Supreme Court news

Regular readers of this fine blog may recall that one of my "five things" is that I am a Supreme Court geek.  Friends and others may remember that I also enjoy, to put it mildly, the music of Mr. Bob Dylan.  Well, my friends, those two worlds collided recently.  

In an achingly dull case involving the requirement of standing under Article III, Chief Justice Roberts cited an unusual source in his dissenting opinion.  Here's the quote:

The absence of any right to the substantive recovery means that respondents cannot benefit from the judgment they seek and thus lack Article III standing. “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” Bob Dylan, Like A Rolling Stone, on Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia Records 1965).

Beautiful.  Simply beautiful.  Of course, Dylan actually sang, "When you ain't got nothing...," but we'll let that slide.  

In other news, the Supreme Court struck down the D.C. gun ban because it violates the Second Amendment.  Scalia's opinion is powerful and unassailable.  One passage in which Scalia responds to the dissent's argument that the phrase "bear arms" has an idiomatic meaning but "keep . . . arms" does not is masterful.  Here's a snippet:

In any event, the meaning of “bear arms” that petitioners and JUSTICE STEVENS propose is not even the (sometimes) idiomatic meaning. . . .  The word “Arms” would have two different meanings at once:  “weapons” (as the object of “keep”) and (as the object of “bear”) one-half of an idiom. It would be rather like saying “He filled and kicked the bucket” to mean “He filled the bucket and died.” Grotesque.

Ouch.  I highly recommend reading the entire opinion.