Source: https://joshblogs.wordpress.com/category/articles/privileges-or-immunities-articles/
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 02:49:20+00:00

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Barnett v. Kerr on McDonald v. Chicago. A fun little tussle is brewing on Volokh today.
A fun little tussle is brewing on Volokh today.
Professor Kerr made his predictions for McDonald (my thoughts here), Professor Bernstein made his predictions (my thought here), and now Professor Barnett has opined.
I am expecting Professor Kerr to reply shortly, but Barnett I think has the better argument. As Barnett points out, 4 Justices had to request that the Privileges or Immunities reference should exist in the Question Presented. On Kerr’s breakdown, only one Justice seems interested. This just doesn’t jive.
With the Supreme Court, always expect the unexpected.
I had a feeling my post predicting the votes on the Privileges and Immunity argument in McDonald v. City of Chicago might draw a disapproving response from Randy, and I see it did. Based on past experience, I gather Randy’s questions directed to me are rhetorical questions designed to defend Randy’s view of the Constitution, not ones asking for my response. But I did want to open a comment thread on the issue in case our commenters wanted to weigh in.
He posted an open thread, which should yield some interesting debate.
I predict that, every time I or another VC blogger posts with closed comments on a subject that Orin finds interesting, he will post something short with open comments soon thereafter. We will see how this prediction holds in the future.
At Volokh, Orin Kerr gazes into his crystal ball to predict how the Supreme Court will respond to Gura’s arguments regarding the Second Amendment and the Privileges or Immunities Clause.
Kennedy is not an originalist, and will incorporate through Due Process.
Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor will view Gura breif as attempt to rehabilitate Lochner, and won’t buy it.
In an article I co-authored with Ilya Shapiro fortchoming in the Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy, titled Opening Pandora’s Box? Privileges or Immunities, The Constitution in 2020, and Properly Incorporating the Second Amendment we deal with a lot of these points, so I will try to summarize the argument here (we will be posting a PDF of the article later this week).
First, I think Orin presents a binary choice; incorporate through Due Process OR incorporate through privileges or immunities. The question presented asked about both routes of incorporation. Neither path is by necessity mutually exclusive. As Gura’s brief makes clear, the Court could incorporate through the Due Process Clause, and alternatively recognize that the right to keep and bear arms is also among the Privileges or Immunities of Citizenship. The Court need not displace 100 years of substantive due process jurisprudence with this single case. And from a practical perspective, basically the entire Bill of Rights has been incorporated. So, unless some people start clamoring about states quartering troops in theirs homes, this would be a one time deal. Such a holding would do little to upset the apple cart, or as we put it, open Pandora’s Box.
Second, I think Orin over-simplifies Scalia’s views on originalism and stare decisis. Our article shows that Scalia, while on the Supreme Court, has never voted in favor of a substantive due process incorporation. The last such case was in 1982. Can Scalia really cite the doctrine that he excoriated in Lawrence, Casey, and elsewhere based solely on reliance interests? It is no secret Scalia likes guns, and he wants to incorporate the 2nd Amendment. But he does not want to enlarge substantive due process. Is he stuck between a rock and a substantively hard place? The Privileges or Immunities Clause provides an alternative method for Scalia. He could write a classic originalist opinion tracing the right to bear arms during Reconstruction, and find that it applies to the State.
Third, the Court does not need to rehabilitate Lochner (another shameless plug for David Bernstein’s forthcoming book). In fact, the Court can take a narrow view of Privileges or Immunities solely as an incorporative methodology, and leave to a later day the protection of substantive rights. But this possibility raises another issue. While Orin is quite right to say the liberal Justices would be afraid to bring back Lochner, in a different case, the Justices may see the Privileges or Immunities Clause as a means to constitutionalize certain positive rights (welfare, education, health care, etc.). There is a growing body of literature, springing from the Constitution in 2020 project, that aims to use P/I as a means to elevate positive social rights to constitutional rights.
So, while Justice Breyer may not be willing to recognize the right to keep and bear arms as a Privilege or Immunity, the Court in a few years, with a much different composition, may be willing to recognize a constitutional right to health care, for example. While these types of arguments failed under due process and equal protection, privileges or immunities jurisprudence will be written on a clean slate.
