Defending Heller from "Faux Conservatism"

Of the many critiques that followed the Supreme Court's landmark gun rights decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, perhaps the most interesting came from conservative federal Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III. In a Virginia Law Review article entitled "Of Guns, Abortions, and the Unraveling Rule of Law," Wilkinson denounced Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion for engaging in judicial activism and compared the reasoning in Heller to that in the abortion rights case Roe v. Wade (not exactly a compliment from one conservative judge to another).

Now George Mason Univesity's Nelson Lund and the Independence Institute's David Kopel have written what looks to be a decisive critique of Wilkinson's article, which they recently made available via the Social Science Research Network. Here's part of their abstract, which doesn't exactly pull any punches:

Part I shows that Judge Wilkinson's analogy between Roe and Heller is untenable. The right of the people to keep and bear arms is in the Constitution, and the right to abortion is not. Contrary to Judge Wilkinson, the genuine conservative critique of Roe is based on the Constitution, not on judicial "values." Judge Wilkinson, moreover, does not show that Heller's interpretation of the Second Amendment is refuted, or even called into serious question, by Justice Stevens' dissenting opinion.

Part II shows that Judge Wilkinson himself does not adhere to the "neutral principle" that he claims to derive from "judicial values." Under the principle of judicial restraint that he articulates, many now-reviled statutes, including the Jim Crow laws of the twentieth century, should have been upheld by the courts. Judge Wilkinson does not accept the consequences of his own supposedly neutral principle, preferring instead to endorse or condemn Supreme Court decisions solely on the basis of his policy preferences. That is not judicial restraint. It is judicial lawlessness.

Read the whole thing here. I wrote about Heller, Judge Wilkinson, and the failures of conservative judicial restraint here.