has achieved the ability that has characterized all tyrannical governments throughout history. Such prosecutions, because they can exist pre-textual, tend to wing under society'south and the news media's radar. Professor Alan Dershowitz has written a trenchant Foreword to my book, in which he notes how the Soviet system of "justice" used this technique to command and terrorize dissidents. Indeed, postal service-Soviet Russian federation uses the aforementioned techniques today – using bogus "taxation" prosecutions to imprison critics of the authorities. In my view, this is a crucial civil liberties issue, and I've seen no one else write about it in any kind of systematic mode, and so I've undertaken to practice it. My volume could not exist written by a scholar or a law professor, but only by a practitioner.

How did the Code of Federal Regulations abound into such a morass?
More and more responsibleness for defining and elucidating the law was put, past the Congress, into the easily of bureaucrats, and the inevitable has occurred.

Tin you walk me through how exactly you estimated that someone commits three felonies a day?

The "three felonies a day" is really a figure of voice communication, hardly an verbal count. People who are very active in certain fields probable commit more three arguable federal felonies a day. People who are less active in life and in commerce probably commit fewer. I would imagine that lawyers, accountants, and securities dealers commit more than, while fruit-stand vendors commit fewer. Just my point was that an active member of our club goes nearly his or her busy workday non realizing the potential for committing arguable federal felonies in a wide variety of business and personal endeavors on a typical day.

Do you think that there a danger that federal laws tin can be as well specific? That if a police force is too particular nigh details, that someone guilty might be permit off on a technicality?

In the commencement place, I exercise believe that it is meliorate that a few miscreants go complimentary than that an innocent person be convicted.

Second, if an action is sufficiently bad, so Congress tin but outlaw it in terms sufficiently articulate so that ordinary people understand what they may non do. There is surely a golden hateful between beingness also full general and as well specific. After all, our country mutual law systems manage to enact and enforce criminal laws that are adequately well understood by the populace. But the federal criminal law is divorced from our common constabulary traditions, and we are suffering the consequences.

Third, a central problem with federal criminal law – specially the laws that fall most oft in the category of prosecutions I criticize in my book – is that our fraud statutes focus upon the ways rather than the substance of a crime. We accept, for example, "mail fraud" – fraud committed past the utilise of the mails. Or "wire fraud" – fraud committed by the use of the means of interstate communications (phone, electronic mail). Or "securities fraud" – fraud committed in connection with the purchase or auction of securities. Merely these statutes do not define what "fraud" ways! And often Congress, at the urging of the executive branch and of federal prosecutors, has intentionally kept such definitions vague. Run into, for example, my word in my volume, at pp. 114-122, of the federal government's intentional effort to go along the "insider trading" laws and definitions vague, so that they can prosecute whomever or whatever seems advisable at the time. This is a veritable formula for tyranny.

What tin can be done to reform the organization?
I accept devoted virtually my entire book to exposing the problem, but have only a very few pages devoted to suggesting, in full general terms, the remedies. I practice not actually propose remedies, but, rather, I propose directions in which we take to travel, and coalitions that we have to create in order to fight this largely under-the-surface tyranny. I decided to do what I do best – tell the world what I've learned, from my experience, is going on. I want to kickoff a public give-and-take. From that discussion I believe remedies will emerge. That'due south what democracy is all about, later on all.

This item originally appeared in The Open Case mag.