There is an area of Yellowstone Park known as the "Zone of Death" because, due to a constitutional loophole, a crime committed there could go unpunished. We talk with the MSU law professor who first published a paper about this loophole.
Movies often portray the old west as a lawless place, and the assumption is that today those places no longer exist. But in 2005, an MSU law professor discovered a loophole in the Sixth Amendment that could allow for potential lawlessness in a remote sliver of land in Yellowstone National Park.
At that time, Professor Brian Kalt wrote about the loophole in an article for the Georgetown Law Journal called “The Perfect Crime,” and he referred to the swath of land as the “Zone of Death.”
The article garnered major attention at the time and still does today, yet the loophole remains unchanged.
We talk with Brian Kalt about Yellowstone's "Zone of Death."