More on Property Rights (Plus Privileges, Immunities, Due Process)

Yesterday I blogged about the Florida property rights case, which I now consider the best unanimous opinion against my position I could ever imagine.  Although the property owners lost, four justices stood for the idea that courts no less than legislatures or executive bodies are capable of violating the Takings Clause (Fifth Amendment), while two others endorsed remedying such violations via Substantive Due Process (Fourteenth Amendment), and the remaining two didn't express an opinion one way or the other.  For more on the case, see the blogposts of Cato adjunct scholars Tim Sandefur, Ilya Somin, and David Bernstein.

An interesting side note involves Justice Scalia's excoriation of Substantive Due Process (and Justice Kennedy's use of it):

Moreover, and more importantly, JUSTICE KENNEDY places no constraints whatever upon this Court. Not only does his concurrence only think about applying Substantive Due Process; but because Substantive Due Process is such a wonderfully malleable concept, see, e.g., Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U. S. 558, 562 (2003) (referring to “liberty of the person both in its spatial and in its more transcendentdimensions”), even a firm commitment to apply it would bea firm commitment to nothing in particular.

…

The great attraction of Substantive Due Process as a substitute for more specific constitutional guarantees is that it never means never—because it never means anything precise.

Scalia also calls Kennedy's method "Orwellian"  -- after having said that Justice Breyer uses a "Queen-of-Hearts" approach "reminiscent of the perplexing question how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?"  Really, this is classic Scalia, a delight to read (and you should, here).

The problem with what Scalia says, as Josh Blackman points out, is that the Court is about to release its opinion in the Chicago gun case, McDonald v. Chicago and, based on the oral argument, is about to incorporate the Second Amendment via Substantive Due Process.  If SDP is so bad, how can Scalia (endorsed by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas and Alito) use it to protect a "new" right? -- particularly when the Privileges or Immunities Clause was created for just this purpose!  One answer is that, to Scalia, "babble" -- his term for SDP -- is still worth more than "flotsam" (his term for P or I), as I discuss here.  Another is that, to put it bluntly, Scalia is a results-oriented non-originalist, as Josh and I discuss here.

Speaking of Blackman-Shapiro collaborations, for the correct way to apply the right to keep and bear arms to the states, see our law review article called "Keeping Pandora's Box Sealed."  And Tim Sandefur, who authored Cato's McDonald brief (read a summary here) just published a fascinating related article called "Privileges, Immunities, and Substantive Due Process."  I haven't read it yet but am very much looking forward to it. 

Tim also recently wrote a book defending economic liberties (which Justice Scalia also disparages in his Stop the Beach opinion), called The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Liberty and the Law.  I hear it makes for good beach reading.