Originally adopted on July 9, 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment grants citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” and states that “No State shall…deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Two different District Court judges ruled against the “good reason” requirement (one ruling was set aside due to a bit of a procedural morass), and those two cases were combined on appeal to the D.C. Circuit. In a 2-1 decision, a panel of the Court of Appeals struck the “good reason” rule down as unconstitutional.
However, the District can appeal this ruling back to the D.C. Circuit in order to have it reheard en banc. The case could also ultimately end up in front of the United States Supreme Court which, since its rulings in Heller (2008) and McDonald (2010), hasn’t seen fit to offer further guidance to lower courts on whether the 2nd Amendment applies outside the home.
With various federal courts coming to different conclusions on that question, this case represents a great opportunity to finally get a definitive answer from the high court.
To begin, it is very unfortunate that President Trump has chosen to elevate the crime problem in the way that he has because it reinforces the mistaken idea that the federal government “oversees” our criminal justice system. In fact, the Constitution says very little about federal criminal jurisdiction.
According to the constitutional text, piracy, treason, and counterfeiting are supposed to be the federal government’s concern, but not much else. The common law crimes of murder, rape, assault, and theft are to be handled by state and local governments.
President Trump may have good intentions, but his gut instincts in the area of criminal justice are terribly misguided. Criminal justice reformers will likely win some policy battles — especially at the state and local level, but the road ahead looks treacherous indeed.
The scholarly community has — with only rare exception — been either grudging or downright hostile to extending constitutional protection to commercial advertising. Most — although not all — scholars believe that protecting commercial speech trivializes what the First Amendment is truly about, reintroduces the threat to the smooth functioning of the regulatory system first presented by the specious and harmful pre-New Deal doctrine of economic substantive due process, and risks diluting the strong protection traditionally given to more valuable areas of expression.
With more than five million copies in print, this edition’s influence has been observed far and wide. It has been held up by senators at press conferences and by representatives during floor debate; found in federal judicial chambers across the country; appeared at conferences on constitutionalism in Russia, Iraq, and elsewhere; and sold at bookstores nationwide.
A D.C.-based public policy research organization (or "think tank") dedicated to the values of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.
