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On Nov. 10, in Spell v. Edwards, a Louisiana federal district court dismissed a suit by megachurch pastor Tony Spell challenging the state's COVID-19 limits on worship services. Plaintiff filed an Emergency Application for an Injunction Pending Appeal with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, contending: This case presents a threshold question that other applicants did not present to this Court in prior religious liberty challenges: Whether the First Amendment places the decision of whether to assemble solely within the jurisdiction of the Church and not the State.

Although Puerto Rico is on its way to holding a status plebiscite over the summer and the governing New Progressive Party has petitioned Congress for Puerto Rico’s admission as a state, some argue the island will have a higher chance of becoming a state if U.S. lawmakers were to declare Puerto Rico an incorporated territory en route to statehood. Right now, the dominant argument among all sectors is that Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory, but pro-statehood lawyer Gregorio Igartúa, who has taken several cases to the courts that seek to grant more rights to Puerto Ricans living in Puerto...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-v1Ta_il94&feature=youtu.be

To gaze upon the world of American corporations is to see a sunny place of terrific profits and princely bonuses. American businesses reported that third-quarter profits in 2010 rose at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion, the steepest annual surge since officials began tracking such matters 60 years ago. It was the seventh consecutive quarter in which corporate profits climbed. Staring at such balance sheets, you might almost forget that much of the nation lives under slate-gray fiscal skies, a place of 9.4 percent unemployment and record levels of foreclosures and indebtedness. And therein lies the enduring mystery of this...

On Monday morning, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the case of McDonald v Chicago, a follow-on case to the Heller case in which the Court ruled that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual, not a collective, right. Following Heller, Chicago and a few other localities argued that since that case had been about the District of Columbia's ban, it was not clear that the Court's ruling applied to states and other non-federal territory. With its 5-4 decision in McDonald, the Court says that the right applies everywhere in the U.S., that the right...

The Supreme Court granted certiorari in the case of McDonald v. Chicago to resolve the question of Second Amendment incorporation, setting the stage for a second seminal Second Amendment ruling in as many years. Today, we received that long-anticipated holding. As expected, the opinion, written by Justice Alito, holds that the Second Amendment DOES in fact, incorporate against the states through the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment.

In reviewing the oral-argument transcript for the McDonald v. Chicago case, I can see now why some was so hard to follow in the courtroom. Aside from bad audio in the room during parts, much of the dialog depended on knowing other cases everyone referred to. If you didn't know the case, you couldn't tell what they were talking about. The Justices didn't miss a beat. I missed several. Also, a lot of the dialog was in sentence fragments, disjointed, poorly thought out, and hard or impossible to assemble meaningfully. In order to understand the analysis below, you need to...

I recently blogged about an interesting op-ed in which Ken Klukowski and Ken Blackwell of the American Civil Rights Union argue that the Supreme Court need not overturn The Slaughter-House Cases while “incorporating” the right to bear arms against the states. (Josh Blackman fisked the article in more depth here.) This piece was essentially a distillation of the ACRU’s amicus brief in McDonald v. City of Chicago, which ultimately argues, like Cato’s brief, that Chicago’s gun ban is unconstitutional. It has come to my attention, however, that I mischaracterized one aspect of the Kens’ op-ed (sorry about that): while they...

Gun Control: The Supreme Court agrees to decide if the Second Amendment applies to all of us, or just Washington, D.C. Why would the Founders put in the Bill of Rights something applying only to a federal enclave? In a 5-4 decision last year written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court overturned a draconian District of Columbia gun ban enacted 32 years ago that barred private ownership of handguns at all. Scalia wrote that an individual's right to bear arms is supported by "the historical narrative" both before and after the Second Amendment was adopted. The court ruled that...

Even as you are reading this, the Second Amendment offers you no protection whatsoever from state gun laws! But today, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case of McDonald v. Chicago and we may soon finally see the Second Amendment take its rightful place as a protection for ALL Americans!

En banc arguments in a controversial gun rights case were animated Thursday, but don't be surprised if the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sits on this one for awhile. A federal appellate court in Chicago said in June that the Second Amendment should not restrict state gun control laws until the Supreme Court rules that the right binds the states. The high court is scheduled to make up its mind next week about whether to grant cert. "That may well give us an answer, and there would be no need for us to decide this case," 9th Circuit Judge...

Recently confirmed by the Senate, academic Cass Sunstein from Harvard law School is now the Obama Administration's "regulatory czar." Gun Owners of America has warned: Expect problems! . . . [But] in 2007 Professor Sunstein gave a fascinating lecture in which . . . [n]ot only does Sunstein note at time hack 37:20 that gun control advocates' claims that gun control contributes fantastically to public safety "appears not to be sufficiently supported in social science," but more importantly, at the end of his lecture, he states at time hack 57:47: "And here's a point for the Second Amendment advocates, a...

Federal appeals courts hearing gun rights cases after the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment ruling last year in District of Columbia v. Heller are confronting an old issue: whether the amendment applies to restrict state and local laws under the incorporation doctrine. Heller found that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to own a gun in the District of Columbia, a federal enclave. New suits challenging state and local laws have resulted in a split. Two federal appeals courts refused to apply the Second Amendment to local laws without express Supreme Court authorization. A third disagreed. University of Texas law...

In the practice of Zen Buddhism, a koan is a statement that is intentionally insoluble to the rational mind, a tool by which to master life’s seemingly paradoxical events. Yet the Japanese Zen masters have nothing on us red-blooded Americans, who for over a century have become unconsciously adept at sustaining such conflicts, easily accepting contradictory interpretations of Constitutional Law, between the original scope of the Bill of Rights and that since the Fourteenth Amendment. As Madison elaborated in Federalist 45, the Constitution for the United States of America was sold as a list of strictly limited powers; leaving the...

BELLEVUE, WA – Arguing that the Supreme Court opened the door toward incorporation of the Second Amendment in its landmark ruling in the Heller case, the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) has filed an amicus brief in the long-running case of Nordyke v. King, a challenge to the gun show ban in California’s Alameda County. Russell Allen Nordyke had been fighting the Alameda County gun show ban on First Amendment grounds, but a ruling in the case by a district court judge opened up a Second Amendment issue. This is a critical issue for all Americans in the wake of the...

In 1991, the Supreme Court of the United States considered this question: Do the dancers at the Kitty Kat Lounge in South Bend, Indiana, have a First Amendment right to perform totally nude, or can they be forced under the state's public indecency law to wear pasties and G-strings? The CHIEF JUSTICE, joined by JUSTICE O'CONNOR and JUSTICE KENNEDY, concluded that the enforcement of Indiana's public indecency law to prevent totally nude dancing does not violate the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of expression. Pp. 565-572. (...) JUSTICE SCALIA concluded that the statute - as a general law regulating conduct...