A lawless pre-lapsarian Shangri-La

Freedom-lovers, libertarians and libertines have flocked to my home state ever since the days of the Civil War draft dodgers. Now it seems that, on the eastern edge of Idaho, there still is a little strip of Eden, a place where a man can stand up and break the law with impunity (besides the Legislature).

The corner where Idaho, Montana and Wyoming meet is beautiful. If you look at the map, you can see the boundary between Idaho and Wyoming, and a second, separate line which marks the western boundary of Yellowstone. Between Line A and Line B, argues law professor Brian Kalt, is "a 50-square-mile swath of Idaho in which one can commit felonies with impunity."

Say that you are in the Idaho portion of Yellowstone, and you decide to spice up your vacation by going on a crime spree. You make some moonshine, you poach some wildlife, you strangle some people and steal their picnic baskets. You are arrested, arraigned in the park, and bound over for trial in Cheyenne, Wyoming before a jury drawn from the Cheyenne area. But Article III, Section 2 plainly requires that the trial be held in Idaho, the state in which the crime was committed. Perhaps if you fuss convincingly enough about it, the case would be sent to Idaho. But the Sixth Amendment then requires that the jury be from the state (Idaho) and the district (Wyoming) in which the crime was committed. In other words, the jury would have to be drawn from the Idaho portion of Yellowstone National Park, which, according to the 2000 Census, has a population of precisely zero.

It sounds perfectly idyllic.

Thanks to Letters of Marque, who got it from Orin Kerr.