Judge Reeves - Order from felon-in-possession of firearm case

Haven't read the whole thing but someone sent me this and suggested I at least read the last 7 pages. He doesn't hold back, and I thought some would find it interesting, particularly the section of the Conclusion titled Revisiting Originalism.

Twitter thread:



PDF:

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23863670/reeves-order.pdf

We have one Constitution. All of it is law. It has been enforced today as best as this Judge can discern the Bruen Court’s holding and reasoning. And, one hopes, a future Supreme Court will not rest until it honors the rest of the Constitution as zealously as it now interprets the Second Amendment.

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For one, the originalist case for originalism is lacking. This Court has yet to see evidence proving “that the original meaning of Article III of the Constitution included the understanding that courts should interpret the Constitution based on its original meanings.” Erwin Chemerinsky, Worse than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism 82 (2022) [herein‐after Worse than Nothing]. In other words, it is not clear that founding‐era Americans collectively agreed that for time immemorial, their descendants would be bound by the founding generation’s views on how the Constitution should be read.

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Many of our Nation’s finest moments came when we rejected the original public meaning of a Constitutional provision. Brown v. Board of Education rejected the original interpretation of “equal protection,” which had led to “separate but equal” schools. Worse than Nothing at 68‐69. The original understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment limited women “to fulfil the noble and benign offices of wife and mother.” Bradwell v. Illinois, 83 U.S. 130, 141 (1872) (Bradley, J., concurring). It had to go. Earlier Americans might not have understood the notion of “due process” to include marriage equality. See Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015). But future generations did. “We changed.” Campaign for Southern Equality v. Bryant, 64 F. Supp. 3d 906, 922 (S.D. Miss. 2014).

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Let’s be clear about what this means for originalism. The next generation will have its own conceptions of liberty. It will interpret the principles of the Constitution, enduring as they are, differently than this generation has interpreted them. Change is unstoppable. And to the extent Bruen and decisions like it try to stop that change, they will not last long. The only question is how long the People will let them remain.