This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 2, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Supreme Court has ended its term, Cato Institute's senior fellow in constitutional studies.

Ilia Shapiro gives us a rundown of the cases that mattered most and the justices that mattered most. Well, it was a pretty good year for those who are concerned about civil liberties, cutting down on lawsuit abuse, you know,

breeding legislation as it's as it's supposed to be read and not having judicial overreach with some

exceptions. This year the court decided 70 cases which is a record low each

year they seem to be going further and further

towards putting themselves out of business,

although as I'll discuss in the future,

that trend might be reversing itself.

Some of the more important ones, let's go by topic areas.

Well, first of all, and most recently, the Heller case, the court of course threw out

the District of Columbia's ban on handguns and rule that if you want to have a long

gun in your house, it has to be unloaded and either disassembled or trigger locked.

This is a significant opinion.

It's the first time that the court has dealt with the Second Amendment on all fours,

and the first time that it's mentioned even the amendment in almost 70 years in a little

squib of a case called Miller that really was made out to stand for more than it did.

Others have talked about Heller a lot, especially elsewhere on the

Cato website and other podcasts. I won't go into it more here. The other case that was

also very controversial recently was

Bumadine, the enemy combatants in Guantanamo, the court finding again five to four

...