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Saturday, January 12, 2019

We May Be About to See Justice Kavanaugh's Confirmation Take Effect

A challenge to New York's very restrictive gun control law, which has been denied cert (effectively, the Court is not hearing the appeal) has been "relisted."  What does that mean?
A relist occurs when the Justices consider a petition at private conference but decline to act on it, redistributing it for the following conference. The practice is now an accepted feature of the certiorari process.  “[A]t least one relist is generally viewed as a necessary step on the way to a grant of further review …. A relist remains an effective prerequisite to a grant of certiorari.”  
It may not result in cert, but we have at least some basis for hope.

3 comments:

  1. He replaced Kennedy. Was Kennedy not a good 2nd Amendment guy? I know he went left of social issues, but am not aware of his 2nd Amendment stances.

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  2. Kennedy was in the majority on both Heller and McDonald. There is evidence that Scalia softened the decision to get Kennedy on the majority. Likely Kennedy has been the reason the Court has refused to grant cert on some of the horrendous appellate decisions.

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  3. Conventional wisdom has been that both the pro-gun and anti-gun justices were wary of which way Kennedy would vote. It takes 4 justices to grant cert, and neither side wanted to roll the dice on which way he was going to vote, so other than obvious slam-dunk cases like Caetano, both sides shied away from approving Second Amendment cases.

    So we ended up with a court that was "gun shy". Hopefully, that's going to change for the better now.

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