This is a classic example of a test case, much in the vein of Brown v. Board of Ed. and Griswold v. Conn. Levy thought it up and pushed it forward under the guise of D.C. residents.
Here's a key part of the article:
Before they filed the lawsuit in February 2003, arguingNotice the care that goes into selecting the plaintiffs. This points out that this really isn't their case, it's Levy's. So why does he do it? The story goes on to state that Levy's motivation has less to do with gon controal than with civil liberties:
that the city's gun statute violates the Second Amendment's
language on the right to bear arms, Levy and Clark M.
Neily III, a public-interest lawyer, spent months carefully
assembling a cast of plaintiffs, Levy said.
"We wanted gender diversity," he said. "We wanted racial
diversity, economic diversity, age diversity." The plaintiffs
had to be D.C. residents who believed fervently in gun rights
and wanted loaded weapons in their homes for self-defense.
And they had to be respectable.
"No Looney Tunes," Levy said. "You know, you don't want
the guy who just signed up for the militia. And no criminal
records. You want law-abiding citizens."
He and Neily worked the phones. "We called all our contacts
in the legal community," Levy said. "We looked at the
newspapers: Who was writing on the subject? Who was sending
letters to the editor about gun laws?" They scoured the city.
"Friends lead you to other friends, and you just keep talking
and talking to people, until finally you have your clients."
They found dozens of likely plaintiffs, Levy said. They
went with three men and three women, from their mid-20s
to early 60s, four of them white and two black. They found
a mortgage broker from Georgetown and a neighborhood
activist in a crime-scarred area of Northeast Washington.
They also lined up a communications lawyer, a government
office worker and a courthouse security guard. In their
disparate walks of life, the six shared an eagerness to
arm themselves.
Levy knew only one of them: Tom G. Palmer, 50,
a Cato colleague who is gay.
What matters most to him is whether the statute unjustlyMy question is whether it is appropriate for a resident of one state to engineer an attack on a statute in another region of the country--not another state in this case because this is in Washington D.C.
infringes on personal liberties. He doesn't dispute that
"reasonable" gun controls are permissible under the Second
Amendment. But the District's law amounts to "an outright
prohibition," Levy said, and "that offends my constitutional
sensibilities."
Does this make anyone uncomfortable? Uneasy?
Is this not judicial activism, and if successful, doesn't it vindicate recent efforts to use the courts to change public policy? After all, a right often pits a minority against a majority--often a local or state majority--and an individual liberty guaranteed by the Constitution is a legitimate subject for the courts, even if it negates that actions of democratically attuned local authorities.
There are of course two ways to look at this: substantively and procedurally. The proceduralist looks at how policy is established while one who is only interested in the substantive outcome looks to the end result, no matter how it was attained. This raises a dilemma for gun rights activists who are concerned about the increasing power of the courts. Though this victory may be substantively appealing, does it increase the procedural power of the court in a manner which may come back to haunt them?
