DC v. Heller is a great opinion to read for us Constitutional Law nerds though. Scalia really put the historical scholarship work in on that one digging up all that 1776 history. It is a very long and detailed treatise.
If you are a gun control fanatic, I could see where that one would rub you the wrong way, but it was a fantastic piece of legal scholarship.
It was a whole lot of motivated speculation about how some people were thinking hundreds of years ago and how they would interpret contemporary weapons. It is indistinguishable from a reddit post with fancier words. Scalia would have been happy to hear you think it's a fantastic piece of legal scholarship, though - it was his job to dress up his opinions in that way. I quite enjoyed this account of it: https://www.fivefourpod.com/episodes/dc-v-heller/
Heller was also the product of a decade of scholarship by liberals like Larry Tribe and Akhil Amar. The dudes who had just overthrown their government with muskets they had lying around the farm really intended for firearms ownership to be a private right. Least surprising thing ever.
The opinion of the court in Heller seems pretty explicit about not establishing a private right for citizens to bear military weapons (just sweep the whole opinion for the word "military"; it comes up multiple times.)
Military weapons weren’t at issue in Heller, and anything it says about them is dicta. My point is that the historical circumstances of militias armed with weapons they had lying around confirms Heller’s holding that the right conferred by the 2A is a private right.
The regulations that allowed for private warships and artillery?
Those gun control regulations?
If there are actual gun control regulations from the post-revolutionary period, I'm sure that they'll be used to defend NY's and CA's modern regulations soon.
> Scalia really put the historical scholarship work in on that one
I'm afraid not, and not by a mile. He based his decision on his unfounded and unsupportable belief that most Americans believed that self-defense was inclusive to the 2nd, based on nothing but what he thought, and he was wrong, because most Americans are not idiots, but even if he was right (which he definitely was not), the Supreme Court is not and not supposed to be a democratic institution swayed by the whims of alleged popular opinion.
In considering the 2nd Amendment, the Framers debated self-defense and intentionally left it out of the Amendment. Scalia knew this, being a strict Constitutionalist, probably personally reviewed the minutes of the Constitutional Congresses where it is very clear the Framers did not want self-defense inclusive to the 2nd. They did not want an armed citizenry. The 2nd only concerns militia and tyranny. The proper exercise of the 2nd looks exactly like Black Panthers surrounding the Alameda County Courthouse in Oakland, California in 1968. It does not look anything like Florida (and elsewhere) Stand Your Ground nonsense, nor Texans shooting kids in the back.
What Scalia did was criminal, bastardizing the 2nd, changing it from a selfless right to stand against tyranny into a selfish right to protect self and property. Self-defense is far more fundamental than the Bill of Rights and is superfluous there. If the right of self-defense comes from any document, it would be one far, far older than the Constitution. But it's really a natural right, older than writing, older than language. Self-defense transcends our species and is a right of all living things. The Bill of Rights does not give us rights we already have and have had since long before we even evolved into humans.
And self-defense was completely skew and unrelated to the issues of DC v. Heller. That portion of DC v. Heller will be struck down, eventually, as soon as its challenged under a balanced court, because Scalia stepped way, way beyond the bounds of the mandate of the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution, instead literally adding meaning that was never there before, sidestepping the legal methods of amending the Constitution aka 2/3rds majority of both houses of Congress or state legislatures.
Scalia vandalized, gutted and diluted the 2nd Amendment. Prior to 2008, the 2nd was noble and great. After DC v Heller, it is worthless. DC v. Heller is just another assault on the Constitution, just like the suspensions of habeas and the 5th Amendment.
Gun owners don't need the 2nd Amendment. Hunters never did. The 10th Amendment was always where (nearly all) gun owners' gun rights derived and still do, through legislation by the States, as the Framers intended, abiding by the first 3 words of the 2nd Amendment, put right up front to underscore their importance, and that every gun owner loves to ignore or lie about their clear and literal meaning. The 2nd limits itself and allows the 10th to legally cement what has become a dirty word: regulation. "Shall not be infringed" was placed last, making it less important than and subject to regulation. And commas are important, and it is easier to understand the 2nd removing the clauses between them:
A well-regulated Militia shall not be infringed.
The "right of the people to keep and bear Arms" is "a well-regulated Militia and necessary to the security of a free State." Before Heller, and after that portion is struck down when the Court is inevitably balanced again, no personal right to bear arms existed nor will exist, respectively, except what the States grant under the 10th Amendment.
May I ask you what you think about Blackmun’s opinion in Roe v. Wade’s case? Was it correctly argued as a matter of constitutional law and historical practice?
