Berkeley CSUA MOTD:Entry 48675
Berkeley CSUA MOTD
 
WIKI | FAQ | Tech FAQ
http://csua.com/feed/
2025/05/24 [General] UID:1000 Activity:popular
5/24    

2007/11/21-27 [Reference/Law/Court] UID:48675 Activity:kinda low
11/21   The USSC granted Certiorari in DC v. Heller (the DC gun control
        case in which the DC Cir. held that the 2d amend confers a personal
        right to keep and bear arms):
        http://tinyurl.com/2ybkhz (nytimes.com)
        The SCOTUSBlog discussion for this case is here:
        http://tinyurl.com/36ou5y (scotusblog.com)
        [For those who asked me to update the motd on how I did on the CA
         bar, I passed!]
        \_ Yeah? Congrats?  Who are you?
           \_ ranga@soda
              \_ Do you have an Innnndian accent?
        \_ Grats! That's cool because we had a shortage of lawyers.
        \_ That's great! Obviously, this world needs more lawyers!
        \_ [Congrats! What kind of law are you planning to do?]
           \_ I'm working at a firm that mostly handles patent cases.
           \_ Right now, I'm working at a firm that mostly handles patent cases.
              \_ Are you making more money than you used to? Working more
                 or less hours? -ausman
                 \_ I am making quite a bit more money. My hours are
                    about the same as when I was a coder.
2025/05/24 [General] UID:1000 Activity:popular
5/24    

You may also be interested in these entries...
2013/6/18-8/13 [Reference/Law/Court, Politics/Domestic/Crime] UID:54695 Activity:nil
6/17    Don't mess with Texas:
        http://gawker.com/woman-tells-carjacker-he-picked-wrong-witch-runs-him-513728108
        \_ Kudos.  I just worry that some shameless ambulance-chasing lawyer
           might sue her on behalf of the criminal.
           \_ America has more lawsuits per capita than any other nation.
              Lawyers, rejoice!!!
	...
2013/6/3-7/23 [Reference/RealEstate] UID:54685 Activity:nil
6/3     Why are "real estate" and "real property" called so?  Does the part
        "real" mean something like "not fake"?
        \- without going into a long discourse into common law,
           it is to distinguish land/fixed property from intangible
           property [like a patent] and movable, personal property,
           like your car. Real property has historically had special
	...
2012/10/1-11/7 [Reference/Law/Court] UID:54488 Activity:nil
10/1    Photos of the Supreme Court in session:
        http://preview.tinyurl.com/8zuqc25 [slate]
	...
Cache (6712 bytes)
tinyurl.com/2ybkhz -> www.nytimes.com/2007/11/21/us/21scotus.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
Supreme Court announced Tuesday that it would decide whether the Constitution grants individuals the right to keep guns in their homes for private use, plunging the justices headlong into a divisive and long-running debate over how to interpret the Second Amendments guarantee of the right of the people to keep and bear arms. The court accepted a case on the District of Columbias 31-year-old prohibition on the ownership of handguns. In adding the case to its calendar, for argument in March with a decision most likely in June, the court not only raised the temperature of its current term but also inevitably injected the issue of gun control into the presidential campaign. The federal appeals court here, breaking with the great majority of federal courts to have examined the issue over the decades, ruled last March that the Second Amendment right was an individual one, not tied to service in a militia, and that the District of Columbias categorical ban on handguns was therefore unconstitutional. Both the District of Columbia government and the winning plaintiff, Dick Anthony Heller, a security officer, urged the justices to review the decision. Mr Heller, who carries a gun while on duty guarding the federal building that houses the administrative offices of the federal court system, wants to be able to keep his gun at home for self-defense. Mr Heller was one of six plaintiffs recruited by a wealthy libertarian lawyer, Robert A Levy, who created and financed the lawsuit for the purpose of getting a Second Amendment case before the Supreme Court. The appeals court threw out the other five plaintiffs for lack of standing; only Mr Heller had actually applied for permission to keep a gun at home and been rejected. The Supreme Court last looked at the Second Amendment nearly 70 years ago in United States v Miller, a 1939 decision that suggested, without explicitly deciding, that the right should be understood in connection with service in a militia. The amendment states, A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. The justices chose their own wording for what they want to decide in the new case, District of Columbia v Heller, No. The question they posed is whether the provisions of the statute violate the Second Amendment rights of individuals who are not affiliated with any state-regulated militia, but who wish to keep handguns and other firearms for private use in their homes. The courts choice of words is almost never inadvertent, and its use of the phrase state-regulated militia was somewhat curious. The District of Columbia, of course, is not a state, and one of the arguments its lawyers are making in their appeal is that the Second Amendment simply does not apply to legislation enacted exclusively for the District of Columbia. For that matter, the Supreme Court has never ruled that the Second Amendment even applies to the states, as opposed to the federal government. It has applied nearly all the other provisions of the Bill of Rights to the states, leaving the Second Amendment as the most prominent exception. The justices evidently decided that this case was not the proper vehicle for exploring that issue, because as a nonstate, the District of Columbia is not in a