Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for Friday, June 27th, 2008.

Ooh, David, well done.

I'm David Plotz.

I'm here in the Slate Washington office with Emily Bazelon and a special guest appearance from Slate's other legal eagle, Dahlia Lithwick.

I feel like I'm facing a murderer's row of legal talent here.

It's going to be daunting.

But we have such good legal subjects to talk about it.

Today we're going to talk about the Supreme Court's big decisions this week.

Our second topic will be, you know, the presidential campaign because there's something surely happened in the presidential campaign this week. We'll come up with some. And then our last topic will be the gruesome news out of Zimbabwe. And then we'll have, to lighten the mood, we'll have cocktail chatter. So, Emily, why do you kick it off? Tell us what the big Supreme Court decisions were this week,

and then Dalyu can interrupt and disagree with Emily's characterization of them.

Immediately.

Interrupt quickly.

I already agree with everything.

We can stipulate that at the outset.

I should say John Dickerson is on vacation.

We haven't thrown him overboard.

He'll return.

He'll be back in a couple of weeks.

He'd be glad that you were covering for him.

Thursday was an especially big day at the court because the long-awaited decision about

the Washington, D.C. handgun restriction came down, and the Supreme Court said that

there is an individual right to bear arms in the Second Amendment the first time the court has made that big statement and struck down the D.C. ban as being too restrictive and going too far in implicating that individual right to bear arms. And there's other good meaty stuff. The court also, that was a 5-4 decision. There was another big 5-4 this week saying that states cannot have death penalty laws that apply

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