WSJ article on Alan Gura

Here's a Wall Street Journal article on Alan Gura and the Heller case.

The case that became D.C. v. Heller was the brainchild of three lawyers at a pair of libertarian organizations, the Cato Institute and the Institute for Justice. All were busy with other matters, so they hired Mr. Gura. "Alan was willing to work for subsistence wages," Cato's Robert Levy tells me, "in return for which he got a commitment from me that if the case went anywhere, it would be his baby. It turned out that that commitment was very important."

Mr. Gura says he set out "to do a careful, strategic litigation on the issue." One court that had not yet taken a position on the Second Amendment's meaning was the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. As it happened, the nation's capital had the most restrictive gun law in the country: a total ban on handguns, and a requirement that shotguns and rifles be kept disassembled or locked within the home.

To challenge the law, Mr. Gura says, "it was very important for us to pick decent, law-abiding people . . . . We consciously wanted to have plaintiffs from across the demographic spectrum in Washington, D.C. We wanted all manner of diversity, because it's important -- people want to see that you are arguing for a right that is held by ordinary people."
...
When the case reached the Supreme Court, Mr. Levy says he came under pressure to replace the young Mr. Gura, who had never argued a case before the high court, with a veteran litigator like Ted Olson, Ken Starr or Miguel Estrada. No dice, Mr. Levy replied. He had a commitment, and besides, Mr. Gura "had been immersed in this issue for 5½ years . . . so he knew the material cold."

The results speak for themselves. All nine justices agreed that the Second Amendment established an individual right. But four dissenters offered an interpretation of that right so cramped as to render it a nullity.

"My biggest surprise is that it was 5-4," Mr. Gura says. "I thought the case was much stronger than 5-4. . . . However, I'll take the five and be very happy with that."

The court's close division meant that Mr. Gura needed the vote of Anthony Kennedy. Most court-watchers consider him the least predictable justice, but not Mr. Gura: "I received a lot of grief from people about Justice Kennedy going into the argument. We were told that we were not responsible, gambling on the views of this one justice who might be completely inscrutable and unpredictable. . . .

"Justice Kennedy did not trouble me all that much. The fact is that if you look at Justice Kennedy's voting pattern, the cases where he tends to disappoint the so-called conservative bloc -- in almost all those cases, Justice Kennedy sides with a claim of an individual right being held by a person against the government, whether that is in the abortion context, or whether that's in the context of intimate sexual relations, whether it's the habeas case in Guantanamo Bay."

The articles on this landmark case just keep on coming. The good news is that everyone's talking about Heller and its implications. I imagine that cases like Brown v. Board of Education, or Roe v. Wade, also generated similar extended coverage, although these were pre-World Wide Web era cases, so most of the coverage of those earlier cases was necessarily limited to the traditional print press and broadcast media.