The Supreme Court decided McDon­ald v. Chicago, the sequel to D.C. v. Heller, this morn­ing. A major­ity held that the Sec­ond Amend­ment applies to state and local gov­ern­ments and threw out Chicago’s ban on hand­guns. A plu­ral­ity of four Jus­tices (Alito, Scalia, Roberts, Kennedy) held that the Sec­ond Amend­ment is incor­po­rated by the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amend­ment, and avoided address­ing the ques­tion of whether the Slaugh­ter­house Cases, which long ago cas­trated the other half of the 14th Amend­ment, the Priv­i­leges or Immu­ni­ties Clause, should be recon­sid­ered. One Jus­tice, Jus­tice Thomas, wrote a sep­a­rate opin­ion con­cur­ring in the judg­ment, but assert­ing his oppo­si­tion to the doc­trine of sub­stan­tive due process which has been used since Slaugh­ter­house to enforce sub­stan­tive restric­tions against the state gov­ern­ments. Instead, he con­cluded that the Priv­i­leges or Immu­ni­ties Clause was the more straight­for­ward route.

The slip opin­ion is avail­able at the Supreme Court’s web­site [direct link, PDF].