For these reasons, and others mentioned in our article, we ask the Court not to punt on P/I for future generations, but rather to assert an originalist jurisprudence; namely, adopt the Washington v. Glucksberg test. By looking at only those rights deeply rooted in our nation’s history, the Court can find the right to keep and bear arms is such a right, and thus incorporate it to the state.
The NRA seeks incorporation under the Privileges or Immunities as an alternate ground: If the Court does not decide this case in favor of Petitioners on selective incorporation grounds, then the Court should find that the right to keep and bear arms is one of the privileges and immunities of national citizenship protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. See U.S. Const., amend. XIV (“No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States”).
Respondents in Support of Petitioners do not believe it is necessary to revisit the entire analytical framework the Court has developed for the Privileges and Immunities Clause, under which that Clause protects only rights connected to national citizenship, in order to recognize that the right to keep and bear arms is protected.
But, in the alternative, the NRA seeks for the Court to reconsider Slaughter-House.
For the reasons given at greater length in the brief of Petitioners, it is time for this Court to depart from the The Slaughter-House Cases and recognize the incorporation of the Bill of Rights, or at a Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges and Immunities Clause. Even if this Court finds it unnecessary to hold that the entire Bill of Rights is so incorporated, it would be faithful to the original understanding to hold that the Second Amendment is incorporated.
Because the NRA is a Party in Support of Petitioners, they file earlier than the 11/23 deadline for amici (H/T Ilya Shapiro for the deadline clear up).
Reflecting the lawyers’ view that their best chance is to rely upon the privileges clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, only seven pages of their 73-page brief are devoted to another provision of that Amendment: the Due Process Clause.
In a bold thrust, the attorneys for the challengers to Chicago’s strict handgun ban asked the Court to strike down three of its prior rulings: the Slaughterhouse Cases in 1873 — the ruling that made the privileges clause a nullity — and two decisions limiting the Second Amendment to a restriction only on federal laws: U.S. v. Cruikshank in 1876 and Presser v. Illinois in 1886. “Faced with a clear conflict between precedent and the Constitution, this Court should uphold the Constitution,” the brief argued.
I just skimmed the brief, and I am very, very impressed by Gura’s approach. As Ilya Shapiro and I discuss at great length in our forthcoming article, titled Opening Pandora’s Box? Privileges or Immunities, The Constitution in 2020, and Properly Incorporating the Second Amendment, the Privileges or Immunities Clause is a vastly superior means for incorporating the Second Amendment.
I’ll blog about this some more later.
I am pleased to post on SSRN an article that Ilya Shapiro and I have been working on for some time, titled Opening Pandora’s Box? Privileges or Immunities, The Constitution in 2020, and Properly Incorporating the Second Amendment.
This article will be published in Volume 8 of the Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy. The article will be published in January 2010, right in time for oral arguments in McDonald v. Chicago.
The purpose of this article is to provide a roadmap to welcome the Privileges or Immunities Clause back into our modern constitutional jurisprudence. The Slaughter-House Cases “sapped the [Privileges or Immunities Clause] of any meaning” but the Supreme Court now has the opportunity correct this mistake. Heeding Justice Thomas’s call, we “endeavor to understand what the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment thought” the Privileges or Immunities Clause meant, and seek to restore that original meaning. This framework ensures that the Privileges or Immunities Clause is not manipulated to constitutionalize certain modern “rights” that lack deep roots in our nation’s history and traditions. No, the Constitution cannot be properly read to protect positive rights. Pandora’s box will thus remain sealed.
This article proceeds as follows: In Part I, we discuss the history of the Privileges or Immunities Clause starting with the Articles of Confederation and continuing through the Clause’s untimely demise with the Slaughter-House Cases, its re-emergence in legal scholarship, and its potential rebirth in Supreme Court jurisprudence. In Part II, we discuss the meaning of the Second Amendment as it relates to the states by considering District of Columbia v. Heller and subsequent litigation.
In Part III, we explore the Progressive vision of the Privileges or Immunities Clause as it fits into the “Constitution in 2020” paradigm. This progressive model recognizes rights according to national and international consensus, evolving standards, and the enactment of so-called landmark legislation. We show why privileges or immunities serves as the desired weapon of choice to achieve the “Constitution in 2020” by way of its superiority over Substantive Due Process and Equal Protection. Through the Privileges or Immunities Clause, progressives seek to reconceptualize the provision of education, health care, welfare, and other positive entitlements as inviolable constitutional rights. Thus, Pandora’s Box is cracked ajar, with all manner of governmental guarantees and policy preferences spewing forth.
