McDonald v. Chicago
Explanation:
The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment extends the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms to the states, at least for traditional, lawful purposes such as self-defense.
Facts
Four Chicago residents, including Otis McDonald, challenged a Chicago ordinance that required the registration of firearms while accepting no registrations that post-dated the implementation of a handgun ban in 1982. The law also required the re-registration of handguns with the payment of an annual fee and prevented any individual from registering a gun again once its registration had lapsed. McDonald, who was 76 years old and a former maintenance engineer, pointed out that his neighborhood in Morgan Park was prone to gang-related violence as a result of drug trafficking. He had been the victim of five burglaries, so he felt that he needed a handgun for the purposes of self-defense. (He owned shotguns for hunting but did not want to use those.)
Building on the Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), McDonald sought to expand the Second Amendment's application to state and local governments through selective incorporation. (Since Heller had unfolded in the District of Columbia, the Bill of Rights was directly applicable to this federally controlled area.) This meant that the right to bear arms must be deemed fundamental because of its deeply rooted presence in national history and traditions or its inherent role in protecting liberty. McDonald also offered the novel argument that the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause should be allowed to apply the Bill of Rights to state and local governments, overturning the Court's 1873 decision in the Slaughter-House Case. This doctrinal shift would have allowed the Bill of Rights to be applied directly to non-federal governments without the need for incorporation. It could have had an impact on other parts of the Bill of Rights to which incorporation had not yet been applied.
Issues & Holdings
Issue: Whether the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires the application of the Bill of Rights in its entirety to state and local governments.
Holding: No. The holding in the Slaughter-House Case remains in effect, and incorporation is the appropriate way to selectively apply provisions in the Bill of Rights beyond the federal government.
Opinions
Majority
Samuel A. Alito, Jr. (Author)
John G. Roberts, Jr.
Antonin Scalia
Anthony M. Kennedy
Clarence Thomas
Declining to address the Privileges or Immunities Clause component of McDonald's argument, Alito applied the incorporation doctrine to find that state and local governments are subject to the Second Amendment through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. He reminded readers that the right to bear arms is not unqualified and that the restrictions recognized in the Heller decision remain intact, such as bans on straw purchases, restrictions on use in school zone and federal buildings, and bans on use by convicted criminals or the mentally ill.
Concurrence
Clarence Thomas (Author)
Thomas would have accepted McDonald's bolder argument and overruled the Slaughter-House Case, finding that the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment automatically applied all of the protections in the Bill of Rights to states and cities.
Concurrence
Antonin Scalia (Author)
Dissent
John Paul Stevens (Author)
Arguing against the principle of incorporation, Stevens would have reverted to the narrower 19th-century understanding of this doctrine.
Dissent
Stephen G. Breyer (Author)
These dissenters felt that there was no fundamental right to individual self-defense guaranteed by the Second Amendment. (Breyer had written a similar dissent in Heller.)
Case Commentary
Despite the holding that the Second Amendment applies to state and local governments, this decision emphasizes that provisions of the Bill of Rights should be incorporated only if they are part of the national tradition or fundamental to historical visions of liberty. Whether this language will serve as a practical limit on incorporation is not certain.
As with Heller, the Court did not state the standard of review that was appropriate for Second Amendment cases. Like that earlier decision, it spawned a plethora of cases challenging various gun laws, since the highly case-specific nature of the jurisprudence in this area means that each type of law must be analyzed separately.
