Question for the legal eagles:
If the gun control advocates don’t like the way this is going...if by the overall tone they conclude the decision would not be in their favor, and they don’t want a decision supporting individual rkba...can they withdraw?
Not a legal eagle but as I understand it, it’s FAR too late for withdraw and it was the moment that Heller appealed as well.
Mike
Not a legal eagle, but I think that once SCOTUS has it and arguments are heard the dice are thrown neither party can withdraw.
Scalia seems to mention the Scots often:
Although the more cautious Jacobites did not wish to take part in the Prince's enterprise, the Government has been at pains to keep them under restraint, since three-quarters of the whole nation is still attached to the House of Stuart. And so two laws, both of great importance, have been passed. One is to abolish the jurisdictions of the nobility and free their vassals from the services which they owe to them in accordance with the traditional ways of the Kingdom. The other is to disarm all Highlanders without exception, and to force them to change their dress. The purpose of the first of these laws is to deprive the nobility of their most cherished rights; of the second to deprive the whole nation of a militia which until now has been its greatest safeguard. The Scots are well aware of the purpose and the consequences of these laws. Those who have recently come across assure us that they have fired everyone with indignation and that even the Whigs look on them as manifest breaches of the Treaty of Union with England.
“....can they withdraw?”
No. Both then, and all cases heard thereafter, are bound to the legal precedent set by the decision. Only in certain instances can an amendment to the Constitution, a law enacted by Congress, or a USSC’s overturn reverse it - the latter being less likely since a majority of all cases are based upon precedents and any challenge to this in particular would most likely be resolved long before ever reaching a USSC appeals docket.
This ruling has FAR REACHING implications. Read Lincoln’s First Inaugural:
http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres31.html
“I do not forget the position assumed by some that constitutional questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court, nor do I deny that such decisions must be binding in any case upon the parties to a suit as to the object of that suit, while they are also entitled to very high respect and consideration in all parallel cases by all other departments of the Government. And while it is obviously possible that such decision may be erroneous in any given case, still the evil effect following it, being limited to that particular case, with the chance that it may be overruled and never become a precedent for other cases, can better be borne than could the evils of a different practice. At the same time, the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal. Nor is there in this view any assault upon the court or the judges. It is a duty from which they may not shrink to decide cases properly brought before them, and it is no fault of theirs if others seek to turn their decisions to political purposes.”