The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times

Judge King: Gun Decision Unlikely to Affect Caseload

Lawyers across the country have already begun speculating about what Thursday’s Supreme Court decision that struck down the District’s gun ban will mean. But in the District, Rufus King III, chief judge of the D.C. Superior Court, says he doesn’t expect the decision to have much impact on the Superior Court's caseload.

King notes that if some people knowingly broke the law when a full-fledged ban was in place, it makes little sense to think they now would go through the trouble to file for gun licenses if the District’s government makes them available.

“The city is still going to want to regulate guns on the street, so they will come up with a law that determines who can get a license and where and when you can have one. That all has to be sorted out,” King says. “The courts don’t have any role in choosing that policy. My role is to interpret and follow the law. Anything other than that is beyond my pay grade.”

Agreeing on Originalism

Lots of people are commenting on D.C. v. Heller. John Eastman, the dean of Chapman University School of Law in in Anaheim, Calif., focused on the decision’s methodology.

According to his e-mailed statement:

“One of the most interesting aspects of the Heller decision, in my view, has nothing to do with the Second Amendment but with the Court’s methodology. Every one of the Justices — the five who joined Justice Scalia’s majority opinion, and the 4 who joined Justice Stevens’ dissenting opinion, agreed that the original understanding of the Amendment was dispositive. They just disagreed on what the original understanding was. This stands in stark contrast to the Louisiana “Death Penalty for Rape” decision handed down [Wednesday], in which Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, said that the 8th Amendment of the Constitution does not turn on the original understanding but rather on the Court’s own view of evolving standards of decency.”

Morning Wrap

Aftermath: Thursday's D.C. v. Heller decision emboldened pro-gun rights groups to challenge Chicago's handgun ban by filing a suit only hours after the Supreme Court ruled, The Associated Press reports via the Chicago Tribune. The New York Times provides this analysis.

E-mail at Work: A fired employee at a finance company is suing his former employer because he found out executives there accessed his personal Yahoo e-mail account after he had left the company, The New York Times reports. Observers say the case raises novel issues for electronic discovery and privacy rights.

Anti-trust Bust: Four airlines have agreed to pay more than $500 million to settle charges they conspired to drive up cargo shipping prices, according to The Associated Press. FBI and Justice Department officials say the agreement with Air France-KLM, Cathay Pacific Airways, Martinair Holland and SAS Cargo Group is the one of the largest antitrust settlements in U.S. history.

Victory: A federal judge on Thursday sided with Facebook over its long-running dispute with one-time rival ConnectU in an intellectual property case, The Recorder reports via Law.com. The judge ruled Facebook can enforce a February settlement reached with ConnectU, which had accused Facebook's founder of stealing its secrets.

Malpractice Suit: Celanese Corp., a former client of Kaye Scholer, is suing the New York firm claiming it fouled up discovery of documents that led to Celanese's $107 million antitrust settlement, The New York Law Journal reports via Law.com.

DOJ Reacts to Gun Case

The Department of Justice is "pleased" that the Supreme Court found an individual right to possess firearms in D.C. v. Heller, says Brian Roehrkasse, director of public affairs, in a press release.

Roehrkasse adds, however, that the department is also pleased that the ruling recognizes that the individual right is not unlimited, that prohibitions on felons carrying firearms are not in doubt, that machine guns are not protected under the Second Amendment, and that laws forbidding guns in government buildings are still permissible.

The Justice Department will "continue to defend vigorously" the constitutionality of all existing federal firearms laws.

Initial Shots Over Heller

Today’s Supreme Court ruling on the Second Amendment will be sparking a lot of discussion in coming days. Here are some more initial reactions:

The Volokh Conspiracy saw such an influx of traffic that its server was overwhelmed. But when the cybersmoke cleared, Orin Kerr thinks that Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion was “relatively narrow” in leaving a lot for another day. Jim Lindgren finds both Scalia’s opinion and Justice John Paul Stevens’ dissent to be “quite scholarly.” And Eugene Volokh looked at the voting breakdown and says, “There’s no substitute for winning elections.”

