I'm giving up for the day on the whole 10 Commandment cases thing. Nobody likes Lemon anymore, everybody's proposing their own new rule, and it's looking like more "I know it when I see it" balancing is winning the day, only with fewer guidelines. Great. I'm exaggerating slightly, but not much. I've scribbled something on McCreary - both the opinion and Scalia's rather radical dissent - but I've only read Van Orden and haven't even tried to synthesize them. From the tone of some of the dissents and concurrences, it appears that any attempt to synthesize this mess could rip massive holes in the legal/moral continuum and reverse the spin of the universe as we know it. D*mn lawyers.
UPDATE: I think part of the problem is I'd really like to do something that deciphers for non-lawyers, if they have the patience to wade through it - I've had more questions from people about this issue than many others. But if Greenman thinks my other posts make his brain bleed, well, these cases make lawyers' brains bleed. You end up with scorecards about which judge is on board with what issues, and almost all of them end up reciting the entire history of 2nd Amendment law in a fruitless effort to harmonize it. The latest two seem to have given up efforts to articulate a test for another "I know it when I see it" approach, based on the history of all the jurisprudence. Efforts to simplify it are, well, interesting.
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