Seventh Circuit Revisits the Second Amendment

Here’s another one to file under “no, we don’t want a revolution.”  A few days ago, I posted on a new Seventh Circuit opinion that seemed to adopt a minimalist reading of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Carr v. United States.  Over a vigorous dissent, the Seventh Circuit reaffirmed the validity of pre-Carr decisions regarding the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act.  Now, the Seventh Circuit has a new opinion that reaffirms the validity of a gun-control statute, and another dissent accuses the court of incorrectly limiting a recent Supreme Court decision.

Last year, I posted on the interesting panel decision in United States v. Skoien, in which the Seventh Circuit remanded to the district court for the government to attempt to justify 18 U.S.C. § 922(g) in the face of the defendant’s Second Amendment challenge.  The panel relied heavily on the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller.  However, the government successfully sought en banc review, and now the en banc court has decided simply to affirm Skoien’s conviction without further proceedings. 

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Baby, You Can Drive My Carr . . . Or Maybe Not

The ink is barely dry on the Supreme Court’s decision in Carr v. United States, and already we have a contentious case in the Seventh Circuit questioning its meaning.  In Carr, the Court had to interpret a notoriously clumsy bit of legislation from 2006, the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (part of the so-called Adam Walsh Act).  SORNA makes it a federal crime for a person who is required to register as a sex offender to (1) travel in interstate commerce, and (2) knowingly fail to register or update a registration.  In Carr, the Court held that a person may not be convicted under SORNA based on travel that occurred prior to SORNA’s enactment.

At the time Carr was decided, the Seventh Circuit already had pending before it United States v. Vasquez.  Vasquez was convicted of a SORNA violation on the basis of stipulated facts that showed (1) he failed to register as a sex offender as he was required to do in Illinois, and (2) he subsequently traveled from Illinois to California for some undetermined purpose.  On appeal, Vasquez argued that the statute required the government to prove he had knowledge of his federal registration obligation, and that the statute exceeded Congress’s regulatory authority under the Commerce Clause.

The Seventh Circuit rejected these arguments in a majority opionion authored by Judge Bauer. 

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Best of the Blogs

What do we have this week? Over at the wonderful Mirror of Justice, you can follow a debate involving Michael Perry, Mike Scaperlanda, Robbie George, Robert Hockett and Rick Garnett  and others (I’ve linked to some but not all of the posts in the thread) on Pope Benedict XVI’s concern about the “dictatorship of relativism.”  Professor Hockett’s argument that terms like “relativism” and “tolerance” often mask conclusions rather than do much argumentative work reminded me of Steven D. Smith’s excellent new book, The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse. I just finished reading it and hope to  blog on it shortly.

At Public Discourse, Rob Vischer considers the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez upholding a requirement at Hastings Law School that recognized student organizations may not exclude students based upon their refusal to accept the organization’s objectives or beliefs. Rob concludes:

The next challenge is clear: we must think seriously about how to help deepen our public discourse about discrimination and diversity to include recognition that associational diversity is a key component of religious and moral liberty, and that even if a university now has the right to make all groups accept everyone, it is a right best left unexercised.

At Ballkinization, Jack Balkin expresses concern over a decision Thursday by a district judge in Massachusetts v. HHS finding that the Defense of Marriage Act violates the Tenth Amendment. 

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