Jack Balkin and Sandy Levinson are right to probe with hypothetical the dimensions of the newly-minted, or perhaps ancient, right of self-defense, or right to own handguns, in one's home, or maybe outside it, or maybe also to own other weaponry, or maybe not, so firmly established in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) per those ...

Many commentators, including my good friends Randy Barnett and Larry Solum, have praised Justice Scalia’s opinion in Heller v. District of Columbia as a sparkling example of original meaning originalism. After having read the opinion closely a number of times, I am not so sure.I do not doubt that Scalia uses original meaning methodology at the ...

C'mon, Orin, you don't give us enough credit with your non-Volokh post. There are plenty of truck-ownin', tobacco-usin', gun-shootin' folks here at Slate. Admittedly, we're a bit of a discrete and insular minority within the Slate family, but I don't think your Heller discussions are unwelcome here. I'm going through the opinion now, ...

Yesterday, in Giles v. California, Justice Scalia, true to the originalist method, kept to the text of the Constitution and enforced the Confrontation Clause for the benefit of a criminal defendant complaining that his conviction was wrongful because he did not have the ability to cross-examine the out of court testimony of his girl-friend about ...

Since we may have a few more minutes before the big news from the last days of the Supreme Court term, I had probably better offer at least a brief response to Eric's last post. As much as I love the imagery of Scalia astride a tank, that's of course not particularly what I was saying. But as I am generally a fan of the idea of agency ...

Phil, I find myself in the awkward position of disagreeing both with Scalia's comments about Boumediene and your critique of them. You offer three reasons why Scalia's comments are wrong. Your first point, that we are really at war with ''a very diverse constellation of [radical Islamist] groups'' rather that ''radical Islamists'' ...

While deducing from the calendar who is likely to write an opinion from any given sitting is a matter of considerable speculation, there is reason to believe that Justice Scalia may be writing D.C. v. Heller. Should that prove to be true, it is worth recalling Justice Scalia's own definition of originalism, and his particular ''originalist'' ...

I'm glad Dahlia chose to open her ''Breakfast Table'' discussion with Walter Dellinger, Jack Goldsmith, and Cliff Sloan with a note about Boumediene—and Justice Antonin Scalia's absurd sky-is-falling dissent arguing that detainees will exit the habeas process to fight us again on the battlefield. Ever the public intellectual, Scalia took ...

The court just granted cert in a case in which plaintiff—a detainee who had been held here in the United States in pretrial detention shortly after the 9/11 attacks—is seeking damages against former Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller (among others) based on claims that his treatment in detention violated his ...

Jack, thanks very much for your response to my post on selling liberal constitutionalism. Your post tends to confirm my sense that there are two basic ways to sell liberal constitutionalism: First, try to out-populist the populists, and second, focus on the results.   Here's a reading of Jack's post with my two categories in mind. ...