As I mentioned yesterday, the petitioner’s brief in McDonald v. City of Chicago written by Alan Gura asks the Supreme Court to overrule The Slaughterhouse Cases and adopt a very different interpretation of the Fouteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause. The obvious question is, how many Justices will agree? My guess: only one. In this […]
Archive | Guns
McDonald v. Chicago and Gilbert & Sullivan: The hidden connection!
In March 1994, I was in the Georgetown Gilbert & Sullivan Society‘s production of Gilbert & Sullivan‘s operetta Patience. You can find a list of the Society’s past shows here; I was also in the same show the next time they produced it, in April 2007. Also, you can find the libretto of the show […]
NRA brief in McDonald v. Chicago
By David Kopel on November 17, 2009 7:59 pm in Constitutional Theory, Guns, Originalism, Supreme Court
Last night, Orin noted the filing of the Petitioner’s brief in McDonald v. Chicago, the case that will decide whether the 14th Amendment makes the 2d Amendment applicable to state and local governments. As Orin noted, that brief is almost entirely devoted to incorporation under the Privileges or Immunities clause. It directly asks the Court […]
Ohio Court of Appeals Strikes Down State Preemption of Local Gun Laws
The opinion is City of Cleveland v. State (Nov. 12), and it rests on (1) state constitutional “home rule” principles, and (2) separation of powers. I can’t opine confidently about the first item, which rests on Ohio case law that I’m not familiar with. The analysis seems unsound, since it seems to suggest that comprehensive […]
Bleg on criminal prosecution of people for transient possession of illegal objects they want to give to the police
In a recent case in Surrey, England, a man found a black bag in his garden one evening. He looked into the bag, and found that it contained a shotgun. He took the shotgun into his home, and the next day he called the police, and brought the shotgun to the police station. He was […]
D.C. Court of Appeals Accepts (Partly) Defendant’s Second Amendment Claim
The case is Plummer v. United States, decided today. Several years ago, before D.C. v. Heller, Plummer was convicted of carrying a pistol without a license and of possessing an unregistered firearm. (He was acquitted of the greater offense of carrying a pistol without a license outside one’s home, so the jury essentially found — […]
The Second Amendment on Military Bases
A reader asks whether the ban on soldiers’ carrying weapons for self-defense on military bases would violate the Second Amendment. One could equally ask whether bans on carrying on military bases by non-soldiers — civilian employees, soldiers’ friends and family members, and such — would be unconstitutional. I think the answer to both questions is […]
Bloggingheads TV on Moses as the essential American hero
Robert Wright’s BloggingHeadsTV is often the best place on the Web for highly intelligent conversation about politics and culture. Particularly excellent is a new episode, posted today, in which Wright interviews Bruce Feiler, author of the new book America’s Prophet, Moses and the American Story. Wright is a scholar of the history of religions, so the conversation […]
Georgetown Panel on McDonald & the Privileges or Immunities Clause:
By Randy Barnett on November 6, 2009 9:16 am in Constitutional Theory, Guns, Originalism, Uncategorized
As many readers probably know, McDonald v. Chicago involves a constitutional challenge to the Chicago handgun ban, which raises the issue of whether the individual right to keep and bear arms, which was recognized by the Supreme Court in DC v. Heller also applies to the states. Somewhat amazingly, the Court announced that this was […]
Another good night for the Second Amendment
NY-23: Winning Democrat Bill Owens was A-rated by NRA (as was Hoffman). Virginia: Either Deeds (B rating) or McDonnell (A) were sure to be a big improvement over outgoing Governor Kaine. Deeds lost the NRA endorsement by supporting closing of the (non-existent) “gun show loophole.” In the Attorney General race, Republican Ken Cuccinelli (A+) handily […]
Will the Arms Trade Treaty provide effective embargos on human rights violators?
By David Kopel on November 2, 2009 12:41 pm in Guns, International Human Rights Law, International Law
Reversing the position of the Bush administration, the Obama administration recently announced support for the global Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which is currently being drafted by the United Nations. The leading voices for the ATT are the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA, funded by George Soros, and run by the Open Society’s former gun control […]
Funny Sign
Thanks to John Burgess for the pointer. UPDATE: Just to make this clear, it seems to me extremely unlikely that this is an actual permanent sign — I assume it’s either a Photoshop or a temporary sign put up just for the photograph. If this was a real sign, it would likely be pretty unneighborly […]
Pretend “Gun-Free” School Zones: A Deadly Legal Fiction
That’s the title of my forthcoming article in the Connecticut Law Review; a revised version is now available. The article suggests that, under Heller, bans on guns at schools are constitutional. However, as a policy matter, gun prohibition on campuses turns them into targets for criminals, particularly mass killers. The response of anti-gun groups is to warn about the dangers of 18-year-olds […]
The Right to Bear Arms and 18-to-20-Year-Olds
A Fifth Circuit nonprecedential decision yesterday involved a challenge to the federal limits on 18-to-20-year-olds’ acquisition of handguns, but didn’t need to reach the Second Amendment question: Defendant-Appellant Cantrell Bledsoe appeals her conviction after pleading guilty to one count of conspiring to make knowing, false, material representations to a federally-licensed gun dealer, in violation of […]
Government as Proprietor, and the Second Amendment
United States v. Dorosan (unpublished), decided Wednesday by the Fifth Circuit, upholds a ban on bringing handguns onto U.S. Postal Service property. Here’s the key legal discussion: First, the Postal Service owned the parking lot where Dorosan’s handgun was found, and its restrictions on guns stemmed from its constitutional authority as the property owner. See […]