Potentially exciting U.S. Supreme Court case

Current Events Domestic United States Politics
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Following in the wake Heller, the case wherein the 2nd amendment right to bear arms was agreed to be an individual right, there comes an opportunity to get it incorporated against all of the states. The court had a choice of cases to select from which would frame the question to be decided in a manner conducive to a clear decision. It picked this case having the question to be decided “Whether the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms is incorporated as against the States by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities or Due Process Clauses.” The petitioners have filed a stunningly ambitious brief to overturn a Supreme Court precedent set in 1870, which would incorporate the 2nd amendment against the states via the 14th amendment by reinvigorating the ‘privileges and immunities’ clause.

Why this can matter: Restoring the Privileges or Immunities Clause. This country could use a new dose of old abolitionist thought.

via The Volokh Conspiracy: Petitioner’s Brief in McDonald v. City of Chicago (The Second Amendment Incorporation Case), which links the brief and the precedent to be overturned.

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Can you put this in layman’s terms? Afraid I’m not much of a Constitutional scholar.

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Can you put this in layman’s terms? Afraid I’m not much of a Constitutional scholar.

Incorporation means a Constitutionally protected right that applies to the states and overrides their separate constitutions. As originally written, the Bill of Rights only restricted federal government actions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_(Bill_of_Rights) explains it well enough. The Reason article goes into the significance of the P&I clause better

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Can you put this in layman’s terms? Afraid I’m not much of a Constitutional scholar.

If the Federal constitution allows people to bear arms, then states cannot assert some type of “state’s right” to deny such a right to individuals.

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Timothy Sandefur explains that this case has ramifications far beyond the 2nd amendment.

My senior year in college, I heard a speech by Clint Bolick, then at the Institute for Justice, now at the Goldwater Institute, about litigating in defense of the rights of entrepreneurs. It was a great speech—I was overwhelmed. I was convinced then and there that I wanted to go to law school and work in public interest law, defending the right to economic liberty.

One central component of that mission was to get the United States Supreme Court to overrule its disastrous 1873 decision in the Slaughter-House Cases, …

… …

… McDonald doesn’t involve economic liberty; it’s about the right to possess firearms. But the Court is being directly asked to reconsider its former decision, and if it does, the constitutional protection for hardworking business owners may also be restored.