This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 18th, 2008.

I'm Kila Brown.

Today we bring you one of the highlights of the Constitution Day discussions at the Cato Institute,

Clark Neely co-counsel in the Supreme Court case that killed

the DC gun ban, discussed the aftermath of the case and just how disappointed he was with the

dissents written there. This is a short segment of his talk.

The full Constitution Day audio is available at Cato.org.

As everybody in the room knows, I assume the Heller case produced a five to four decision in which the majority of the Supreme Court interpreted the Second Amendment as protecting an individual right.

Essentially what it was, and there were three opinions.

Justice Scalia wrote the majority opinion for five justices and

then Justice Stevens and Justice Breyer each wrote dissenting opinions in which

all the dissenting justices joined. In other words, all four dissenting justices joined both

dissenting opinions. I would say that most of the action in the Heller decisions comes down to

a kind of an originalist duel between Justice Scalia and Justice Stevens.

They go over the text and the history of the Second Amendment, reach opposite conclusions

about its meaning, but it sort of takes you on a really wonderful and I think fascinating tour through history,

not only the history of the drafting of the Second Amendment, but even the history that preceded that,

in terms of the English Bill of Rights, Common Law, and what was essentially the

intellectual underpinnings for the Second Amendment.

I won't go through the decisions in a tremendous amount of detail but I will say this

There have been a lot of criticisms of the Justice Scalia's decision some people who are various

Fervent gun rights advocates say that he essentially threw portions of the Second Amendment

...