Merits brief, NRA amicus brief filed in Chicago gun ban case

From SCOTUSblog:

With a strong plea to revive the Constitution’s ill-fated Privileges or Immunities Clause, lawyers for four Chicagoans told the Supreme Court on Monday that history shows clearly that the Second Amendment’s protection of personal gun rights applies to state and local laws as fully as to those at the federal level. The brief is dominated by a wide-ranging survey of the meaning and origins of the privileges clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, only seven pages of the 73-page brief are devoted to another provision of that Amendment: the Due Process Clause. (The Court presumably is more familiar with the Due Process Clause, repeatedly litigated for decades even as the Privileges or Immunities Clause has lain largely dormant.)

In a bold thrust, the attorneys for the challengers to Chicago’s strict handgun ban asked the Court to strike down three of its prior rulings: the Slaughterhouse Cases in 1873 — the ruling that made the privileges clause a nullity — and two decisions limiting the Second Amendment to a restriction only on federal laws: U.S. v. Cruikshank in 1876 and Presser v. Illinois in 1886. “Faced with a clear conflict between precedent and the Constitution, this Court should uphold the Constitution,” the brief argued.

The Slaughterhouse precedent, “and its unavoidable progency, Cruikshank and Presser,” the brief said, “established that the States could continue to violate virtually all privileges and immunities of American citizens, including those codified in the Bill of Rights, notwithstanding [the Fourteenth Amendment] Section One’s clear textual command to the contrary.” Those three rulings, it added, “lack legitmacy.” ...

Read it here. The merits brief is available here. The NRA's amicus brief is available here.

I believe Justice Scalia hinted in a footnote in last year's Heller decision that the Court might be amenable to revisiting Slaughterhouse and related precedents. The challengers certainly appear to be focusing more on that argument (Privileges and Immunities) rather than hoping the Court will apply its convoluted Due Process and selective incorporation jurisprudence to resolve the case.