It is not easy to understand, but I think Blackmun got it right. But the Court should have said more in establishing Constitutional privacy. It is undeniable that the right to privacy lives in the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 9th Amendments. What is easy to see is that Dobbs v. Jackson not only violates the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, it is also an extremely rare case of blatantly violating the 9th Amendment.
What is worse is the Court ignoring the fact that at least one of its members is illegitimate and Merrick Garland should have been seated. Barrett is not the only untrustworthy Justice that claimed to support women's rights to choose in order to be confirmed and then apparently couldn't break her word fast enough (we had such high hopes, but it turns out she's as ineffective and as big a fruitcake as Thomas). Alito and Roberts are the surprise. Just what are they thinking? I'd like to know how they think history is going to remember them for making such an impotent and (expectedly) short lived ruling.
The Court also ignores the current state of the country for the last 20 years at least that conservatives are distinctly in the minority and likely will remain so indefinitely. They should not make decisions that are so painfully obviously unlikely to stand. Row v. Wade stood for very nearly half a century. Dobbs v. Jackson will be lucky to make it a decade and a half before it is either overturned or made irrelevant by Congress, either by law or a new Amendment.
Ignoring details, abortion is clearly wrong, but there are some things the government can not do, and saying anything about what a woman can or can't do with their body is one of them. The government is prohibited from doing so by the Constitution as it stood in 1789. Roe v. Wade should not have been necessary, but we have too many intellectually dishonest tyrants that must be put into submission through case law.
It is ironic that there are individuals refusing COVID vaccination, claiming the government has gone too far and has no right to mandate vaccination, crying their rights are being violated, yet by and large these are the same individuals that would have their government tell women they have no choice. It is ironic, but it is also absurd that a vaccination mandate is an intolerable infringement on privacy and the 4th Amendment while at the same time insisting on killing children for the sake of unborn fetuses.
Pro Life and Pro Gun movements go together, and they are each internally logically inconsistent, each reveal cognitive dissonance, and when both ideologies are held by the same individual that individual is necessarily a hypocrite, a twice cognitively dissonant hypocrite as well as a bully and a coward. The Pro Life control freak bullies say: we tell you what you can or can't do; The scared Pro Gun cowards say: don't tell us what we can or can't do. Ridiculously, their sworn political enemies are those that are tolerant of others, including them.
Okay, and can you name any decision by SCOTUS that was decided egregiously incorrectly in favor of liberal/progressives? And any decision by conservative SCOTUS that was decided correctly, to a detriment of liberal/progressive cause?
My point is that if your arguments and positions about matters or law always just so happen to align along partisan lines, why should anyone even pay any attention to the arguments long comments you write, when the conclusion is preordained anyway? Why should anyone even bother to answer to the Gish gallop of wrongheaded arguments, if no arguments would ever get to change your position?
Of course, you can prove me wrong, by pointing to any opinion of Court, written by Justice Scalia, that you think is correct, but most Democrat voters would prefer to have been decided differently. Can you?
> prove me wrong, by pointing to any opinion of Court, written by Justice Scalia, that you think is correct, but most Democrat voters would prefer to have been decided differently.
You're asking for a contradiction. If he had written any decisions correctly, no one would disagree with him. Scalia consistently wrote horrible decisions, but one stands out that is correct, Crawford v. Washington, 2004.
> If he had written any decisions correctly, no one would disagree with him.
This is absurd, and only a complete partisan could write something like this. There is absolutely no point in discussing anything with you, because you literally are unable to concede that your side can ever be wrong. This attitude is extremely corrosive to peaceful coexistence: when more people understand that for you, the only “correct” court decisions are the ones that go according to your preferences, why would they want continue to participate in the rule of law? The whole point here is to solve disagreements by appeal to shared rules and procedures. If you are unable to concede that rules and procedures can ever result in an outcome that is against your preferences, you’re effectively telling people that you do not care one damn about these. Why should then anyone else? This will cause the judiciary to devolve into pure partisanship, with some latin words sprinkled on top.
> The whole point here is to solve disagreements by appeal to shared rules and procedures.
Rules and procedures are merely for civility. Not sure where you get your pejoratives, but partisanship is a very good thing. Things only get better when individuals disagree. Without adversity nothing would ever change, nothing would ever improve, and there would be no such thing as technology. Sometimes disagreements can only be solved by democracy where the majority rules, not like the current State where the constantly shrinking conservative minority has somehow turned that on its head.
If you are a gun control fanatic, I could see where that one would rub you the wrong way, but it was a fantastic piece of legal scholarship.