Will Baude

gun cases, but it seems to be his first trip to the Supreme Court.

And he is making the kind of the hardcore argument, like no flipping the default.

I don't even concede that any of these cases don't raise second amendment questions.

There's got to be a national tradition.

There's no national tradition, kind of a very broad argument.

I think the perception when he showed up with that argument among a lot of people who wanted him to win was that was not a good way to win the case.

Right.

So then the United States Solicitor General, the Deputy S.J.

Sarah Harris, a very experienced, very good advocate, she shows up with the United States brief on his side with a much different and more limited argument.

So she doesn't want to say you can never flip the default or anything like that.

She wants to say the big problem here is pretext.

The big problem here is you can look at the law and tell this is not really a property law.

This is really an anti-gun law in part because of its over-inclusive, under-inclusiveness, the way it's gerrymandered to avoid various things.

And so you should really kind of think of this as in the First Amendment context as

After Smith says that neutral laws that burden religion are going to be okay, the next year the court strikes down a law anyway in the Church of Lukumi Babalu'aye versus the City of Hialeah, where it's like a ban on ritual sacrifice of animals.

And the court's like, this is obviously a religion thing, even though it never says that.

So she's making sort of that kind of argument.

So the court's already sort of presented with the, you know, you could strike this down on broad grounds or narrow grounds, and the justice spent a lot of time kind of working with both advocates to figure out what to do.

Yeah.

No, definitely I think the wind was at their backs.