Master Doug Huffman
Banned
imported post
Fourteenth Amendment background, 'privileges or immunities', 'due process', The Slaughterhouse Cases
http://reason.com/archives/2010/03/04/guns-for-all-privileges-and-im
Fourteenth Amendment background, 'privileges or immunities', 'due process', The Slaughterhouse Cases
http://reason.com/archives/2010/03/04/guns-for-all-privileges-and-im
http://reason.com/archives/2010/03/04/guns-for-all-privileges-and-im [EXCERPT]
Justice Antonin Scalia delivered the big laugh line of the hour at Tuesday’s Supreme Court hearings in McDonald v. Chicago. That case’s outcome will decide whether the Second Amendment rights vindicated in 2008’s D.C. v. Heller apply to states and localities. Scalia amused the crowd by asking a question that has perplexed some legal scholars and gun activists both for and against McDonald lawyer Alan Gura’s general goal of applying Second Amendment protections to all levels of American government.
To get the joke, such as it was, you first need the background about what was at stake. The Bill of Rights was originally interpreted to bind only the federal government. The framers of the 14th Amendment intended to change that, and bind the states as well in respecting Americans’ rights. This was in 1868, when recently freed slaves had their rights to work, own property, and bear arms widely abused and unprotected by state and local governments.
The history of the 14th Amendment's passage indicates that a certain part of the amendment was meant to bear the interpretive burden of applying—“incorporating” in the legal lingo—the Bill of Rights (and other restrictions on government power) to the states. That was the Privileges or Immunities Clause: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.”
Since a controversial 1873 Supreme Court decision in a set of cases regarding a slaughterhouse monopoly in Louisiana, known as the Slaughterhouse Cases, the Privileges or Immunities Clause has been pretty much interpreted out of existence. The Supreme Court has instead used the vaguer and less textually sensible “due process of law" provision of the same amendment to incorporate certain rights against the states. Using that tool, the Court over the past century has already incorporated most of the Bill of Rights on the states, and some unenumerated rights as well. Gura elected to reverse this trend by arguing for incorporation of the Second Amendment on privileges or immunities grounds.[/EXCERPT]