A 50-square-mile slice of Yellowstone National Park inside Idaho sits in a legal blind spot where a major felony may be impossible to prosecute. This episode explains how it happened: Yellowstone is a federal enclave established in 1872, and when Wyoming gained statehood in 1890, Congress placed the entire park under the District of Wyoming, the only federal district court spanning multiple states. Combined with Article III and the Sixth Amendment, which require a jury drawn from both the state and district where the crime occurred, that leaves a jury pool of zero people.

Law professor Brian Kalt uncovered the problem in 2004 while stress-testing the Sixth Amendment and published The Perfect Crime in the Georgetown Law Journal to force Congress to act. The episode covers why the loophole is far narrower than internet lore suggests, the elk poacher who tried to use Kalt’s paper in his defense and was steered into a plea deal, why a one-page fix has never passed, and how C.J. Box’s novel Free Fire, the show Yellowstone, and other fiction picked up where Congress left off.

• Why the Founders required local trials and local juries in the first place
• The limits of the loophole: petty offenses, civil lawsuits, and conspiracy charges
• How the Bilderain poaching case was resolved without setting a precedent
• Why Senator Mike Enzi could not get a five-minute vote on the fix
• How the Yellowstone series’ train station mirrors Kalt’s discovery