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.

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 that. 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. So... 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

to child rapists.

And then there was a big campaign finance case and Exxon Valdez got a lot of money back

because the court said that this enormous $2.5 billion

punitive damages award against Exxon was not going to stand.

The LA Times today said that Exxon will earn that in four days, that $2.5 billion.

So they won't even notice all the great money they got back.

Meanwhile, they didn't get it back.

They just don't have to pay it to these poor cannery workers. Right. And meanwhile, the cannery workers were expecting $75,000 a piece only get $15,000 a piece. And 20% of them are dead because this has taken 16 years to conclude itself. So it's a happy, happy day for Exxon and a sad, sad day for the fish. Let's talk about the gun case because I think the gun case is the one that people are most exercised about. And so what about is it a sad, sad day for the District of Columbia? Should we all be quaking in our boots? No, I actually picked up a gun on the way in today because I wanted to sort of beat the rush. But you live in Virginia, so you probably already had one. I picked up too. But you could bring it with you now. At the Quickey Mart on the way in. You know, is it a sad, sad day? Look, I don't like guns. So for me, I don't think that, you know, everybody packing is a solution to gun violence. But I accept that certainly...

Can I just interrupt?

Dahlia had a fantastic line in her piece today about she chooses the Canadian solution

...