position to argue it one way or another. Because none of the justices now on the court have ever confronted a Second Amendment case, any prediction about how the court will rule is little more than pure speculation. Of the hundreds of gun regulations on the books in states and localities around the country, the districts ordinance is generally regarded as the strictest. Chicago comes the closest to it, banning the possession of handguns acquired since 1983 and requiring re-registration of older guns every two years. New York City permits handgun ownership with a permit issued by the Police Department. The District of Columbia ordinance not only bans ownership of handguns, but also requires other guns that may be legally kept in the home, rifles and shotguns, to be disassembled or kept under a trigger lock. The capitals newly empowered City Council enacted the ordinance in 1976 as one of its first measures after receiving home-rule authority from Congress. The courts order on Tuesday indicated that it would review the handgun ban in light of the provision that permits, with restrictions, the other guns. The opposing sides in the lawsuit presented very different views of how the various provisions interact. To the plaintiffs, the restrictions on the conditions under which rifles and shotguns may be kept means that homeowners are denied the right to possess functional weapons for self-defense. To the District of Columbia, the fact that these other guns are permitted shows that the ordinance is nuanced and sensitive to gun owners needs. In any event, a Supreme Court decision that finds the districts ordinance unconstitutional would not necessarily invalidate other, more modest restrictions, like those that permit handgun ownership for those who pass a background check and obtain a license. Since the only claim in the case is that law-abiding people have the right to keep a gun at home, the court will not have occasion to address restrictions on carrying guns. In fact, lawyers on both sides of the case agreed Tuesday that a victory for the plaintiff in this case would amount to the opening chapter in an examination of the constitutionality of gun control rather than anything close to the final word. This is just the beginning, said Alan Gura, the lead counsel for the plaintiff. Mr Gura said in an interview that gun laws that make sense, like those requiring background checks, would survive the legal attack, which he said was limited to laws that do no good other than disarm law-abiding citizens. Whether the handgun ban has reduced crime in a city surrounded by less restrictive jurisdictions is a matter of heated dispute. Crime in the District of Columbia has mirrored trends in the rest of the country, dropping quite sharply during the 1990s but now experiencing some increase. In striking down the districts ordinance, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said that an individual-right interpretation of the Second Amendment would still permit reasonable regulations, but that a flat ban was not reasonable. Dennis A Henigan, a lawyer at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which advocates strict gun control, said that if the justices agree with the appeals court, an important question for future cases will be what legal standard the court will eventually adopt for evaluating other gun regulations.
Cache (8192 bytes)
tinyurl.com/36ou5y -> www.scotusblog.com/wp/uncategorized/court-agrees-to-rule-on-gun-case/
Print This Post FINAL UPDATE 3:20 pm After a hiatus of 68 years, the Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to rule on the meaning of the Second Amendment -- the hotly contested part of the Constitution that guarantees "a right to keep and bear arms." Not since 1939 has the Court heard a case directly testing the Amendment's scope -- and there is a debate about whether it actually decided anything in that earlier ruling. In a sense, the Court may well be writing on a clean slate if, in the end, it decides the ultimate question: does the Second Amendment guarantee an individual right to have a gun for private use, or does it only guarantee a collective right to have guns in an organized military force such as a state National Guard unit? The city of Washington's appeal (District of Columbia v Heller, 07-290) seeking to revive its flat ban on private possession of handguns is expected to be heard in March -- slightly more than a year after the DC Circuit Court ruled that the Second Amendment right is a personal one, at least to have a gun for self-defense in one's own home. The absence of any action may mean that the Court has decided not to hear that case. If that is so, it will be indicated in an order next Monday. Both sides had urged the Court to hear the city's case, but they had disagreed over how to frame the Second Amendment issue. Here is the way the Court phrased the granted issue: "Whether the following provisions -- DC Code secs. The first listed section bars registration of pistols if not registered before Sept. The Court did not mention any other issues that it might address as questions of its jurisdiction to reach the ultimate question: did the one individual who was found to have a right to sue -- Dick Anthony Heller, a DC resident -- have a right to challenge all three of the sections of the local law cited in the Court's order, and, is the District of Columbia, as a federal enclave, even covered by the Second Amendment. While neither of those issues is posed in the grant order, the Court may have to be satisfied that the answer to both is affirmative before it would move on to the substantive question about the scope of any right protected by the Amendment. The DC Circuit ruled that the Amendment does apply to the District because of its federal status, subject to all provisions of the Constitution. At this point, therefore, it appears that the