Here’s a take on the US Supreme Court’s consideration of three major Second Amendment cases in their upcoming conference this Friday. Chris Johnson wrote this, and he’s quite the dedicate follower of SCOTUS and loves to deep dive research this stuff.
Take a look at his post at The Vine of Liberty blog and see what you think. Also, keep your eye out on Mark Smith at Four Boxes Diner on YouTube. He’s another follower of SCOTUS as well. See if Mark Smith hits some of these points in the coming days (off to check his channel right now).
As of January 6th, we are on deck for THREE Second Amendment cases to be evaluated by the Supreme Court.
On January 10th, the justices will discuss all three cases, Ocean State Tactical, Snope, and Gray.
On the following Monday, or Tuesday, they will issue their orders.
The Court can:
- Grant Cert.
- Deny Cert.
- Relist the case.
While it would be wonderful to have them just grant cert in all three cases, the more likely event will be that the cases will be relisted.
In the Roberts’ court, this is the standard for cases where the justices have agreed to hear the case, but Roberts wants to make sure there are no issues hiding in the case history.
We can expect two to four relisting before they finally decide yes or no.
At that time, we will know what the schedule will be. If the cases will be combined, or if they will all be heard on the same day.
We are on track to have a major Second Amendment opinion issued by the Supreme Court around the end of June.
And yes, Mark Smith JUST posted a story about this. While Smith has a tendency to “click bait” his titles, this important.
gun control ******* in america, start running
JB, your title suggests you are skeptical of these opinions. If so, can you elucidate?
He’s skeptical because nobody knows what is going to happen in Supreme Court conferences.
It is all “reading the tea leaves”.
The black box which is Supreme Court conferences has visible inputs. Status of the case, briefings on the case, circuit split, time after the last Supreme Court opinion on the subject and a few others.
For output, we have “Denied”, “Denied with statement”, “Granted”, “relisted” and “rescheduled”.
Why the justices decide on which output is a guess. Some people are good at those guesses. Mark Smith has a good record. I don’t have a record to stand on. We know historically that “rescheduling” happens when the justices want to see multiple cases at the same time. We know that under Roberts, cases that are relisted are almost always granted cert. and those that are not have some procedural issue with them, not merits issues.
Cases that are denied Cert generally have nothing said about them. Think of it as spending 30 minutes trying to convince your parents to do something, and at the end of that they say “no”. That’s how most denial of cert goes. Nobody cares when cert is granted. It is going to happen.
When one or more justices feels strongly that cert should have been granted, they will write a statement to go along with the order list. Occasionally, a justice will write a statement explaining to the petitioner why cert was denied so that they can address the issue.
We saw several statements from Justice Thomas on why they were not granting cert on Second Amendment challenges that were in an interlocutory state.