Why wasn the McDonald v Chicago case decided 9-0?
I was delighted when the Supreme Court case District of Columbia v Heller was decided in favor of the individual’s right to keep and bear arms. I understood how that decision could be decided 5-4 by the nine justices. What boggles my mind is that given the decision of the Heller case, the McDonald v Chicago case wasn’t decided 9-0. Stare Decisis, Latin for “to stand by that which is decided” is the legal principal that once a case is decided, the logic and decision of that case will be used in the future to decide cases that bear on the same principles of law. To me, Heller was a landmark decision and McDonald should have been decided in a few hours, a slam dunk. Instead, Justices Stevens, Sotomayor, Bader-Ginsberg and Breyer tried to argue that a right in the constitution only binds the states if it is an indispensable attribute of ANY civilized legal system. They used international examples of societies where they don’t have guns as examples of civil society, hoping to prove that the
