Say it isn't so, Willian Renquhist!  Two rock-ribbed conservative US Court of Appeals judges, Richard Posner and J. Harvie Wilkinson III, both with impeccable legal credentials, both well-respected by the political right, and both who frequently write for the non-legal public, have recently published criticisms of the Supreme Court's Heller decision [5-4, majority decision penned by Scalia].  

The decision struck down parts of a  Washington, DC gun control law, and for the first time found that the 2nd amendement applies to individuals and is not resticted to a collective right in the form of a state militia or National Guard.

Horror of all horrors,  both Wilkinson and Posner have compared Heller to the flawed and faulty legal reasoning said to characterize Roe v. Wade.

Here's an excerpt below, but read the full link and don't rely on my cherry-picking editorail judgement:


"" Two prominent federal appeals court judges say that Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion in the case, District of Columbia v. Heller, is illegitimate, activist, poorly reasoned and fueled by politics rather than principle. The 5-to-4 decision in Heller struck down parts of a District of Columbia gun control law.

The judges used what in conservative legal circles are the ultimate fighting words: They said the gun ruling was a right-wing version of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that identified a constitutional right to abortion. Justice Scalia has said that Roe had no basis in the Constitution and amounted to a judicial imposition of a value judgment that should have been left to state legislatures.

Comparisons of the two decisions, then, seemed calculated to sting.

“The Roe and Heller courts are guilty of the same sins,” one of the two appeals court judges, J. Harvie Wilkinson III, wrote in an article to be published in the spring in The Virginia Law Review.

Similarly, Judge Richard A. Posner, in an article in The New Republic in August, wrote that Heller’s failure to allow the political process to work out varying approaches to gun control that were suited to local conditions “was the mistake that the Supreme Court made when it nationalized abortion rights in Roe v. Wade.”

Sharp criticism of a recent Supreme Court decision by federal appeals court judges is quite unusual, though these two judges — both Reagan appointees — are more outspoken than most.

Judge Wilkinson, who sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., was recently considered for a spot on the Supreme Court. Judge Posner, of the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago, is perhaps the most influential judge not on the Supreme Court. ""