Event: The Supreme Court And The Battle For Second Amendment Rights

Last night, I had the opportunity to attend The Supreme Court and the Battle for Second Amendment Rights, a discussion of the U.S. Supreme Court's two recent Second Amendment opinions, District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the case in which the Court affirmed that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right, and last term's McDonald v. City of Chicago, which held that the Second Amendment was applicable to state and local governments via the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause. The event was sponsored by the Independent Institute. 

We obviously do not focus on the Second Amendment on this blog (being much more concerned with the Fifth Amendment than the Second), but McDonald in particular captured our attention since the petitioner's main argument in that case was that the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause (and not only the Due Process Clause) prohibits state and local governments from infringing the right to keep and bear arms. For all you Con Law wonks, that would mean that the P or I Clause incorporates the entire Bill of Rights against the States, not selective incorporation pursuant to the the Due Process Clause (as we all were taught in law school). Back in February, our colleague Mark Murakami moderated a panel of experts in an ABA-sponsored conference previewing the arguments and the possible broad ramifications if the petitioner's argument were accepted, so we were naturally interested in what others thought of the case now that opinions have been rendered.

Check out the video if you are interested.