The Washington Post gets it wrong on comparing Easterbook's decision on applying the Second Amendment to the states to Sotomayer's decision

The Washington Post's piece is here.

But yesterday a panel of conservative luminaries on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit reached the same conclusion. The unanimous ruling rejecting a challenge to Chicago's tough handgun law could complicate efforts to portray Sotomayor as a judicial activist trying to undermine the Supreme Court's landmark decision last year holding that the amendment protects the right to own a gun for self-defense. . . . .

Easterbrook agrees with the conclusion, but he does make some important differences and the language in the two cases is important.

Although the rationale of Cruikshank, Presser, and Miller is defunct, the Court has not telegraphed any plan to overrule Slaughter-House and apply all of the amendments to the states through the privileges and immunities clause, despite scholarly arguments that it should do this. See Akhil Reed Amar, America’s Constitution: A Biography 390–92 (2005) (discussing how the second amendment relates to the privileges and immunities clause). The prevailing approach is one of “selective incorporation.” Thus far neither the third nor the seventh amendment has been applied to the states—nor has the grand jury clause of the fifth amendment or the excessive bail clause of the eighth. How the second amendment will fare under the Court’s selective (and subjective) approach to incorporation is hard to predict. . . .

Read Sotomayer's decision here.