however, the main problem is that the dope who drafted the second amendment wrote something terribly unclear. i have very little insight into what the guy who wrote it meant; what i do know is that, even if the majority managed to divine it correctly, the unfortunate effect is that gun laws that have contributed to the reduction in violence in inner cities in the past twenty or so years will now be struck. i think local legislatures should be allowed to determine what reasonable controls on gun possession and ownership are appropriate for their localities. the same controls that are reasonable in chicago are not the same as in lubbock.

as for the court as a whole, what’s there to say? it’s a generally conservative court. the next president is likely to make multiple appointments, more likely replacing some so-called liberals than the so-called conservatives.

as for its efficacy, they don’t hear enough cases. i’ve got crap i have to deal with that has one rule in some circuits and another one in others. and they won’t take a case which would resolve it. and the court (and the lower courts, as well) has been politcized to an inordinate degree. the ridiculousness of the confirmation process has horrible effects on the legal system. it boils down to far less about fitness to sit than about the judges’ views. unfortunately, the judges at all levels of the federal judiciary hear cases that are, a vast, vast majority of the time, not about these hot-button issues (though i obviously understand why those attract such attention). so then we’ve got backlogs at all levels of the federal judiciary. the two parties really need to work out a deal to solve the vacancies – but i’ve been saying that one for years.

Just like me!

I find it pretty ironic that the conserative court, whose political appointers so often deride an “activist judiciary”, found the time to rule on a municipal law that has reduced violence in one of the most stricken urban areas in the country.

Natural rights is a big part of American political theory. If you are really bored you could read some Hobbes, and then procede to Locke and Rousseau and then onto the Federalist papers.

This is a pretty good discussion for Sunday night on a baseball board. FWIW, I don’t think there is much to most natural rights jurisprudence. The problem with natural rights (and lots of other good sounding but vague doctrines like “original intent” and “states rights”) is that, because they don’t provide any kind of rigorous definition or parameters, they almost invariably become a rhetorical device to justify whatever the author thinks should happen anyway. Scalia is a fairly typical conservative in the results that he finds desirable. He uses his considerable intellect to construct clever arguments to justify those results but the fact is, he thinks that guns should be readily available so he says “natural rights” support that result (with an side helping of “original intent”) thrown in. A typical liberal justice (is there such a thing anymore?) might just as easily argue that the Lockean natural right of men to to combine in self-governing bodies and make their own laws gives polities the right to regulate arms in their communities. Similarly, they can argue, from the “well-ordered militia” text of the Second Amendment and from various 18th Century sources, that the original intent of the framers was to invest collective bodies, not individuals, with the right of self-defense. Both sides can invoke “natural rights” and “original intent” to support their position and it leads to a stalemate.

As a decent rule of thumb, I don’t think any supposedly principled doctrine is worth much unless it compels its adherents to accept some results that they find undesirable. For example, I believe in the rule of law and and am willing to accept that the operation of that rule will occasionally lead to results that I consider unjust. By contrast, supporters of “states rights” always seem perfectly willing to accept overarching Federal legislation when it supports their desired ends, such as the Fugitive Slave Act or the Defense of Marriage Act. Similarly, “natural rights” advocates hardly ever find such a right that leads anywhere other than where they want to go. I’m hardly a scholar, but has Scalia ever invoked natural rights to achieve a result he didn’t like?

Finally, I find it problematic that something as lofty and timeless as a natural right could be limited by the grungy act of line-drawing that we’re going to get into now. No one, not even Scalia or the NRA, thinks that the Second Amendment means citizens can have rocket launchers, land-mines or tactical nuclear weapons (even though you can make a very good argument that it is precisely those weapons a citizen would need to defend himself against an over-reaching government with a professional army). Some restrictions on arms are going to be Constitutional but where to draw that line is going to be an exercise in years of legislation, litigation and hair-splitting jurisprudence. Is someone really going to say that you have a natural right to CAR-15 carbine limited to semi-automatic operation but not the M-16 fully automatic upgrade? Or that you have a natural right to black-powder explosives but not to C-4? Nonsense – its a legislative exercise in line-drawing and the invocation of “natural rights” doesn’t do anything to help you find where to draw the line.

I’m going back over to Blog-a-Bull to propose implausible trade ideas