Today in the News, 3.17.09

“[S]ome liberal lawyers and law professors sense an opportunity, and they have urged courts to incorporate the Second Amendment in a novel way, one that might help liberal arguments for protecting rights not specifically mentioned in the Constitution.” Adam Liptak at the NY Times discusses CAC’s argument that courts should apply the Constitution’s guarantee of fundamental rights against abridgment by the states through the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, rather than through the more common doctrine of “substantive due process.”

“The administration official said part of the reason for making the Hamilton nomination the administration’s first public entry into the often contentious field of judicial selection was to serve ‘as a kind of signal’ about the kind of nominees Mr. Obama will select.” The Times reports that President Obama intends to nominate Judge David Hamilton, a federal district court judge from Indiana, to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, as his first judicial nominee.

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