{"id":11032,"date":"2011-09-07T08:53:34","date_gmt":"2011-09-07T12:53:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=11032"},"modified":"2011-09-07T08:57:31","modified_gmt":"2011-09-07T12:57:31","slug":"a-bit-more-on-the-lacey-act","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/09\/07\/a-bit-more-on-the-lacey-act\/","title":{"rendered":"A bit more on the Lacey Act"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Economist<\/em><\/a> has a brief mention of the Gibson raid:<\/p>\n

\n

Agents barged in and shut down production. They were hunting for ebony and rosewood which the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) alleges was imported from India in violation of the Lacey Act, a 1900 law originally designed to protect fauna from poachers. This law has metastasised: it now requires Americans, in essence, to abide by every plant and wildlife regulation set by any country on Earth. Not having heard of an obscure foreign rule is no defence. Violators face fines or even jail. FWS claims the ebony sent from India was mislabelled, and that Indian law forbids the export of unfinished ebony and rosewood.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

Guitarists now worry that every time they cross a state border with their instrument, they will have to carry sheaves of documents proving that every part of it was legally sourced. Edward Grace, the deputy chief of the FWS\u2019s office of law enforcement, says this fear is misplaced: \u201cAs a matter of longstanding practice,\u201d he says, \u201cinvestigators focus not on unknowing end consumers but on knowing actors transacting in larger volumes of product.\u201d But Americans have been jailed for such things as importing lobsters in plastic bags rather than cardboard boxes, in violation of a Honduran rule that Honduras no longer enforces. Small wonder pluckers are nervous.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Original report on the Gibson guitar raid here<\/a>. Rules like the Lacey Act are tailor-made for petty bureaucrats to exercise immense amounts of judicially unsupervised power. It’s hard to believe that this kind of rule is being enforced evenhandedly, and rather easier to believe that it is being used selectively as a way of paying off scores, providing a “service” to certain firms at the expense of others, and creating lots of opportunities for bribes, “protection money”, and the like.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Economist has a brief mention of the Gibson raid: Agents barged in and shut down production. They were hunting for ebony and rosewood which the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) alleges was imported from India in violation of the Lacey Act, a 1900 law originally designed to protect fauna from poachers. This law has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,65,23,9,13,161],"tags":[52,200,661],"class_list":["post-11032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-environment","category-india","category-law","category-usa","category-woodworking","tag-absurd","tag-music","tag-regulation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2RW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11032"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11035,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11032\/revisions\/11035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}