In Re Burke

THE COURT.

—The petitioner asks for his discharge on habeas corpus from an imprisonment under a charge of a violation of the Wright Act, so called, being an act of the legislature submitted to a referendum at the last election and carried by the people. His principal point is that the act is void because it purports to enact into the law in this state all the penal provisions of the so-called Volstead Act, being an act of Congress passed pursuant to the eighteenth amendment of the federal constitution, and to enforce its provisions.

The question whether a state may enact a law in that manner is…