re: #464 Political Atheist

Statistics with cohorts and all that hardly seems to undermine that for the time being, pending at least a district court win against the 2nd, it’s the law and we should discuss it in that context.

No idea what you mean by this. What I’m saying is that you shouldn’t depend on a 5-4 supreme court decision being permanent. You can depend on it ‘for the time being’, of course.

It happens sometimes. We both knew that all along and I still question the relevance of that fact. When the law is on your side you get to say so until that law changes. When the law is against your view you get to complain about it. About 121 cases overturned. But how many decisions (including letting lower courts stand) have there been in that time? 50 a year or so? Over an awful lot of years….

See, that sort of speculation is just useless. Even a large-scale analysis of how frequent overturns are would tell you next to nothing about how likely a specific decision is to be overturned.

If a ‘conservative’ was replaced by a ‘liberal’ on the SC, or vice versa would be the most important data. And that’s in the future, unknown.

How many took away the individual right finding from edit any of the bill of rights? After all that is a lot different than some of the relatively minor adjustments that show up in the list.

This also is a pretty useless metric, since there aren’t very many rights that might be ruled as collective rights. You seem to be trying to use statistics on past Supreme Court behavior in an area that’s so small you can’t even get useful statistics in order to try to make an argument. It’s tenuous and it doesn’t really work.

The real question is: If one of the justices who voted for Heller was replaced by a justice who people would think would vote the other way, how much would the previous ruling inhibit the court from overruling it? It’s a pretty unanswerable question, it depends on a ton of other variables, as does any other potential overturn.

I also don’t get the point of the argument that it won’t get overturned. It may or may not get overturned: I’d think that a gun rights advocate would want to actually be prepared for the eventuality of its overturn. I know as a pro-choice advocate, I fully accept that Roe v. Wade may one day get overturned. If, say, the GOP wins the next president and they either pack the court or a liberal is replaced by a conservative—and perhaps not even needing that—it might happen.

So what is the point of strenuously arguing that it won’t get overturned?