Court's review may not reach a major question -- does the Second Amendment also protect individual rights against state and local government gun control laws? But a ruling by the Court recognizing an individual right to have a gun almost surely would lead to new test cases on whether to extend the Amendment's guarantee so that it applied to state and local laws, too. The Court last confronted that issue in Presser v illinois, in 1886, finding that the Amendment was not binding on the states. Some observers who read the Court's order closely may suggest that the Court is already inclined toward an "individual rights" interpretation of the Second Amendment. That is because the order asks whether the three provisions of the DC gun control law violate "the Second Amendment rights of individuals." But that phrasing may reveal very little about whether the Amendment embraces an individual right to have a gun for private use. Only individuals, of course, would be serving in the militia, and there is no doubt that the Second Amendment provides those individuals a right to have a gun for that type of service. The question the Court will be deciding is, if there are individuals who want to keep pistols for use at home, does the Second Amendment guarantee them that right. Just because the Second Amendment protects some individual right does not settle the nature of that right. One of the interesting subsets of the question the Court will be confronting is whether the 1939 case of US v Miller is a precedent for what the Second Amendment means -- individual or collective right. If that decision did find in favor of a collective right, the current Court would have to decide whether this was a binding precedent, or whether it should be overruled. At his nomination hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he said that "the Miller case sidestepped" the issue of whether the Amendment protected a collective or an individual right. So people try to read into the tea leaves about Miller and what would come out on this issue, but that's still very much an open issue." The local law at issue in Heller has been discussed widely as a sweeping ban on private possession or use of handguns. But the Court order granting review took it a step further: the one section that will be at issue that goes beyond handguns is the provision that requires that any gun kept at home be unloaded and disassembled, or at least be locked. Thus, that provision also applies to rifles and shotguns kept at home, in terms of whether those weapons would remain "functional" in time of emergency if that provision were upheld. That part of the order appeared to widen the inquiry in a way that the local residents who challenged the law had wanted. Additional grants on Tuesday: The Court also granted review on Tuesday of the question of whether federal labor law bars a state from forbidding a company that receives state funds from using any of those funds to speak out on issues in bargaining with a labor union. The US Solicitor General, asked by the government for its views on the case, urged that review be granted. At least 16 states have laws or are considering laws like the one in California at issue in the case. The Court also said on Tuesday that it will hear an appeal by Alabama's governor, Bob Riley, in a voting rights case -- but will not necessarily decide the merits of the appeal. The Court postponed the question of its jurisdiction until its hearing on the case of Riley v Kennedy, et al. That means the Justices will, indeed, hear oral argument, but will focus part of that argument on whether the case is properly before them. The other side in the case contended in its response that the state officials waited too long to file their appeal, thus depriving the Court of jurisdiction. The merits issue raised by the governor is whether rulings by state Supreme Courts on the meaning of state or local election law do bring about the kind of changes in voting rights that must first get federal clearance before going into effect -- for those states and local jurisdictions that are covered by the pre-clearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act's Section 5 These other two cases, like Heller, are likely to be scheduled for argument in the March sitting that begins on Mar 17. Of course if it is considered a collective right then all the other rights will have to be considered collective as well (such as the 1st Amend, etc). After all the Founding Fathers were all about the individual .............. and of course a friend to the indissoluble union of these States. This is the only chosen spot of liberty-this the only republic on earth." If the Supreme Court Justises know history, and I bet they do, the good guys have won again! I get the feeling, based on the question presented for argument, that the Court is disinterested in that nuance and is going for a home run ruling, but still ... It seems to refer more generally to a principle-a state (nation, republic, any other synonym you'd like to put here for clarity) free from tyranny, rather than a State needing to maintain its own militia. In that sense, it seems that whatever the amendment means, it has to apply to the entire nation, regardless of whether DC is a "State." No one would argue the right of the people to petition the government for redress of grievances applies to state officials but not to individuals acting on their own. Similarly, the rights to general free speech, religion, privacy and so on, rights reserved to "the people" are held not to be rights of state governments against the federal, but rights of the people against the nation. However, with the government attempting to exert even more control; We need to quit watching anerican idol' and begin to pay attention to...
Cache (58 bytes)
nytimes.com
The New York Times On The Web News Newspaper Current Event