The D.C. government is disappointed. Mayor Adrian Fenty emphasized that the D.C. gun laws remain in effect at the moment, but “I have directed the Metropolitan Police Department to implement an orderly process for allowing qualified citizens to register handguns for lawful possession in their homes.”

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence fears the decision will “most likely embolden criminal defendants, and ideological extremists, to file new legal attacks on existing gun laws.”

Wayne LaPierre, president of the National Rifle Association, says, “The Second Amendment as an individual right now becomes a real permanent part of American Constitutional law.”

Linda Singer Weighs in on D.C. v. Heller

Following the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in D.C. v. Heller, which struck down D.C.'s ban on handguns, Linda Singer, the former attorney general for the District of Columbia, has authored a reaction to the decision.

Singer's piece can be found over at LegalTimes.com.

D.C. vs. Heller

You can read the court's opinion in the gun case at the Supreme Court's Web site. Click here.

Supreme Court: Scalia and Stevens Duke It Out

It was an extraordinary 23-minute-long scene at the Supreme Court this morning as Justice Antonin Scalia read from his majority opinion in D.C. v. Heller and then Justice John Paul Stevens read from his unusually pointed dissent. Both cast aspersions on each other's interpretation of the Second Amendment and relevant precedents, and spectators were left with a lot of reading to do to determine what the justices actually decided. The Court had clearly declared an individual right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment; Scalia said it could be limited, even rattling off the kinds of regulations that might be acceptable. But Stevens, in dissent, seemed to say that the majority's ruling was broader than Scalia was making it out to be.

"Do not accept the summary you have just heard," Stevens said at one point. Earlier, Scalia told spectators they had to slog through 154 pages of opinions to really understand the Court's position. And Scalia said it was "particularly wrongheaded" for dissenters to rely on United States v. Miller, the 1939 case that marked the last time the high court ruled on the Second Amendment.

When Scalia was reading his own opinion Stevens occasionally shook his head in disbelief. And Stevens jousted back. With emphasis on the word "genuine," Stevens said that "a genuine judicial conservative" would not have inserted the Court into the "political thicket" of the gun rights debate as Scalia had done.

Through it all, the rest of the Court seemed either calm or exhausted on this, the final session of the Court's term before it adjourned for the summer. Wakefulness escaped Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg repeatedly throughout the Scalia-Stevens confrontation, and Justices Stephen Breyer and David Souter seemed to be struggling to stay awake at times as well. In fact Stevens, age 88, seemed to be the only dissenter with any spark or vigor. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. smiled broadly as he opened the session, and Justce Clarence Thomas, who often seems bored or disengaged on the bench, seemed unusually animated. At the end of the session Roberts offered the standard thanks for the "superb work" of the Court staff and the "professionalism" of the Supreme Court bar.

And then everyone scrambled to read the hefty opinion. On the Court's ground floor Alan Gura, the lawyer who took on the D.C. gun ordinance and won, was smiling as he waited for a copy of the ruling. "It sounds good — what we were hoping for," said Gura. But before going further, Gura said he wanted to read the whole decision. More on the decision later at LegalTimes.com.

Maryland Law School Dean Stepping Down

Karen Rothenberg announced Wednesday that next year she will be stepping down as dean of the University of Maryland School of Law. When she leaves next June, she will have served 10 years at the school's helm.

Rothenberg, the first woman to serve as the school's dean, says she wants to take the “Seinfeld approach” and go out while the school is on top. She points to the school's success in raising $28 million and in creating a new program on ethics, moral formation, and leadership development.

“I thought about staying around until [2012], but I decided that was too long,” Rothenberg says. “I spoke to a number of deans I know, and they all said 10 years was a good number to serve as dean. I have very mixed emotions, but I feel 10 years is not too long, but long enough.”

After a sabbatical, Rothenberg plans to return to teaching and research at the law school.

D.C. Gun Ban Struck Down

The Supreme Court has found that D.C.'s strict ban against possession of handguns is unconstitutional. The ruling was 5-4, with Justice Antonin Scalia writing the opinion for the majority. We'll have more on the ruling in D.C. v. Heller on the BLT and LegalTimes.com.