The Supreme Court is back in session. Today, it is hearing a challenge to a federal law banning depictions of cruelty to animals brought by a defendant convicted of selling pit-bull dogfight videos. A federal appeals court struck down the 1999 law as a violation of the First Amendment. The government is asking the Supreme Court to reinstate the law, and rule that animal cruelty depictions are not protected speech, the way some other kinds of speech, like obscenity, are considered unprotected by…

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The Supreme Court has agreed to review a lower court ruling upholding Chicago’s handgun ban.   In 2008, the Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 vote, struck down Washington, D.C.’s handgun ban.  But the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals refused to apply that ruling to Chicago’s handgun ban, saying that the Second Amendment only applies against the federal government, not state and local governments like Chicago.  A decision in McDonald v. Chicago is expected some time next year.

The idea that the Second Amendment only…

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The Brady Campaign has spent years trying to convince the courts to strike down a federal law, passed with bipartisan support, that bans suits against gun makers for acts committed by criminals. It has spent great effort to get judges to override a popular law, under a novel “separation of powers” argument.

But yesterday, its head, Paul Helmke, wailed about “judicial activism” that supposedly overrides “the will of the people” in an editorial in the Atlanta Journal. His complaint is like…

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