Law Professors Say: Yes on 19

A number of Cato friends -- including senior fellow Randy Barnett, former tech policy director Tom W. Bell, David Friedman, Nadine Strossen, and Erik Luna (Lindsay Lohan's favorite law prof) -- have endorsed California's Proposition 19, which would decriminalize and regulate marijuana. Also among the 65 signers of the petition are some professors with whom we have disagreed, such as Erwin Chemerinsky.

It remains to be seen whether a group of the country's smartest legal scholars will be any match for the combined weight of the Obama administration, the leading Democratic and Republican candidates for office in California, and almost all the major newspapers in the state. Reason editor Matt Welch, who has been monitoring newspaper editorials, tells me that all of the 21 largest papers that have editorialized on Proposition 19 have opposed it.

That's about as overwhelming as the editorial opposition to Proposition 13 back in 1978. All major papers except the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner opposed the granddaddy of tax-cutting initiatives, but it passed with 65 percent of the vote. Perhaps Proposition 19 will be equally successful as a way for voters to thumb their noses as the political establishment.

As Welch says:

I'll reiterate and update my previous pitch: If Dianne Feinstein, Meg Whitman, Jerry Brown, Barbara Boxer, Dan Lungren, Steve Cooley, Lee Baca, 49 California congresspeople, the California Chamber of Commerce, the Sacramento Bee, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Dean Singleton's MediaNews empire are against it, the vote-yes commercials write themselves.