In Part IV, we contend that the Second Amendment could be incorporated through the Due Process Clause, though this approach is historically deficient. In light of Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion in Heller, and applying modern selective incorporation jurisprudence, the Court is likely to find that the Second Amendment is “necessary to an Anglo-American regime of ordered liberty” and should thus be extend to the states.
In Part V, we show that, instead of dutifully treating the Second Amendment as it has almost all the other parts of the Bill of Rights, the Court should find the underlying rights to be among the privileges and immunities directly protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Accordingly, this article is not so much concerned with how the Second Amendment should be incorporated but instead provides the Court a roadmap to protecting the right to keep and bear arms for defense of person and property through the Privileges or Immunities Clause. Indeed, the notion of “incorporation” was anachronistic at the time of the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification. Historical accounts of the ratification debates reveal that the Privileges or Immunities Clause was meant to protect both more and less than the Bill of Rights. Thus reconceptualized, the clause should be viewed not as a mechanical incorporator of the first eight amendments, but rather as a limitation of the power of the states to infringe certain liberties. In 1868, these liberties were referred to as privileges or immunities.
What are these privileges or immunities, and what relationship do they have to the Second Amendment? To resolve this query we answer Justice Thomas’s call in Saenz, and seek to “understand what the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment thought that it meant.” We propose extending the Glucksberg framework for recognizing substantive rights that are deeply rooted in our nation’s history and traditions to understand how privileges or immunities were understood in 1868. By applying the Glucksberg test and adapting Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain’s opinion in Nordyke v. King, we find that the right to bear arms for the defense of person and property—independent of its enumeration in the Second Amendment—was considered a privilege or immunity of citizenship in 1868.
Part VI concludes by echoing Justice Thomas and implores originalists not to shy away from the Privileges or Immunities Clause for fear that it will become the camel’s nose of positive rights into the constitutional tent. Instead, resurrecting the Privileges or Immunities clause can continue the process of aligning the original meaning of the Constitution with the protection of our most sacred liberties. This process will also eliminate the “current [state of] disarray” of our Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence. Failing to take control of the Privileges or Immunities narrative invites an alternative vision of the Fourteenth Amendment that further departs from the original meaning of the Constitution. Now is the time, and McDonald is the case, to advance an originalist vision of the Privileges or Immunities Clause. Only be correcting the historical record and claiming it for our own can we keep Pandora’s Box sealed.
A PDF of the article, and future commentary will be forthcoming on this Blog. Stay tuned!
On September 30, 2009, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in the case of McDonald v. City of Chicago on the question of whether the the Due Process Clause or the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment makes the Second Amendment applicable to the States and invalidates Chicago’s ordinance prohibiting the possession of handguns in the home.
To discuss the Privileges or Immunities question, we have Institute for Justice Senior Attorney Clark Neily and Loyola Law School Professor Kurt Lash. George Mason University School of Law Professor Nelson Lund will moderate the discussion.
I am co-authoring an article with Ilya Shapiro from Cato on McDonald and Privileges or Immunities. A draft is forthcoming. It’s good. I promise.
Things keep getting worse and worse for Chicago. First, they lost Richard Epstein. They, they lost the Olympics. And because bad things come in threes, they will lose McDonald v. Chicago!
Chicago and Cook County residents aren’t the only ones about to get shocking tax news; the city is debuting a “tax whistle-blower” plan that could turn neighbor against neighbor in Chicago’s business community.
The folks at city hall will pay cash bounties to informants who turn in business tax cheats around the city. The reward would amount to some sort of percentage of the tax money that the city recovers.
“It’s just another way of bringing people into compliance,” Revenue Department spokesman Ed Walsh told the Sun-Times.
Laffer Curve. When you increase taxes, people find ways to evade taxes. When you crack down on people not paying taxes, taxpayers will exit. They may not go all the way to Galt’s Gulch, but perhaps they will visit a city more hospitable to liberty.
Local gun shop owners say they’re seeing an increase in the number of women shoppers right now. The reasons, they say, are many, including the downturn in the economy and violence on the street. According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, about 48 percent of people taking their first handgun seminars this year happen to be women. CBS 2’s Pamela Jones reports on the growing trend.
And soon, the right to keep and bear arms in Illinois will be Constitutionally protected.

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